Hi all,
the never-ending wait for the beta release is becoming sort of disheartening for so many of us.
Any chance that the first beta will be released by the end of this year?
If not, could you please give us a tentative timeframe?
Thanks
HaikuForever
seems to be a lot of progress at a pretty good clip, judging by pulkomandy’s monthly updates
I won’t give a timeframe because all previous attempts at this have failed. The main issue currently is https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/10893, and Waddlesplash is working on it. The second big problem is the breakage of network things, both the DNS resolution code, and the web browser, which aren’t in acceptable state for a release. Once these are solved we can create the release branch and put the developers in “release mode”. During this testing phase we will need to work on some other things like the filesystem trim support for SSD, which should see more testing to make sure it doesn’t accidentaly wipe your disk or otherwise corrupt the data, and general testing to make sure issues like https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/9404 are solved. Running Haiku in live CD mode, testing on as much hardware as possible, etc.
All of this can take a lot more time than initially thought. In the meantime, you can use the nightly builds, so you can try the latest state of things. They are sometimes broken, in that case, you can help us by making bug reports. It's better to do so before the beta release, so the bugs are fixed before the release is made.
Connectivity seems to be working again. Unfortunately there was a review happening just as that was going down: http://bsilverstrim.blogspot.com/2015/07/revisiting-haiku-operating-system.html
The alpha release works fairly well, let’s try the nightly build! Latest features!
That…was a mistake.
That statement from the linked Haiku review pretty much summed up the current state of the Haiku nightly’s.
In fact, I can’t recall a single instance when a nightly build actually had everything I normally use on Haiku all working at the same time.
I see another alpha release in Haiku’s future…not a beta.
That’s why there is no release yet. Our definition of “beta” is not “more stable than alpha”, it is “all planned APIs are implemented”. And we have reached this with the package management work. The remaining work is making it as stable as our previous alpha releases again, then we will have our beta version.
That’s why there is no release yet. Our definition of “beta” is not “more stable than alpha”, it is
"all planned APIs are implemented". And we have reached this with the package management work. The
remaining work is making it as stable as our previous alpha releases again, then we will have our
beta version.
So, that means that in theory the current branch is already feature complete, right?
What about hardware support? Last time I tried to install a Haiku on real hardware (about two years ago), it was not even able to boot. And it was not some obscure brand or model (it was a HP Pavilion latop).
Have problems like this been solved?
Did you open a bug report and attach a syslog? If not, it’s unlikely that the problem is solved. It’s tempting to think “the devs surely already know about it, I’m using common hardware and they will have noticed on their own machines”, but that won’t work. On my machines, I did the needed work to fix the problems I had. But we can’t fix these problems if there are no bug reports.
It's a good idea to try this now, and open a bugreport. During the testing of the beta 1 branch (so, after branching it) we will also have a public request to the community to test images even more carefully and on as much hardware as possible (including all these old machines stored in your basement or whatever), so we can have an idea how well Haiku runs on a set of machines as large as possible.