Playing with Haiku
Haiku, the operating system (not the poetry) aims to pick up where BeOS left off. BeOS was an operating system for personal computers created in the 1990’s. It was famed for it’s ability to multitask and it’s many other ground breaking features. Whilst it wasn’t based on any of the more familiar alternatives to Windows (such as Linux) it was positioned as a competitor in this market. In the days before Mac OS X, Apple‘s current operating system family, it was hoped by many (including Be Inc) that they would be purchased by Apple and their future OS would be built on BeOS. This didn’t happen, Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and a few years later Palm bought Be.
Whilst this is all very interesting it doesn’t explain Haiku. The goal of the project is to recreate BeOS and extend it, bringing it up to date whilst still being compatible with BeOS and it’s existing suite of software. I really don’t see any benefit to Haiku, other than a curiosity of a system kept alive by loyal fans, but with it being freely available to try I thought I’d see what it was like.
Not only is it easy to try Haiku it’s also completely free. I downloaded my favourite virtual machine programme – VirtualBox, the latest Haiku test image (VMware images work in VirtualBox), created a new virtual machine gave it at least 128MB of RAM told it to use the VMware disk image as the hard disk and pressed Start.
Haiku booting
Haiku desktop
Haiku comes with a few recognizable applications such as Firefox and with the developers releasing an up to date compiler, they’re making it as easy as they can to encourage common open source applications. It does all smack of being rather pointless though. BeOS failed back in the day when it was cutting edge technology and now Haiku is playing catchup. People have moved on and other than being just a curiosity, it probably only has some education value if you want to branch out of Linux programming and try something different. The Haiku project is after programmers and there is a lot to do but some cool stuff to work on.