Haiku the next level!

… but they have 3D acceleration and multi display support.

We’ll see what happens with the ongoing work to bring MorphOS to x86 CPUs, I guess, their decision to support only PowerPC so far was probably limiting their outreach by a lot. But they’re working on it.

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Uh…what? 3D acceleration is a third-party add-on for AmigaOS 4.1FE unless you count MiniGL, a limited OpenGL 1.5 clone comparable to MorphOS’ TinyGL. Only on older Radeon cards and chips.

Aros has shader support but only for ancient nVidia cards and some Intel cards. The 3rd-party add on to AmigaOS 4.1FE is shader equipped and compatible to OpenGL ES 2.0 and is the best of the bunch if you have a supported Radeon HD or Radeon RX card.

None of them have multiple monitor support. Full-stop.

In short, we’re almost caught up with AROS for its Gallium 3D and only have AmigaOS 4 to look toward because they ditched Mesa for a homebrew solution called Warp Nova from AEon, Inc.

Re:MorphOS on x64

All 32bit apps on MorphOS v4 will be either PPC or 68k. No support for x86 32-bit is planned. Secondly, all hardware for the x64 version will be cherry-picked hardware starting with ONE SUPPORTED MOTHERBOARD and some Radeon graphics cards. All other hardware will be unsupported. Finally, their motive is that aging Mac PPC models are failing from lack of adequate repair facilities.

Anyway, you get the idea. I have a 1.5 GHz PPC Mac Mini with 1 GB of RAM, 64 MB of video RAM running MorphOS 3.15. It’s nice for single-threaded code.

Multi display support documentation in MorphOS: Multi-display - MorphOS Library

Is the doc lying and explaining things that don’t exist?

If so, can you explain the pictures showing it in action here? MorphOS 3.12 adds proper Dual-head External DVI Handling - Amitopia
Are they fake too?

Good choice. Why would they port to an obsolete architecture?

It’s exactly what some users keep asking us to do. Can’t make everyone happy I guess.

And, you have to start somewhere. We’ll see what happens after they get the first motherboard running.

Also, “supported” can have different meanings. If you have ever heard of “hackintosh” you see what I mean. The system will probably run to some extent on hardware that’s not officially supported.

Re: Dual head on MorphOS

Amigas have always had support for multiple “screens” on the same monitor but I had to follow both links you posted before I believed that MorphOS got dual-head support a year and a half ago. It requires specific hardware configurations and it is not all usable from the same desktop screen like in other operating systems but it seems to work. It appears that you have to flip between them like Amiga public screens have always done but now you have 2 active at once. My MorphOS machine only has one video out so I cannot use that function but I guess it works. I stand corrected.

Re: One Motherboard

The MorphOS team is planning on making drivers for the functions of that one motherboard and keeping it closed hardware. Haiku is open source so if someone can figure out how to support their own driver, have at it. MorphOS is closed source and may just support a single-board PC like I see as a low-hanging fruit for driver support on any system. A SoC is the same for all system configurations which makes the Nuc a likely choice for the first system.

Older video cards did have dual screen support in Haiku (see Question: dual monitor support?). As the Haiku developer base grows, we may get proper video drivers for modern cards.

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Also don’t forget this post:

For PCI-express the choices are more limited, but Matrox PCIe G550 does exist (got one or two here), these are single lane cards as that offers enough bandwidth for this older card (32Mb RAM),
Also within the supported range of nVidia cards PCIe types exist. Don’t know by heart which ones, but I guess this can be easily found out by searching for the subject on a search engine on the net :wink:

Nvidia Quadro FX (G70) series. Quad-monitor capable.

On Amiga subject, AROS did develop a 64-bit multicore/multithreaded Amiga OS…

There is also another very promising project and it’s even a one man-team. It’s called Serenity OS.
Never personally tried that one before, but it looks pretty cool.

Yeah I know of SerenityOS. I really should try to watch some of Andreas’ videos. It is not at all a one-man project anymore though, it has more active contributors than Haiku:

In the last week:

Excluding merges, 39 authors have pushed 365 commits to master and 365 commits to all branches. On master, 526 files have changed and there have been 12,023 additions and 4,740 deletions.

It is much, much more active than Haiku, but is a much younger project.

I think Haiku can learn some things from Andreas and SerenityOS to build excitement with some streaming videos and other educational content. Though maybe people like something new and shiny and Andreas used Youtube to build a nice community. Haiku needs to maybe modernize a bit, our Youtube presence is basically non-existent.

I am a bit sad that someone like Andreas decided to start a new C++ OS project rather than contribute to Haiku, but I’m sure plenty of other operating system projects say the same about Haiku. Though overall I think the more viable alternative operating systems we have the better. The world needs options to Windows, macOS and Linux.

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Have played with it. Very limited at present, but growing and evolving very quickly for a one-man passion job. What is there reflects an obsessive attention to detail. Narrow (shifting) focus, but high polish. Not sure how it will fare when it hits the limits of productivity and needs additional arms and legs to help it grow further.

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I see … I didn’t know that fact.

And I totally agree … the more the better. It really doesn’t make any sense to have only 3 major OSs in the first place.

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I looked at videos a bit and I can’t take Serenity seriously until most development will move from Linux to Serenity itself.

I am, 3deyes and other developers are using Haiku on real hardware for writing Haiku software.

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I think SerenityOS is the “hobby OS” that many other people consider Haiku to be.

And that’s fine, people seem to be having a lot of fun with it. But making something into a real usable OS is less fun.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKtf_qxqYFRI2466AOr6GxA/videos

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If you go to “distrowatch” and set the page hit ranking to the last seven days Haiku is actually ranked tenth at the time of writing.

In many ways Beta 2 was a breakthrough for Haiku’s wider awareness, with even Arstechnica giving it a whirl, even if the review was a bit pithy in places. I think the release of Beta 3 will consolidate on those gains and many people whose curiosity was piqued by the last release candidate will this time try it out.

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I hope you are right. And of course it emphasises the importance of regular releases. Hats off to the team for getting this one out on schedule.

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Not bad for an OS which isn’t actually Linux. Shall we tell them?

Yes, I know it’s not exclusively Linux (and BSD), but that is the main focus.

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I tried to get dual monitor config running on Haiku with a supported video card. I was unsuccessful. I haven’t seen that anyone else got it running. Maybe there is a missing step in the setup?

It would be cool to have 3D driver support on Haiku, even if only on specific video cards.

I din way back. A supporten card and a card that the driver suport multi screens on are not the same.

But it can be that this are broken now.

What brand and type videocard are you using?