An OS of yore

Revived and open source freed

Waiting to be used

Haiku is not only a Japanese short poem with a defined structure—it's also the name of an open-source recreation of BeOS, an alternative operating system originally developed in the mid-1990s. It was the brainchild of Jean-Louis Gassée, a flamboyant, enthusiastic manager and head of Apple France. He climbed his way up the executive ladder to become the head of “advanced product development and worldwide marketing” before being forced out of the company by then-CEO John Sculley in 1990.

Undaunted, Gassée decided he would create a brand new computer platform from scratch, including both custom hardware and a new operating system. Gassée was following in the footsteps of Steve Jobs, who had attempted the same thing in with NeXT in 1985 when he was ousted from Apple.

The BeBox was released in October 1995. It was a curious beast, sporting dual 66MHz PowerPC 603e processors, a “GeekPort” for attaching custom electronic devices, and vertical “Blinkenlights,” LED strips that showed CPU usage. Only 1,800 BeBoxes were sold in total before Be, Inc. discontinued all hardware manufacturing and concentrated on selling the operating system by itself, initially for PowerPC Macintoshes.

In 1996, Apple was searching for a new operating system to replace its failed “Copland” project, and for a while BeOS was at the top of the list (this list included both Windows NT and Solaris, neither of which would have been especially appetizing for Apple fans). While negotiating a sale price, Gassée, exuding his typical bombastic confidence, told a reporter that “we’ve got Apple by the balls and we’re going to squeeze until it hurts.” Someone at Apple got wind of this and phoned a guy, who phoned another guy... who phoned up Steve Jobs at NeXT. The rest is history. “C’est la vie,” said Gassée, and switched the focus of BeOS to x86-based PCs.

BeOS reached its pinnacle of success in 2000 when the R5 version was released as a free download. However, few people upgraded to the $99 “Professional” version, and a last-ditch attempt to save the company by bundling BeOS with the Sony eVilla Internet Appliance failed to bring in the necessary cash. Be, Inc. sold all its assets to Palm, Inc. in November 2001 for $11 million.

Since then, a German company, yellowTAB, released a “new” version of BeOS called Zeta in 2005 (which I reviewed). However, the company never confirmed whether or not it had access to the BeOS source code. The company discontinued Zeta in 2007, stating that sales failed to live up to expectations.

With the legal status of the BeOS source code in limbo, it was up to an open-source group of hackers to try to recently keep the BeOS dream alive. Their project was originally named OpenBeOS, but trademark issues forced a name change. Haiku was chosen as a callback to the old error messages in BeOS’s built-in Web browser, which were delivered (appropriately) in haiku form. Today, the Haiku group aims not only to rebuild that operating system, but to also run application binaries originally designed for BeOS. With the team recently releasing version R1/Alpha 4.1, Ars decided to take the OS for a test drive

Installation

Haiku is available for download in a source code bundle: an .iso file that can be used to burn a live-booting and installation DVD, and a binary .image file that can be written directly to a USB thumb drive. The latter is the preferred method to check out Haiku. It can be run directly off the flash drive without needing to install it on the computer’s hard drive.

Copying the .image file to a thumb drive can be done with the Unix command ‘dd’ on Linux and OS X, or using the free ImageWriter program on Windows systems. Once the image has been copied to the USB drive, the computer immediately complains it cannot read the drive. In Windows’ case, it even offers to format it. The reason it can’t read the drive is that it is formatted with BeOS's native BFS file system. That's something only BeOS (and now, Haiku) knows how to read.

To start up the operating system, one simply inserts the thumb drive into a USB port and reboots. Most modern computers can be set to boot from the USB key by pressing the ‘Del’ key during the boot process then selecting the thumb drive manually in the boot priority menu.

The .image file creates a roughly 600MB partition for Haiku, leaving the rest of the USB drive unpartitioned and empty (mine had a 2GB capacity). For future releases, the Haiku team should seriously consider increasing the partition size, as the default distribution fills up that 600MB nearly completely with only a few megabytes free. The built-in partition manager application in Haiku lets you partition, format, and mount the rest of the space as another virtual drive, but it cannot dynamically resize partitions. This became an issue when testing.

Tested Hardware

I first tested the Haiku thumb drive on an older computer, a Core 2 Duo @ 1.8 GHz with 2GB RAM. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the computer went into an endless reboot loop as soon as it started accessing the thumb drive.

Next, I tried booting from my trusty MacBook (a late 2008 model, the first to come with the aluminum unibody, sporting 4GB of RAM). Sadly, the USB key refused to boot at all on this hardware. I tried booting from the Live DVD instead. I got as far as the boot screen, but then the computer hung and refused to proceed any further.

The last computer I tried was an ASUS P5K-VM motherboard with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU running at 2.4GHz and 8GB of RAM. This is my Media Center PC, hooked up directly to my television. Fortunately, Haiku booted on this hardware without any issue. Startup was very fast and took less than 15 seconds to get to a fully functional desktop. By default, the system booted into a resolution of 1024x768. Unfortunately, there was no option to switch to a widescreen resolution. Searching the forums, I found the system was using a default VESA driver and was not aware of my graphics card. I tried installing a (very) old BeOS NVIDIA unified driver. It appeared to install correctly, but the driver was not initialized on a reboot. According to the Haiku forums, the operating system will automatically support any NVIDIA graphics card up to a GeForce 7950, but cards newer than that (my graphics card is one of them) default to the VESA driver instead. Haiku does all 3D rendering in software mode and does not support 3D acceleration, so the lack of a driver didn't change the overall functionality of the operating system that much.

My other hardware was supported just fine: my network card, sound system, and various wireless USB mice and keyboards all worked automatically.

Listing image by http://haiku-os.org