The Haiku open source software project, which is building a clean-room implementation of the BeOS platform, has published its third alpha release. The new version was made available over the weekend, and it offers enhanced hardware support, better stability, and a wide range of new features. I tested Haiku Alpha 3 in VirtualBox and on my HP Mini netbook.

BeOS was one of the most advanced desktop computing platforms of the '90s, but it failed to gain mainstream acceptance. Be's assets were sold to Palm and eventually ended up in the hands of Japanese browser vendor Access. After Be's demise, the subsequent owners of the BeOS copyrights declined to continue development or release the code base. The Haiku project was formed in 2001 with the aim of rebuilding the operating system from scratch.

Developing Haiku from the ground up has been a long and painstaking process. After a decade of work, the platform can boot reliably on some mainstream computers. There are still a lot of gaps in hardware compatibility and third-party application support, however, and the platform isn't as compelling today as BeOS was in the '90s.

Despite the limitations, some of the classic advantages of BeOS still shine through in Haiku. The operating system fully boots to a working desktop in mere seconds and has an extremely responsive user interface. The platform also benefits from a very small hard disk and memory footprint.

To test Alpha 3 on my netbook, I copied the "anyboot" Haiku image to a USB thumb drive. I was able to boot and run the operating system entirely from the thumb drive without having to install it on the netbook hard drive—much like you can with modern Linux "live" images. Despite running from a USB drive, performance and responsiveness were excellent.

Haiku's hardware support is much better today than it was in 2009 when we last gave it a full hands-on test, though compatibility is obviously not as broad as Linux's yet. Haiku had no trouble with my netbook's high-resolution display, but the screen had a barely-noticeable flicker. I tried to correct the problem by testing a number of different refresh rates, but couldn't get it to go away.

The other major hardware problem that I encountered was lack of networking support. Haiku has had support for WiFi since Alpha 2 and is designed to be able to reuse existing FreeBSD wireless drivers. The WiFi hardware in my netbook uses proprietary firmware, so it doesn't work out of the box. Scripts are provided for automatically downloading the firmware, but that obviously requires that you have an existing Internet connection. I tried using a regular ethernet connection, but didn't have any luck.

The other hardware problem that I encountered was poor support for my netbook's touchpad—a Synaptics ClickPad. The Synaptics hardware is really finicky and doesn't work all that well with Linux, so I wasn't surprised to find that it is problematic under Haiku. The entire touchpad clicks and it has left and right segments for left and right clicking. Haiku interpreted a tap as a click rather than responding to an actual touchpad press, and it couldn't differentiate a right click. Aside from that, it worked basically as expected, including two-finger scrolling.

Read/write support for mainstream filesystems has been added in Alpha 3, so I had no trouble mounting the NTFS and Ext4 partitions (for Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04) on the netbook's hard drive. The write support is still a bit experimental, but I didn't encounter any problems when I copied some files over to the Ext4 filesystem.

Being able to see Haiku boot on a netbook was pretty exciting, but the lack of networking made it a very short experiment. I did most of my actual testing in VirtualBox, which supported the networking properly after I changed the emulated network adapter to Intel Pro/1000 MT Desktop .

The Haiku desktop looks a lot like how I remember BeOS looking, but with a few modern embellishments. Haiku's vector icons, for example, make the environment look a bit crisper. It's still mostly gray and yellow—an echo of '90s software aesthetics.

Third-party software availability on Haiku has gotten much better, largely thanks to a community-driven port of Nokia's open source Qt development toolkit. The Haiku port of Qt has native-looking widgets, which means that many Qt applications conform with Haiku's native look and feel. The Qt port is far enough along that even some KDE applications will work on the operating system.

Aside from the Qt port, Haiku offers its own clean-room implementation of the BeOS developer APIs and widget toolkit. There isn't a ton of native software for the platform yet, but it's still possible to run some legacy BeOS applications on Haiku. The Haiku developers have gone to great lengths to preserve binary compatibility with BeOS R5.

One of the coolest new features in Alpha 3 is an experimental window decorator that introduces support for tiling and tabbed windows. If you hold the Windows keyboard key and drag the titlebar of one window over another, the titlebars will snap together into a row and the windows will be grouped. You can switch between them by clicking the titlebars. When you drag around a window, all of the other windows in its group will come with it.

The tiling works basically the same way. When you hold the windows key on the keyboard and drag a window alongside another window, it will snap into place and create a tiled group. The edges of tiled windows will resize together, just like in tiled window managers such as Ion.

These advanced window management features, which were developed as a University of Auckland project, aren't included in Haiku's default window decorator yet. They are part of a separate "StackAndTile" decorator that can be enabled for testing purposes by typing setdecor SATDecorator at the Haiku command line.

Haiku has come a long way since the project started in 2001. A lot of functionality is in place, but there is still a lot missing. One of the biggest omissions at this point is a package management system. That bit is currently a work in progress, as you can see from the TODO list. When this piece falls into place and some of the remaining hardware issues are resolved, Haiku will look a lot more interesting.

You can get more details about the new features in Haiku Alpha 3 by referring to the official release notes. The Alpha 3 image is available in various formats from a number of mirrors. You can get a download link from the Haiku website.