Ordinary Users

[darkshadow]

Hi All

Just a quick note on what is needed for HaikuOS to succeed is not just developers but also ordinary users, because when I opened the monthly report this morning I thought why not install HaikuOS as the 3rd OS on my laptop.
But as I catch up on my messages on the discussion board I realised that it would only be a project OS and not something that I could use daily or as a fallback OS.
But on further reading of the topics on the board that idea is now fading because Haiku is just for developers, so please let me know when a ordinary user can try Haiku.
And the more Windows stuff you include in Haiku the more users will walk away.
Hope you all have a good day
Darkshadow

[humdinger]

@darkshadow

so please let me know when a ordinary user can try Haiku.[/quote]
There are already “ordinary” users of Haiku. “Ordinary” is a meaningless distinction though. Haiku meets the needs of some users, and doesn’t for others…
As it’s so easy to try an image in a VM, it takes almost no effort to see if Haiku fits your needs, compared to ask others to convince you or describe what works and what doesn’t.

[quote]And the more Windows stuff you include in Haiku the more users will walk away.

While it’s refreshing to see someone this confident in his opinions, I’m unaware of “Windows stuff” in Haiku, so I’m relieved we dodged that bullet…

[cosmogatokat]

Haiku is easy to use, but unstable, then maybe is this why there are a lot of developers here… but you can try haiku very more easy than it seems…

[darkshadow]

I did install and tried Haiku last year but it was in the early stage, but after writing the post I have decided to install Haiku on my backup laptop and go that way.
I do believe that Haiku has a place in the scheme of things.
Eventhough I am not running Haiku at the moment I do try to keep up with what’s happening with the OS, so please keep up the good work.

Darkshadow

[chuckcmagee]

I have been a total computer geek since around the 3rd grade. My science teacher gave me an “plug board” from, of all places, AT&T. It was for a VERY

[chuckcmagee]

I have been a total computer geek since around the 3rd grade. My science teacher gave me an “plug board” from, of all places, AT&T. It was for a VERY early voice sythesizer. You changed the electronic parts for various sounds. It only made one sound at a time, like oooooooo or ahhhhhh. Since then, my real passion has become operating systems and compilers. In 1975, I convinced my then boss to pay me to modify the in-house IBM provided COBOL compiler. I would implement some commands available in a full COBOL compiler that were NOT available in this one. The most important of these was the CORRESPONDING modifier on a verb, like MOVE. The short version of this is one instruction from the human could generate around 20 or 30 move statements, on its own, with no help from the human programmer. It would match up names in a record to names in another type of record and find all the names that were the same, like CUST-ID as an example (customer number). It was the ABSOLUTE best time of my life, up at 1 a.m., poring over CORE dumps off the printer, trying to find my most recent error. HOG HEAVEN. I was being paid to do what I absolutely loved. The point, you ask? My point is DEVICE DRIVERS are extremely, and I mean extremely, hard and complicated to write. I know, I wrote the Interupt Service Subroutine that drove the full sized main frame type tape unit we used to make hard drive backups with. It was all in IBM 1130 Assembler code and get one instruction in the wrong place or too early and thud - it didn’t work or was flaky. So, I have extreme respect for what we know as the “developers”. If asked if I would take on writing a brand new operating system, I would tell them " You out of your friggin mind! You have any idea of the number of unique devices out the in PC land??". Let’s see, how about say 50,000 man hours of work to get just the required device drivers written, debugged, and out there. That’s why so many frequent references on here to virtual machines. Just a few well known and documented devices to worry about, instead of the total real world mess of installing Haiku on a real pc with a hard drive and a 1993 sound chip that hasn’t been used in 20 years. So, when will Haiku “be soup” as they say. Well, in several VM products, it’s soup already. When will it be soup installed on people’s machines?? Hard to say. I would bet on NEVER, The PCs and other devices are coming out faster than you can even spell the name of the device. There is absolutely no way a small group of dedicated but maybe misguided developers can keep up. Sure, you might find a 1998 Gateway Solo laptop with a Pent 4 and various chips that will work (I have one next to me on the floor), but a general release? Don’t hold your breath.

