R1/B5, 5-7-5
September 15, 2024 5:44 PM Subscribe
Over on Youtube
"Haiku Beta 5 is OUT!"
Action Retro shouts
Said right: "Be Oh Ess,"
Beta 5 brings huge upgrades
in stability
It's great advantage
Has long been responsiveness
Its UI runs well
A useful option
To make use of old hardware
Modestly it runs
If you want to try
I suggest VirtualBox
Or else KVM
If you try VB
To Other (64 bit)
You should set OS
And Pointing Device,
You should set to USB
Tablet, works the best
If you reply here
Please don't feel like you have to
Write them in haiku
I did this only
As a silly game, you don't
Have to do it too
But if you want to
Play along with this dumb post
Don't let me stop you!
"Haiku Beta 5 is OUT!"
Action Retro shouts
Said right: "Be Oh Ess,"
Beta 5 brings huge upgrades
in stability
It's great advantage
Has long been responsiveness
Its UI runs well
A useful option
To make use of old hardware
Modestly it runs
If you want to try
I suggest VirtualBox
Or else KVM
If you try VB
To Other (64 bit)
You should set OS
And Pointing Device,
You should set to USB
Tablet, works the best
If you reply here
Please don't feel like you have to
Write them in haiku
I did this only
As a silly game, you don't
Have to do it too
But if you want to
Play along with this dumb post
Don't let me stop you!
haiku boots swiftly
yet the tears begin to flow
it lacks a geekport
posted by phooky at 6:17 PM on September 15 [4 favorites]
yet the tears begin to flow
it lacks a geekport
posted by phooky at 6:17 PM on September 15 [4 favorites]
We used to get Byte mag at the office in the 1990s, and it was still pretty good.
I still remember the excitement of the BeBox issue, had a similar impact on me as the 1987 Mac II cover. It really looked like a better Amiga, but I guess NeXT had a 4 year head start and several hundred million dollars of R&D lead too I guess, so when Gil was looking for an OS in 1996, NexT was the only choice . . .
I guess Be just needed the www to mature underneath it, these days I do 99% of my stuff in the browser . . . which, ironically, NeXT had a hand in enabling TBL to get that ball rolling.
posted by torokunai at 6:33 PM on September 15 [3 favorites]
I still remember the excitement of the BeBox issue, had a similar impact on me as the 1987 Mac II cover. It really looked like a better Amiga, but I guess NeXT had a 4 year head start and several hundred million dollars of R&D lead too I guess, so when Gil was looking for an OS in 1996, NexT was the only choice . . .
I guess Be just needed the www to mature underneath it, these days I do 99% of my stuff in the browser . . . which, ironically, NeXT had a hand in enabling TBL to get that ball rolling.
posted by torokunai at 6:33 PM on September 15 [3 favorites]
Why go halfway? Try NirvanaOS. It has no apps, no internet connectivity, and only one command line program: AUM, which has no man page. Oh, and it runs on everything.
Of course, after making this joke, I find there actually is a NirvanaOS. And it’s not even one of the 9 billion flavors of linux.
posted by jabah at 8:55 PM on September 15 [4 favorites]
Of course, after making this joke, I find there actually is a NirvanaOS. And it’s not even one of the 9 billion flavors of linux.
posted by jabah at 8:55 PM on September 15 [4 favorites]
I was looking for something light, so I tried it out on real metal with a middle aged thinkpad (X220). It is indeed quite snappy. Installation was a little weird about partitions, only mentioning doing it "properly" while also warning against the correct default.
The two browsers available just weren't up to snuff, though. They didn't work with all my self hosted sites' frontends (so maybe it's my fault on both ends). Falkon was the better of the two.
I, too, could get by with just web based tools, ssh with keys, and sshfs/nfs to a NAS. In a couple hours of testing across two days, I was only able to get the ssh keys working. But, hey, I read the manuals, so I learned something about something.
posted by Snijglau at 10:27 PM on September 15 [1 favorite]
The two browsers available just weren't up to snuff, though. They didn't work with all my self hosted sites' frontends (so maybe it's my fault on both ends). Falkon was the better of the two.
I, too, could get by with just web based tools, ssh with keys, and sshfs/nfs to a NAS. In a couple hours of testing across two days, I was only able to get the ssh keys working. But, hey, I read the manuals, so I learned something about something.
posted by Snijglau at 10:27 PM on September 15 [1 favorite]
Some good things about Haiku:
- It installs and launches amazingly fast. Both times are just a few seconds.
- It runs on super modest hardware. Its 32-bit version (which is still binary compatible with BeOS!) runs with just 384MB of RAM.
- It places super-high priority on the UI experience. A program might seem to lag a bit, but the system itself and its controls always remain solid.
- It has an extra simple UI, that hasn't succumbed to the intervening 28 years of decay. Scroll bars aren't hidden, binary choices are checkboxes so they don't obscure what's on and off, and you can drag the Tracker, its version of the Taskbar/Dock, to any corner or side of the screen.
- It has a simple and sensible filesystem layout.
- Like BeOS that it was based on, it has a database-like filesystem that allows files to have arbitrary attributes. This is less of a selling point these days, but once Microsoft was toying with adding a similar feature to Windows in the form of a NTFS replacement called WinFS.
The drawbacks? While it has used code from other projects to help with is hardware support, it still lags behind. Don't expect many graphics card specific drivers. While BeOS was always brilliant at multimedia, I don't think a lot of cards have hardware acceleration. As mentioned, it doesn't have a great web browser yet. And it's still an intrinsically single-user OS.
posted by JHarris at 3:13 AM on September 16 [4 favorites]
- It installs and launches amazingly fast. Both times are just a few seconds.
