Hello class! Now, who can remember what we learned last time. Oh yes... When we last left our friend Jean-Louis he was in a mess. His company Be inc had just been sold for about 11 million dollars to Palm inc. This was significantly lower than the original offer from Apple of 125 million. So BeOS fades into oblivion, never to be heard of again...
Not quite. Although the story ends here for Jean-Louis, the spirit of BeOS lived on through it's small, but loyal, fan base which was made up of BeOS developers and users. They kept on developing software, and it was not long before there was a group developing an open source continuation of the fallen operating system. The project was called OpenBeOS, and it had the lofty goal of recreating BeOS out of open source components. The idea was for OpenBeOS to be an continuation of BeOS with backwards compatibility at the heart of the project.
Development began and soon the first version, a patch for BeOS R5, was available. The name was changed to Haiku, which represents the simplicity of the OS and is also in reference to the unique error messages in BeOS, which were often in haiku form. The project flourised throughout the next years, with the first stand-alone version being developed. Soon Haiku was able to render windows. It was still years away from being a usable desktop operating system, but Haiku was gaining steam.
From that point on Haiku only picked up speed, developing much faster than ever before. In 2006 a tentative date for the alpha 1 release was set for 2008. Leaps and bounds were made in this period and soon Haiku was self hosting. By the time the Alpha was released in September of 2009, Haiku boasted a native gcc4 port, allowing existing programs to be built for Haiku. Developers continued to work to bring things like Java to Haiku, and at this point Haiku borrows NONE of its code from BeOS.
That is where we are today! I know I missed some things, but you can check out the official project history. Alpha 1 is out right now so go on and give it a try. The next part in this series will deal with competitors and the main differences in Haiku as opposed to other OS's. As always, if you see a mistake or want to comment on this post or series you can do so through the forums, email, wave, or simply by commenting on this post.
I'll leave you with this screen capture of Haiku running in VirtualBox
-The Thoth-
I like the tabs on top... is there any way to do that in Linux?
ReplyDeleteThe bar on the top of the window is just the title bar, the tabs appear as normal in the browser. I personally am not a huge fan because it puts the close button on the left and the maximize button on the other side of the title bar. It does take some getting used to. If you like the look of Haiku, you can get something close to it if you are using GNOME here: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Haiku?content=114723 but it really isn't a good copy.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment!