I’ve had an interest for some time now in an highly reconfigurable operating system that can be retargeted for specific platforms through little more than a a few configuration options and a rebuild, much as Apple has now apparently done with OS X.
As a long term fan of BeOS (I’m a proud owner of my original r4.5 and r5 disks) and follower of Haiku I’ve long expected someone to mention a similar system for Haiku. The build system is already setup in a way that would make it simple enough to do this. It seems that it would be a matter of developing some additional interfaces for the most part. For example once the WebKit port is farther along there could be a web based replacement for DeskBar that could be used for kiosk or perhaps set top TV boxes.
With Haiku already being cross buildable from Linux, Mac, and I seem to recall some mention of Win32/cygwin it’s already in an excellent position to be an embedded developers friend, as no matter you shop’s current operating system paradigm you can start building disk images. Further, there is a common repository for the entire system, where with Linux you have to build from another distribution or build one from scratch and while the BSDs do have a repository system similar they don’t include X11 (well, I guess the ports may) and you also have to bolt on a toolkit to use X11!
I don’t know how many of you have looked at the SDK and documentation of Android but after looking at it myself my first though was, “Hey, Google just made BeIA.” The similarities are just scary and if I understand correctly the kernel level namespace daemon that glues Android together is a GPL’ed portion of Palm OS which would makes me think that it’s at least possible that it is actually a distant cousin to BeIA’s bind server.
I guess my point and question is this, Haiku seems to be the direction that operating systems are moving, however the desktop seems to be on the way out as the way that the common person interacts with their data, with the cell phone and smarter tv based products being on the rise, SO is there an interest with in the Haiku community to develop such an extension to the current codebase? Just how much does the community want Haiku to focus only on traditional desktop?