Focus on a small set of computers/hardware!

1

I followed some discussions about how is the development of the Haiku project and the delay in the release of the final version.
I have been following the progress of Haiku since it was still called OpenBeOS! Very thing was done !! New features were added to the original, which is very good !!
However, in my opinion, some lines of work, although valid, could be left to when the project was already in its final version! For example, the port to other processors! We should focus all the effort first defined what will be the final version, then complete the missing features are finished in function than to set for the final version and finally remove any remaining bugs.
The setting of targets for the completion of the project should be as lean as possible to allow the few developers can focus their efforts.
People like me who unfortunately is unable to contribute code, can help with donations.
I have an idea that might seem crazy to some that would reduce the spectrum of hardware that Haiku can work. Explain, we could elect a small set of computers in a small number of manufacturers (eg, Dell, Lenovo, HP and Samsung) and focus mainly on developing drivers for this hardware reduced. I imagined that seeing Apple’s philosophy on having a OS for a hardware specific and hardware for an OS specific!
I’ll be waiting stones in this discussion!! I hope comments [constructive comments, of course!! :)].

(translated with google translate)

2

there’s not much that’d be sped up by narrowing hardware focus. most of what’s left is purely software issues.

3

This is an open-source project. If somebody wants to grab the code and port it to their cellphone there’s nothing Haiku, Inc can do to stop them except to stop them calling it “Haiku”, so it might as well give those people a little server space and so keep an eye on things. In the process they might solve problems the main project is experiencing.

It’s actually getting harder and harder to source the plain-vanilla computers that Alt-OSs thrive on - Getting a laptop without a touchscreen is already becoming a little difficult. I bought my wife a HP laptop last year. You wouldn’t believe what I went through to find a Windows 7 machine but that’s another story - the keyboard is full of keys that are useless with anything that is not Windows.

Yes, it would help if somewhere on this site, there was a list of a budget laptop, a high-end laptop and a desktop saying “Buy one of these machines and the current official release will run on it - sound-card, webcam, everything. We guarantee that.” Then the further away you get from those three reference platforms, the more likely you will have problems booting and running Haiku.

(No, don’t bother coming up with the list on Haikuware. I appreciate it, I’ve put stuff up there myself, but a user-created database of things that sort-of work is no equivalent to an officially sanctioned HW list on this website.)

But how to do that? It would mean that somebody would have to buy, rent, borrow or beg a lot of machines, install Haiku and then test the life out of them until they came up with a shortlist of the three best Haikuboxen. That’s a lot of time and money, and it would have to be done over and over again as new machines came onto the market. Any rich old philantropists out there who might want to sponsor this effort, you know where to apply. Give me a desk and I’ll make a career out of it. :slight_smile:

But you look like you want to do it the other way round. You say “let’s take the Dell X123, the HP Z245 and the Samsung 6789 and just make drivers for those three.” OK, except that three months from now Dell discontinues the X123 and brings out the NEW! IMPROVED! X125a with a completely different set of components.In response, HP drops the entire Z range and goes back to the letter A, While Samsung sells its PC division to Apple, which promptly closes it down. Now what?

We get frustrated when our hw does not work with Haiku. I know, I too have complained when my middle-of-the-road laptop refuses to boot my favourite OS. And there’s nothing wrong with end users making their wishes known. After all, what is an OS being developed for if not to be used? But in the end, it comes down to man-hours and money. Neither of which is flowing like water around here.

4

Hi Michel,

The process of the release these companies I mentioned is not so fast! Another point when I referred to Apple is that her usually releases its products annually!
We not need run every time a new model is released by the companies that I quoted !!
I quoted four, but can be only one! That with a set of models with specification the simplest to or the easiest to work and maintain!
If a company is bought or that will not manufacture computers, this usually occurs with signs on the market out sufficiently in advance!
There is an initiative of the FSF and Debian to assemble a list of open source drivers for Linux(http://h-node.org/). Nothing stops the look this list to work with Haiku!
Again, I get frustrated by not being able to contribute code to the Haiku (for now). Next month I will return to contribute to the project and now monthly.

