Please excuse the wall of questions in one post and bear with me if these sound dumb as I’m just an Ubuntu/Debian Openbox user.
Can I install Hauki on x86-64 hardware?
Any optimisation for SSD in installation and in Web app usage or elsewhere?
What is Haiku's sound architecture or framework or whatever? Alsa, OSS…? Does it or media player support gapless playback? Can I set SPDIF as my device?
How can I use/mount my WD network drive; via smb, nfs…?
What toolkit does Haiku use?
Are the apps to be installed only those included in the iso and the ones in Haukiware?
(How) can I install a functional LyX/Texlive environment and some other Qt apps (no KDE ones)?
Is there a backup utility like Luckybackup; or a command line alternative?
Are both global and configurable hot-keys supported? That is, can I configure multimedia keys to control the media app while working with another app?
Is there something like lm_sensors for hardware temp monitoring?
Is there a gmail notifier utility?
CD/DVD/BD ripper?
Is it rolling release?
Can I trust Haiku to continue to be really independent, not to be dominated by some commercial entities (like Red Hat) or by other interest groups; and not to be tabletised, ruined by something like Gnome3 or Unity; or not to be bloated like KDE?
Most of these are questions you should look up for yourself but anyway…
Haiku is mainly 32bit with PAE extensions to support 64GB ram total with 4Gb per program. There is a 64Bit port however it is not ready as of 2012.
Not sure… and what do web apps have to do with SSDs?
Haiku has it’s own mediakit and drivers in addition to being able to reuse drivers from OSS. Dunno about spdif.
There was some work done on native NFS support this GSoC.
BeOS has its own BeAPI for application development so that is native. QT 4.8 is also available at this time although some functionality is not 100% complete for instance qtwebkit doesn’t have html5 stuff hooked up.
There are a few apps you can install with the intalloptionalpackages command. And of course Haikuware. There are a few other sites as well but mainly haikuware.
Check haikuware also use the QT 4.8 package from poorcoding (see qupzilla page on hikuware for a link to the wikipage it can be downloaded from). As far as TEX that is up to you haven’t tried it myself.
I seem to recall there being some backup utilities written in yab. check haikuware.
no idea.
I think there is some for Intel hardware or at least frequency control drivers. None of them work on my AMD systems as far as I know.
I think the built in notification kit works with the built in mail app however I wouldn’t trust it yet the developers have had issues with gmail (lost mail etc…)
More or less since there are nightlies… but keep in mind there is no real package management system in place yet but its coming soon and I believe supports updates and such. There is a new post on the front page about the progress today.
I think you can trust it to be dominated by the developers if those happen to be commercially funded that is how it will be. Haiku Inc, though is a non profit so bare that in mind. That said ALL the developers I have seen are exercising very good common sense in designing a Desktop operating system though I see no reason why not to have a separate tablet UI and BeOS even did this with BeIA it was separate though which I think is key.
Any optimisation for SSD in installation and in Web app usage or elsewhere?
Perhaps you’re worried about cycling an older SSD?
Anyway, recently I’ve taken to running Haiku from the USB stick. Performance is great, and once my apps are loaded, the LED on the stick rarely blinks unless I’m doing an explicit write. It blips a little for browser cookie writes, and reads a little between pages, but there’s no OS “heartbeat” kind of thing, AFAICT. When idle for long periods, there seems to be no drive activity at all. Webpositive is not disk caching images, AFAICT, excepting for page icons. Haiku seems to be very good in terms of using it with a stick drive. I’m running it without a swap file, and with 1G of memory that seems to be no problem. Version alpha-4, if I am not mistaken, will have utility app support for managing swap that’s not on the boot drive. Someone may want to correct me if I’m wrong about the swap …
The alpha-4 is due any day, so you might wait for it, and “dd” the anyboot file onto a stick. Take it for a spin, as they say …