- It runs on super modest hardware. Its 32-bit version (which is still binary compatible with BeOS!) runs with just 384MB of RAM.
- It places super-high priority on the UI experience. A program might seem to lag a bit, but the system itself and its controls always remain solid.
- It has an extra simple UI, that hasn't succumbed to the intervening 28 years of decay. Scroll bars aren't hidden, binary choices are checkboxes so they don't obscure what's on and off, and you can drag the Tracker, its version of the Taskbar/Dock, to any corner or side of the screen.
- It has a simple and sensible filesystem layout.
- Like BeOS that it was based on, it has a database-like filesystem that allows files to have arbitrary attributes. This is less of a selling point these days, but once Microsoft was toying with adding a similar feature to Windows in the form of a NTFS replacement called WinFS.
The drawbacks? While it has used code from other projects to help with is hardware support, it still lags behind. Don't expect many graphics card specific drivers. While BeOS was always brilliant at multimedia, I don't think a lot of cards have hardware acceleration. As mentioned, it doesn't have a great web browser yet. And it's still an intrinsically single-user OS.
posted by JHarris at 3:13 AM on September 16 [4 favorites]
Snijglau, were you using a previous beta, or the new one, Beta 5? I've noticed that, in VirtualBox at least, it's a lot more stable. It's been nearly three decades but it's still moving along.
posted by JHarris at 3:15 AM on September 16
posted by JHarris at 3:15 AM on September 16
BeOS could have been the new MacOS. It would have been interesting to see what Apple would have done with it given what they did with NextStep.
posted by tommasz at 6:01 AM on September 16 [2 favorites]
posted by tommasz at 6:01 AM on September 16 [2 favorites]
Yeah, I'd love to find an historical review for that kind of wild history between System 7 and OS X, and Win3.1 and Win95, when IBM and Apple came together to form Taligent for Pink and BeOS, Steve was doing his money's no object schtick with NeXT, as well as Copland, Cairo and Workplace OS - like everybody was considering a ground up OS rewrite for memory management and networking and a few other things that are obvious now, but were either patent bound or on the kind of wrong side of chip compatibility at the time.
I remember being very excited about the BeBox's multiprocessor capabilities back in the day.
posted by Kyol at 6:31 AM on September 16 [3 favorites]
I remember being very excited about the BeBox's multiprocessor capabilities back in the day.
posted by Kyol at 6:31 AM on September 16 [3 favorites]
> I remember being very excited about the BeBox's multiprocessor capabilities back in the day.
The BeBox takes me back.
I remember reading somewhere, I think from MacAddict?, about how the BeBox's PowerPC 603 chips existed essentially as a tech demo purpose to show they could do multiprocessor, but didn't actually get any increased performance compared to if they could get 604 chips, which they couldn't either afford or weren't easy to get their hands on.
posted by mrzarquon at 7:09 AM on September 16
The BeBox takes me back.
I remember reading somewhere, I think from MacAddict?, about how the BeBox's PowerPC 603 chips existed essentially as a tech demo purpose to show they could do multiprocessor, but didn't actually get any increased performance compared to if they could get 604 chips, which they couldn't either afford or weren't easy to get their hands on.
posted by mrzarquon at 7:09 AM on September 16
Yeah, I'd love to find an historical review for that kind of wild history between System 7 and OS X, and Win3.1 and Win95, when IBM and Apple came together to form Taligent for Pink and BeOS
Daniel Eran Dilger wrote some fascinating articles about this stuff on his old Roughly Drafted blog. Here are some examples. I love the OS screenshots in the third link! The author moved all the files at some point to a new domain and a useful index disappeared, unfortunately. I wish he had made some kind of book about all this, because his stuff was opinionated but enlightening.
posted by jabah at 7:25 AM on September 16 [2 favorites]
Daniel Eran Dilger wrote some fascinating articles about this stuff on his old Roughly Drafted blog. Here are some examples. I love the OS screenshots in the third link! The author moved all the files at some point to a new domain and a useful index disappeared, unfortunately. I wish he had made some kind of book about all this, because his stuff was opinionated but enlightening.
posted by jabah at 7:25 AM on September 16 [2 favorites]
I ought to try it on my modernish-day PC. I bet the teapot will be spinning like mad.
posted by farlukar at 7:28 AM on September 16 [1 favorite]
posted by farlukar at 7:28 AM on September 16 [1 favorite]
Also, Firefox Is (Almost) Ported to Haiku OS
posted by farlukar at 7:32 AM on September 16 [4 favorites]
posted by farlukar at 7:32 AM on September 16 [4 favorites]
I loved BeOS back in the day. I acquired a Power Computing Mac clone by dumpster diving the computer services building at CU Boulder and had it running on that machine. It really seemed like the future.
posted by Eddie Mars at 11:17 AM on September 16 [2 favorites]
posted by Eddie Mars at 11:17 AM on September 16 [2 favorites]
I got BeOS running on my 7500 from the Mactech CD ... since this was after the NeXT reverse acquisition I did it more for curiosity than evaluation.
posted by torokunai at 8:29 AM on September 17 [1 favorite]
posted by torokunai at 8:29 AM on September 17 [1 favorite]
Actually bought a PowerComputing machine and apple shutting the clones out of macos licensing put me off macos ever since. Tried BeOS on that machine and got a dual intel computer soon after for it. Wrote a game (Pongeroids) that is apparently still played, I have unfortunately lost the early versions of the source that actually ran on BeOS though.
posted by Ansible at 3:03 PM on September 17
posted by Ansible at 3:03 PM on September 17
« Older We didn’t know all that stuff; we just knew how to... | Solar farms can benefit wildlife Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by JHarris at 5:45 PM on September 15 [3 favorites]