[chuckcmagee]

BTW, I sent $100.00 to the Haiku project. Why, you ask? Because I too am one of the dreamer types (see misguided comment above). And, I really do NOT believe it will ever " take off “, as they say. It seems to be a developer’s playroom because that is what it is, a developer’s playroom. My wife is a great example – quote from earlier today " I know how to turn it on and run my games. I do NOT care how it works, I just want it to work.” So, general release against Windows, Android, Linux - no "F"ing way. It took me, a super geek of 30 years, around 2 solid days (yes DAYS) to get Haiku actually working on an OLD Gateway Solo laptop. I still get debug thuds and have to “es” my way along but I finally get a desktop and a working Haiku. (oh, whoever is supposed to monitor the CONTACT email account is doing a crappy job, the forum software says it sent me a confirmation email but I never ever get one, so I am forever limited status. Guess you guys do NOT want my help with your NMI interrupt errors and other things)) Anyway, Haiku is GREAT fun - mounting and unmounting, burning CDs with cdrecord, loading up the daily release to see how many "es"es it will take to get to the desktop, all fantastic fun.

[humdinger]

@chuckcmagee

Sure, you might find a 1998 Gateway Solo laptop with a Pent 4 and various chips that will work (I have one next to me on the floor), but a general release? Don’t hold your breath.

My experience is completely the opposite. I tried a nightly Haiku on a USB stick last year (or the year before) on various computers at work, at friends and family. It booted on every one of them, only some needed to be forced to VESA. Audio worked on most, as did networking.

I don’t think Haiku has too much trouble with reasonably new hardware. Too new, or too old and it’s a gamble…

[chuckcmagee]

Well on the positive side, my wife owns a HP that she has used for years…i purchased her a brand new Dell 3668 desktop computer and " took over ownership " of the HP… I am going chop up the 500GB disk for things like, uh, Haiku and ReactOS and misc linuxes and that new Android port to PCs and … Glad there are extended partitions and that relatively new, what is it? GBF or something like that… All my Dells seem to use whatever it is… tThe part I liked was 5 partitions sitting there like they all primary ones… Too much new tech for a single human being… Anyway, I stuck a fairly recent nightly any boot cd in there and… it booted right up… I can not remember but I do not think I had to “es” a single thing… Mouse workd, video worked once I hooked up a very modern 22" HD monitor… The poor also relatively modern Dell 17" monitor could not handle the scan freq. So…bright sunny day here in the desert, heavy rain early this morning, air smells wonderous, awake and happy here talking to my fellow geeks… Let’s use the power of positive thinking!! Maybe those 1,256 missing device drivers won’t be needed.

[lelldorin]

@chuckcmagee

So, when will Haiku “be soup” as they say. Well, in several VM products, it’s soup already. When will it be soup installed on people’s machines?? Hard to say. I would bet on NEVER, The PCs and other devices are coming out faster than you can even spell the name of the device. There is absolutely no way a small group of dedicated but maybe misguided developers can keep up. Sure, you might find a 1998 Gateway Solo laptop with a Pent 4 and various chips that will work (I have one next to me on the floor), but a general release?

I use haiku for many
years on direct hardware, without vm. Sure there are many hardware which
is not supported properly, which is simply because the hardware
manufacturers do not provide drivers for haiku. Every driver is a lot of work by developers who do this without paying in their sparse leisure time.

In addition, a haiku “user” has tested various hardware and presented it on his blog. Unfortunately no further tests have been added since the beginning of 2016. These tests are also included on the BeSly knowledge base. From these tests, we have created a hardware list.

Haiku has made great progress in the last years.

[jma_sp]

Buenas noches:

Hace algunos años llegue al site de Haiku-os y descargue una de las imagenes ISO la arranque pero no funciono muy bien que digamos.

Hace unas semanas volvi a descargar otra imagen de las compilaciones nocturnas y sorpresa, no solo arranco sino que me permitio instalarlo en un pendrive.
En la version x86 de 32 bits hasta se actualiza (la version de 64 bits en otro pendrive no actualiza ni muestra el listado de software instalable).

Todavia se ve bastante inestable para trabajo diario y no pocas veces que cuelga, pero es capaz de arrancar en hardware variado en modo nativo sin virtualizar y eso es un logro.

Seguramente en unos dias lo instale en un disco duro porque quiero seguir la evolucion durante un tiempo.

En mi caso algo interesante seria poder instalar Lazarus/FreePascal.
FreePascal si funciona aunque las ventanas de edicion no se muestran demasiado bien, el crt muestra caracteres recortados.

He visto que hay intentos de que funcione Lazarus pero no he sido capaz de instalar QT4 ni QT5.

En cuanto a la impresion tampoco me ha funcionado bien con PCL pero volvere a insistir.

Veo que monta las memorias USB bastante bien.

Tener un sistema operativo funcionando hasta este punto es un logro importante. En mi caso poco puedo ayudar puesto que soy usuario Windows / Linux pero no se desarrollar un sistema operativo.

