Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 2

Eight months ago the Haiku Project released its first alpha, making many aware of its presence. Alpha 2 is the direct result of the contributions of many volunteers from around the world. With it the project hopes to entice more people to contribute, growing the project and reaching the goals for R1, and beyond.

The Haiku developer team is excited to have this improved version available to a wider audience and more extensively tested, and invites the public to help improve the quality of Haiku.

Notable Changes Between Alpha 1 and Alpha 2

WiFi support with WEP encryption introduced

WebPositive - a native Webkit based browser

New Locale Kit allows localization/translation

Improved USB mass storage performance

ACPI enabled by default

Bash command-line shell updated to version 4.x

Message Signal Interrupts (MSI)

Increased POSIX compliance

Increased performance

For More info, see the Release Notes.

Haiku R1/Alpha 2 Availability

Disk images (multiple formats) available from: /get-haiku

/get-haiku Purchase CD (from the end of May): http://www.cafepress.com/haiku_os

About Haiku

The Haiku Project is a volunteer based initiative started on August 18th, 2001, whose goal is to develop and promote the adoption of Haiku, an operating system which is fast and responsive, easy to use, powerful and enjoyable for everyone, both users and developers. Haiku adopts design and concepts introduced in BeOS™ and take these to the next level by fusing them with recent advances.

Give Haiku a whirl today to see what you think, and discover what you have been missing!

Please use Haiku's bug tracker to report any bugs found.

BeOS is a trademark of ACCESS CO., LTD.