5

http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/09/05/010217

6

It would have worked back when there was only a few differences between company products, but today there are too many.
Who is to say which company & which model?
Should I not have the opportunity to run Haiku on one or more of the machines I already own?
No, the only workable solution is testing & producing drivers for the machines that people own.
We will always be catching up, because manufacturers sell their machines to be used with the most used operating system, the fact that it is poorly constructed/programmed, doesn’t seem to matter to the masses who buy it.
We know better, that’s why F.O.S.S. is gaining ground, (slowly).

7

Not everybody is born to be a C++ programmer. That is just a fact of life. But there are many other ways you can contribute to Haiku. You are writing here on the forum, that is also a contribution.

If you can’t wrap your mind around C++, I understand, I’m in the same position. Try yab. Or python, or ruby. Haiku needs many more things than code in the OS itself. it needs applications, scripts, artwork, media. One thing that we had in the BeOS days that we don’t see so much now is icon collections. If you are a vector-graphic artist you can make a great contribution there.Somebody is going to create the world’s greatest collection of Haiku wallpapers. Why not you? Or maybe you can do audio. Haiku ships without any included system sounds.

HTML is also a code. Start a blog or a website in which you explain how great Haiku is, maybe in a language in which that explanation has not existed before. Post video tutorials of Haiku on youtube. Convert old apps to hpkg format.

We can all do many things to make Haiku more popular and more successful. It is not only up to the devs to present the world with a perfect operating system. The community will have to do its part to make it a success.

8

the '90s are over and all the hardware’s standardized now. when covering new hardware, it’s not vendor specific, but standard specific – the latest thing was usb3 – no one vendor makes usb3 devices and chipsets, but all the major vendors will be including usb3 as the standard from this year forward. even the last hurdle to get hardware acceleration doesn’t require a vendor-specific push since mesa’s gallium drivers already handle that and already target haiku. haiku, inc. couldn’t target a single platform if they tried. apple tries, really hard, with mac os and the hardware line to support it, but you can still run mac os on anything, because all the vendors use the same standards.

9

Reinforcing this line of action that I proposed, the project “Librem 15” could not be taken into consideration?

It’s a good start! The price is still high, but if the community embrace this initiative, market rules will act and the price is likely to will fall!

10

The trend towards tight system security is likely to increase. Signature requirements or BIOS hacks to be able to boot an OS than the one pre-installed on the system will likely decrease the ease of installing Haiku on fresh hardware.

Defining a “Haiku Ready” hardware appears an extreme course of action at this time. The price premium for the liberty to install whatever OS one wishes to run would be difficult to justify for most.

However, how about a HaikuStick (with a Haiku logo on it)? Say, one available with a BFS partition for 3/4 of the space on the stick and a FAT32 partition for the other 1/4 of the space. Add the capability of dual booting directly to Haiku or indirectly via a virtual machine environment on the FAT32 partition. Yes, there exits hints and tutorials on how to achieve something similar yet out of reach to anyone who has always use an OS X or Windows based machine straight of the box.

Once a suitable ARM port is available, one could also consider an ARM-based stick similar to https://www.crowdsupply.com/inverse-path/usb-armory . This could also help in providing a reference ARM-based hardware for further developers.

11

The problem is that my interest in Haiku is to work in computer graphics. Devices like what Stacked_Lambda indicated probably do not have decent graphics acceleration.

12

There is actually a good reason to focus on limited hardware, and that is more testing can be done on the limited set to make sure there are no hardware/driver conflicts than a large set of devices. My main setup is suffering from DPC Latency spikes (not OS specific, btw) because my USB DAC won’t play nice with something in my laptop, a pain to troubleshoot as well.

In Haiku’s mind, and in the minds of most desktop Linux distro’s it’s apparently better to have decent support for all hardware rather than top-quality support for some hardware. No wonder Macs are so attractive.

13

I don’t know why this is so hard. “The following are a high-end laptop, low-end laptop, and a desktop system that will run Haiku. We guarantee it. Oh, yes, BTW they are available with Haiku preloaded from this mom 'n pop outfit that gives a 5% kickback to Haiku, Inc. Shipping worldwide.”

Why the resistance?

1 Like
14 
No wonder Macs are so attractive.

They’re not, they’re overpriced.

Why the resistance?

Probably because Haiku isn’t even at its first release stage yet.

