I’ve just spent my first day with Haiku in Virtualbox and hade some thoughts. First of all, I’m not an old BeOS user, I did try it out back in the days but I was completely stuck in the penguin crowd at that time. Anyway, I need some new playground and decided to try out Haiku and take a look at Darkwyrms interesting programming tutorials.
However, I have a few question as a regular user, like what program does what and how good is it? I browse around haikuware for example and find some IM clients but have no clue on which one to use, it seem that some of them are outdated but perhaps it’s not?
I would love a wikipage or sort of with the alternatives for standard stuff, like office suite, image editing, mesaging etc. I do have a few “must have” applications that I need to get my hands on before I start coding them myself
In Virtualbox, Haiku seem a little bit sluggish (especially Bezilla) put I guess that is Virtualbox only? Maybe I should take a look in the shed and see if I could get some old stuff working…
Hi elwis!
There’s a thread on Haikuware that may turn into what you’d like to see.
Compared to in VirtualBox, Haiku really goes into overdrive on hardware. If get the chance, try it! BeZilla is a bit sluggish there as well, but now that we have WebPositive, I only seldomly have a need for it anymore. Alpha2 is almost here now, a perfect opportunity to install the latest and greatest natively.
Bezilla is extremely sluggish… use webpositive (requires gcc4 or hybrid haiku which is what most of the test images are)
I think Web+ is also replacing Bezilla in the upcoming Alpha2
Also if you dig up some old HW Haiku needs at least more than 64mb ram to be able to boot (heh yah thats old to me… old to most people seem to be anything single core heh)
Thanks for the quick reply and link Humdinger - it will be very helpful.
It seem that there are a lot of apps to be coded for Haiku (I really prefer native apps, must be from my OSX days). I hope this old Java/.NET guy can find the time for it, would be jolly fun.
Well, I DO think there’s an old P4 with 512 MB RAM in the shed, but with a broken optical drive. That machine is 6 years old I think, computers age fast. (and they don’t age like wine either, like me
Actually I do have one more silly question. Since the size of the virtual image is limited I’m using an extra drive. However, when installing applications I suppose they want to reside in /boot/common//apps directory. Or, can I put them somewhere else (on my add on drive) and link them to … or is it simply a matter of modifiying my PATH variable or what is the “correct” way to do it?
You can put your apps whereever you want. I’d also recommend putting all 3rd party apps and your data on a separate volume. That way you just backup your home folder with your settings and are free to update the OS by simply replacing the virtual image.
OTOH, when you’re going native, it’s also possible to boot an updated version from CD or USB stick and use the installer to just update the OS without touching your home folder.
Thanks again, that sound like a clever way to do it. How can I put my $HOME to /new_drive/home - is there a file to be edited?
I’m not having any luck so far. I tried building Caya but got a lot of fails
"caya/trunk/application/Server.h:13: KeyMap.h: No such file or directory"
And my expanded Webpositive complains about missing libs, (libciu, libpng etc) so its a rocky road for the poor rookie. Are there any “must have” devpackages I need perhaps?
In next couple of days Haiku will release Alpha2. Alpha releases are built to be stable and include lots more stuff compared to nightly images. Alpha2 already has Webpositive installed. You should download & install Alpha2. r36769 appears to be final for Alpha2.
Best to wait for Haiku to update site with Alpha2 release information which will allow to choose from one of multiple mirrors to download from.
EDIT: change r36768 to 36769 - off by one - did not realize tagging build changed revision #
