Well, I’ve argued for a smaller install, but this doesn’t shock me. CDs are obsolete technology when you have USB thumb drives lying around all over the house, ISOs can be mounted on the desktop and Etcher will turn an ISO into a bootable USB drive in minutes. Unless you are building your own desktop machine, it is even difficult to buy a computer with a CD drive these days. Yes, I know there are USB CD drives. I have one. Been a while since I actually used it.
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is there anyone having the cd driver now?
On old computers, yes
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On their main PC, probably not. But, Haiku is considered as both a lightweight OS and a retro-computing OS, even if that is a wrong vision. People will tend to install Haiku on a spare computers, some of them can be quite old and only have USB 1.2… As you can guess, USB install on this kind of hardware is a no go but it was CD era and until we can get a net install on a floppy, it still the only way.
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I get your point, and I suppose we have painted ourselves into a corner by maintaining compatibility all the way back to the original Pentium (according to the Haiku FAQ) which came out in 1993 (USB 2.0 dates to 2000). Whether the time has come to drop the 32-bit legacy is a separate topic, but that is what it comes down to.
Dropping IA-32 would mean dropping support for executing BeOS programs, which was the original aim of the project. The feature wouldn’t be useful to me but it would be tragic to come this far and not ship a 32-bit image with R1.
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I know it has been discussed about maybe trying to get 32-bit mode working on the 64-bit version of Haiku. That would be awesome if it can be done. Obviously a lot of work to make happen.
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It’s already done… the patch for 32bit support on 64bit systems is on Gerrit but one of the Haiku developers asked for it to be rewritten in a slightly different way…
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No, it’s not done. The patch on Gerrit as it exists does not support a number of things correctly (like signal handling, I believe); it isn’t ready to be merged.
The alternative implementation(s) suggested would take the implementation mostly out of the kernel and into a runtime_loader addon (or something resembling one), which would make handling things like signals somewhat easier.
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I’m glad to see there’s headway on it. Awesome work.
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I may be unpopular for saying this, but, 32bit & CDs are dead, or at least, dying breeds - maintain a 32bit for the BeOS compatibility stalwarts, if you must - but keep it separate from the 64bit - 64bit & pendrives are now the way of doing things…& have been for some time. 
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Seems to me that you never tried to read files from older pen drive… or that you haven’t used in a while.
CDs, DVDs, BDs, M-discs will be used for a long time to come.
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Well there are a number of BeOS apps still useful (SoundPlay first comes to mind) that require 32-bit mode. I come from the glory days of BeOS. I even have a BeBox in my collection that still works.
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I would even assume that pen drives (as they are now) will be obsolete faster than CDs.
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I know someone who used to daily drive a 32-bit dell desktop from ~2002 until quite recently.
I myself run Haiku on a dual-core 32-bit desktop with 3GB of RAM, and it runs as well as Ubuntu with 8GB.
If Haiku 32-bit disappeared, I would sorely miss it.
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Hello everyone, new here.
To know haiku’s place is better to see some of its former innovations on the Free Desktop landscape:
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Cortex: While an heredated BeOS feature, an unified Audio / Video server wasn’t really a thing on linux land until sometime recently with Pipewire.
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PackageFS: While immutable distros are all the rage nowadays, the then new (and somewhat disliked) Haiku package manager implemented many of this desired features long before were popular.
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File Atributes: While some desktops in the past tried to implement this feature (see KDE SC 4 with Nepomuk for example), i think haiku has probably the simplest yet the most refined implementation yet.
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I totally disagree with you here. The vast majority of people (but probably not quite so many on this forum) have no desire to use a second operating system. One is quite enough.
There are three main OSes in the world today. IoS and Windows are proprietary, and designed mainly to spy on the user and sell him things, and Linux isn’t very user-friendly. This leaves a huge gap ready for an easy-to-use, efficient, and honest OS to fill.
I can see massive possibilities for Haiku in schools, in PCs aimed at the elderly (for whom simplicity is a major selling-point), in the developing world (where cost is an issue, and the ability to use older machines is a benefit), and for users like me who do not want to support massive corporations that are effectively beyond the reach of the law.
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Another Haiku version:
How many ppl use a rescue OS? Or need a fast-booting OS to quickly get online? What about Haiku Rescue release? If something goes wrong with your Haiku install, you can fire up Haiku Rescue and fix things. You could also add / port numerous hardware utilities to make it a general purpose Rescue OS. For working on HDD, SSD, USD, SD discs, filesystems, files etc. e.g., format, partitioning, secure delete files / drives, change R/W disc permissions, burn images to DVD / USB / SD. And you can add web browser/s for those who just want to quickly fire up an OS, get online, and get some stuff done.
It doesn’t matter if Haiku doesn’t have lots of hardware compatabily as that will improve over time. But it would be a useful way to get a sort of “complete-ish” version of the OS happening.
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Pendrives aren’t designed for long term storage, but are excellent for sneaker net & as install media.
Modern version of pendrive is an M2 SSD in an external case; but I don’t know how many people use them,l (I have 2 of them, plus SSD drives running from USB, via cables).
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I too, until last year, also had a 32bit laptop in use, but the writing is on the wall for this old kit - several OS are starting to abandon 32bit, both Linux & BSD are heading in this direction, Windows dropped it, & I suspect Apple too, though I have no personal knowledge of Apple products, never been interested in their overpriced/under powered computers…