Really good news in this is, I read this here for the first time, that the Beta release will support 64 bit machines. This will be essential for acceptance of HAIKU because these days all desktops sold are 64 bit and people will only consider 64 bit OS’es for their machines even if 32 would do in theory.
Lots of good stuff happening lately, keep up the good work, the Beta release will be soon then!
Pulkomondy,
Another excellent report on the high level of activities leading to R1 - Beta 1.
Yes, 64 bit is becoming more important than ever as the newer systems have 64 bit capable CPUs. However, not much is said about a 32 bit «=» 64 bit bridge to enable running older BeOS era applications existing only as binaries. .
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That was one of our GSoC project but none of the students submitted a proposal for it. Maybe one of the devs will take care of it at some point?
Each release will only provide support for the previous release binaries. So R1 will support BeOS binaries, R2 will support R1 but not BeOS, etc. However I think this only applies to the same architectures of each release. So 64 bit R1 won’t support any 32 bit binaries, which includes BeOS. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
Of course any 3rd party package for a 32 bit emulator/wrapper on x64 would be awesome!
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Well, we would include it in R1 (or R2, or…) if someone worked on it. However, with the great work of HaikuArchives on recovering sources for all the old apps, soon BeOS compatibility will become irrelevant and we can just recompile everything to run on 64bit systems. Which avoids writing a lot of code for what is essentially a one-time jump (there are no plans for 128 bit CPUs anytime soon).