15

I don’t think there’s resistence per se (besides maybe preloading it and exposing unsuspecting customers with an alpha quality OS). I think that there are only people around that are merely talking about that sort of thing and nobody with the time, money, expertise and motivation to do it. Posting a comment is cheap, investing months of hard work testing hardware and writing drivers isn’t. All the more since in a year or two they’ll have to do it all over again, because the original hardware isn’t available anymore.

Regards,
Humdinger

16

Its pretty simple… by the time haiku full supports a laptop… they’ve already quit selling it.

So the only alternative is to be as generic as possible so you have a higher chance of just adding some PCIIDs and it working without much additional effort.

17

Good night, at least here in Brasilia DF Brazil :slight_smile:

I perceive that there is some confusion in the proposal I made some time ago!
When proposed in focus on a limited set of notebooks / desktops did not mean it would have to be now mainly with the system still in alpha version! I said it was to define a set of very specific and small goals to complete the development, implement it, test it and then with a system “ready” for a definition from which laptops and desktops could be chosen to be used.
Recently did a post about a notebook of a project called Librem 15 whose hardware chosen to ride it offers free software driver! Well, this is the announcement !! This feature in my opinion is great since we would look at the code and at first set it to the Haiku! I know it is easy to say and that would likely occur problems but would be a start!
Finally, had already said that I am not able for now to contribute code but I do donations (the last this month) that just are not bigger since I am paying debts due to the construction of my house! But nothing is forever and so one day, I can donate more!!

18

The Intel NUCs have been investigated for its potential as common development equipment by some of the devopers. The cheapest NUCS is $140 USD, although most are in the 250-350 price range.

1 Like
19

Good night, at least here in Brasilia DF Brazil :slight_smile:

I perceive that there is some confusion in the proposal I made some time ago!
When proposed in focus on a limited set of notebooks / desktops did not mean it would have to be now mainly with the system still in alpha version! I said it was to define a set of very specific and small goals to complete the development, implement it, test it and then with a system “ready” for a definition from which laptops and desktops could be chosen to be used.
Recently did a post about a notebook of a project called Librem 15 whose hardware chosen to ride it offers free software driver! Well, this is the announcement !! This feature in my opinion is great since we would look at the code and at first port it to the Haiku! I know it is easy to say and that would likely occur problems but would be a beginning!
Finally, had already said that I am not able for now to contribute code but I do donations (the last this month) that just are not bigger since I am paying debts due to the construction of my house! But nothing is forever and so one day, I can donate more!!

20

Good morning (at least here in Brasilia),

Follows below copies of the messages I received when my donation to Librem 15 Project:

Crowd Supply Order 20208

On behalf of the team here and all of the project creators on Crowd Supply, we appreciate your support!

Your order contains the following:

One or more pre-order products that will be delivered on a later date. Please note your transaction will be processed immediately. Once your order is ready, you will receive a shipment confirmation email that contains tracking information for your delivery.

Please double-check the shipping information below to make sure it is accurate. If you have any questions or need to make changes to this order, please email us at support@crowdsupply.com or call (800) 554-2014.
Placed On
Mar 8, 2015
Customer Comments

Would the Project allow a buyer of this notebook install another operating system beyond the Trisquel? I like the Haiku project (reimplementation of BeOS) and I think an initiative like this project would not only help the GNU / Linux, but also other as project Haiku since drivers could at first be ported to this and other operating systems !!
Order Contents
Item Qty Each Total
Support Us!
Librem 15: A Free/Libre Software Laptop That Respects Your Essential Freedoms
1 $5.00 $5.00
Items $5.00
Shipping $0.00
Total $5.00
Crowd Supply
1402 NW Glisan St
Portland, OR 97209
800-554-2014
support@crowdsupply.com

Joshua Lifton
CC
CrowdSupply.com
Mar 9 em 1:35 AM
Hello, and thanks for supporting the Librem 15 project! Yes, once you buy the laptop, the hardware is entirely yours to do what you will with it, including installing other operating systems.

Cheers,
Josh Lifton
Co-founder
Crowd Supply

That is, there is no impediment to consider using this hardware with Haiku!
The Haiku Project could not contact the Librem 15 Project to do a partnership?