He visto que en software instalable esta PostgreSQL pero no PgAdmin, tampoco he podido ponerlo en funcionamiento y seria interesante para practicar posgresql y ya que FreePascal/Lazarus permite conectar a dicha base de datos seria una facilidad interesante.

Ademas existe una variedad de software desarrollado en FreePascal/Lazarus que al ser multiplataforma podria funcionar en Haiku-OS.

Y aunque no funciona todo perfecto en lo poco que ocupa tiene entorno grafico, navegador… y se instala rapidisimo. Es terrible lo que tardan otros sistemas operativos en instalarse/actualizarse para lo poco que ofrecen de base y mas cuanto mas modernos, Haiku-OS no te quita ese maravilloso tiempo, esta en instantes.

Para mi lo fundamental como usuario es que tenga estabilidad, es decir que no se cuelgue con tanta frecuencia.

En cualquier caso un gran trabajo, felicitaciones a los desarroladores.

P.D.: Esto esta escrito desde un sistema Haiku-os en pendrive de 32 GB utilizando el navegador QupZilla.
Se ha quedado colgado varias veces y he tenido que hacer un Resume.

Esto lo he escrito en español porque no me resulta sencillo expresarme en ingles, lo siento, no creo que haya mucha dificultad en ponerlo en un traductor.

Saludos.

[un_spacyar]

Hola jma_sp, bienvenido! Si necesitas ayuda en español, te recuerdo que hay un canal de IRC en dicho idioma, en freenode: #haiku-es. Sólo somos unos pocos, pero estaremos felices de ayudarte.

Hello jma_sp welcome! If you need help in spanish, there are an IRC channel at freenode: #haiku-es. We are only a few, but we will be happy to help you

[jma_sp]

Encantado un_spacyar, no sé en que zona horaria estáis los demás hispanohablantes pero ya cuando avance un poco en familiarizarme con el sistema y sobre todo tenga Lazarus instalado y funcionando os comentaré mis impresiones.
Por el momento lo tengo instalado en dos pendrives, uno con la versión nocturna de 32 y otro con la de 64.
Mi intención es instalarlo en un disco de 80 GB en modo nativo y luego en un Linux virtualizarlo, ya que he visto que tiene drivers virtio, bajo libvirt/KVM/virt-manager, así puedo hacer pruebas y clonar una imagen base con facilidad.

Saludos.

[Earl_Colby_Pottinger]

First, Haiku IS my backup OS. Additional I find a number of things I do in Haiku I can not do in Windows 7/10.

In-fact in Windows 10 I find it very hard to do some simple things even.

I still don’t use Haiku as my primary OS, but it is more the browser is my limiter than any other program I would need to use.

[PulkoMandy]

Be warned that the virtio drivers are still incomplete. They will improve over time, I hope, but for now you may have some system freezes and other problems because of them. Do report any issue you find on the bugtracker!

[luick]

What’s missing on Haiku is actually a browser like Chrome, I would need that for Haiku to be productive for me.

[cosmogatokat]

firefox better… maybe chromiun in the future n.n, it is hart to port? already someone try to port the firefox? why is hard ?

[PulkoMandy]

A little story about Firefox. We had a Firefox 2 port (even running on BeOS) when Firefox 2 was released. Then, came Firefox 3, which replaced the drawing backend to use Cairo. So, we started porting Cairo. By the time we had Cairo mostly running, they had already switched Firefox to use Skia instead of Cairo. This demotivated everyone and Skia was never ported. I’m not sure which rendering backend Firefox is using now, but I know it integrates some Rust code (so we need a Rust port), and in general tends to use a lot of modern technology and be a fast-moving thing.

As with any web browser, porting and maintaining it up to date is barely possible even when you can allocate a full-time developer to it. They are just too big and evolving too quickly.

The decision in the Haiku team was to go with WebKit. The reason for that is that it provides good native integration (uses native fonts, etc) and that we could add public APIs around it and integrate it in the BeAPI so applications can use it to render parts of their GUI in HTML. As such it is a goo addition to the APIs and it makes sense to have it part of Haiku itself. Having other browsers ported is fine, but not something the Haiku team will take care of, as it does not bring the system (in the strict sense) any further - it is just an application. Work on Qupzilla has shown it is possible, and I heard they have a much improved Qt5 version being prepared.

[AGMartinez]

Wow, that was an entitled comment. Does that guy not get that Haiku is still in development and that its total user base is vastly smaller than Linux?! You can look at it, and if you don’t want to chase bugs or tinker around, find that niche part that the OS can do and use it that way, like a dedicated kiosk. You can’t expect it to compete with FreeBSD, yesterday. Here’s the thing, with every new user or developer it gets better for two new users or developers, the whole thing gets smoother, its exponential.