Written by Michael Lankton Monday, 14 September 2009 12:30
After eight years in development Haiku released the first alpha of their open source recreation of BeOS today. Haiku R1/alpha 1 is a livecd, so you will be able to either install it to a hard drive or just run it from the cd to give it a test drive.
BeOS was ahead of it's time in many ways, not least of which was it's focus on multi-threading to make use of multiple processors. Be went under before hardware had caught up with their vision, but launching Haiku from the livecd makes you feel like you are picking up right where you left off the last time you were on a Be desktop. Haiku is a complete reconstruction of BeOS, and not just some linux distro with a Be-ish window manager. Like Be, Haiku boots to a usable desktop in less than ten seconds, and is exceptionally responsive and usable even on older, slower hardware and systems with as little as 128Mb of RAM. Haiku also runs well under virtualization if you'd like to test drive it that way. You'll be shocked at how snappy it is, and if you've ever used BeOS it will feel like a flashback.
BeOS had a small, but loyal following. Haiku recreates the Be desktop to perfection as near as I can tell. No support for wireless in this release, but the FreeBSD wi-fi stack has been ported to Haiku. As soon as they merge it into the release, Haiku is going on my laptop. Got a machine that doesn't have bleeding edge specs, but you'd like to run an operating system that performs like it's running on faster hardware? Take a look at Haiku.
