Hey Good Lookin’ – R2 Desktop Proposal
Stephen B. - November 8th, 2008
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While the primary goal of Haiku’s R1 release is to essentially recreate R5, a portion of the project’s effort has always been devoted to planning for R2 and beyond. Another piece was added to the plan yesterday, as app_server coder extraordinaire darkwyrm posted the second revision of his proposal for the R2 Desktop (the announcement , and is the proposal itself). The proposal mentions improvements that cover many aspects of Haiku, including visual appearance (as my rather glib title suggests), window management, file management, 3d acceleration, transparency, etc. It also follows the old Be Inc. philosophy that there’s nothing wrong with borrowing ideas from other operating systems, as long as you can implement them better. The proposal is currently in the “Request for Comments” stage – so if you have any feedback to offer, head over to darkwyrm’s blog and post a comment.
The recent release of Haiku pre-Alpha builds has finally got me motivated to give it a try on some real hardware (as opposed to a virtual machine) after nearly two years. The amount of progress is very impressive, to the point where I decided to try using Haiku instead of R5 for day-to-day tasks – with the intention of writing a semi-review based that experience (and also providing an update/follow-up to 0033’s similar article from March 2007). It occurred to me that there are probably many others in the same boat – those who follow Haiku’s development, but haven’t had a chance to try it very often (especially on real hardware). So I’m taking requests: if there’s anything that you’d like me to test in Haiku – apps, add-ons, hacks, etc – post a comment or send an EMail to stephenb@beosnews.com.
Back on October 22nd, some sharp-eyed Haiku downloaders spotted an interesting new file in the Haiku files archive, tantalizingly-named “haiku-pre-alpha-r28283.raw.bz2.” Updates to that build have appeared on an almost-daily basis since pre-alpha-r28283 was uploaded – while the newer builds omit the “pre-” before “alpha,” they do still appear to be pre-alpha builds as well. It also looks like the pre-alpha builds contain a number of bundled applications, based on the recently-accepted proposals for Alpha 1.
Over on the Haiku-OS.org blogs, Michael Crawford has made a very interesting post about an organization in San Jose, California, which recycles computer hardware that is “obsolete,” but is still usable. The head of the organization also happens to be one of Michael’s housemates – so he came up with a proposal to catalogue the hardware online and offer it to Open Source developers. From the post:
Sounds like a great deal, especially for Haiku developers – given that much BeOS / Haiku-compatible hardware is no longer available new, and many “obsolete” PCs are more-than capable of running small, efficient OSes like Haiku (I suspect a 1Ghz CPU is already overkill for most tasks). As a personal aside, another source that I’ve found very useful for buying used-but-still-capable hardware (much of which is BeOS-compatible) is VFXweb.com. They’re a small company in western Canada who buy up old computer hardware, do some cleaning and testing, re-sell it. The prices are a bit higher than what you can often find on eBay, but I’ve found it much less hit-or-miss than dealing with random eBay sellers (I haven’t had a single dud yet from them).
Recently we received an EMail from Pier Luigi Fiorini, one of the admins of OSDrawer, letting us know that the site’s new version is now online. From the announcement:
In other OSDrawer-related news, Pier recently sent an EMail to the Haiku Dev. mailing list announcing that development of the im_kit has restarted and the source is now hosted in the OSDrawer SVN respository (also mentioned on Slaad’s blog). And according to the project info page, a new release is due in 3 days (Nov. 1st). Looks like it’s time to update our “Download & Build im_kit†how-to.
Thanks to “scottmc” over on BeGroovy for spotting this page on the Haiku website: R1/Alpha1Proposals. Various proposals were recently submitted and voted on, in an effort to determine the requirements that Haiku will need to meet (and bugs that will need to be fixed) before it will be considered ready for an Alpha release. Some of the more interesting proposals that have been accepted: – Release as the GCC 2/4 hybrid – meaning that “applications compiled with GCC 2 and 4 can run out of the box” While this doesn’t necessarily mean that R1 – or even Alpha 1 – is right around the corner, it is still extremely encouraging that the Haiku developers feel they are close enough to create a roadmap.
The big story in recent BeOS-related news was the addition of swap file support to Haiku (spotted on ICO, also picked up by OSNews). This is especially good news for developers, as development-related tasks often gobble up large amounts of memory (compiling for one) – and without a swap file/partition, most (all?) OSes will hard-crash if they completely run out of memory. So while Haiku has been self-hosting for a while now, this should make the process of actually compiling Haiku from inside Haiku less dependent on physical memory (especially handy with virtual machines, which tend to be memory-constrained).
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