Platform Platform Platform

1

Hi everyone,

Just like the real estate saying “location location location”, I’m starting to wonder why if anyone really understands me when I say to them “platform platform platform”?

What I mean by this is really simple: Use a PC that is attractive, futuristic, well priced, and most importantly - well spec’ed for a solid base to build upon and speed up acceptance.

Here are just 2 examples of where I am personally going to use Haiku:

HP ENVY Recline 27 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9WM5BacJvg

OR

LG Anllinone V960 Ultrawide http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0Y8q_9oYw4

I don’t want to use Haiku on old hardware that sucks, I am going to use it on new hardware that is going to blow my visitors minds when they see it and use it.

I can already hear people stabbing at the keyboard, replying to me that “this isn’t where or what Haiku is all about”, but honestly - why not? Let go of your nostalgia and ideals of using it on any old hardware… it’s time to move on!

Targeting Haiku to a more specific hardware set will increase the “known known” ratio by a factor of 10 at least. Then new, young, full of piss and vinegar developers can jump in and write some code for touch and full GPU acceleration - Or whatever.

Laying a road map is more than just API planning, it’s looking a the big picture and trying to get the herd to move in that direction as easily as possible.

PCs of the past were very personal things - but now, I want “appliance PCs” all over my house. I don’t want logins, I don’t want OS X, I don’t want iOS, I don’t want Android, I don’t want Win8… I don’t want anything that “Phones Home”.

Haiku, this is a HUGE opportunity. You could lead the way - by leading! So? Lead.

Choose a cool desktop and cool tabtop and then Lead the frigin way home down your roadmap to R1!

2

[quote=spinach]…manufacturing an ARM system means designing an embedded system and manufacturing boards, which from the outset is prohibitively expensive and that new centralization means no one who finds out about your system online can just download software for free and try it out, instead they must put down money, sight unseen, for a custom embedded system that is still in the prototype stage, all the while building an entry level x86 workstation gets cheaper by the month; the only open ARM systems on the market are the raspberry pi, the beagle board and gumstix, which are all pretty great embedded systems entirely unsuitable to workstation tasks except when clustered in a manner better suited to a server os, at which point you begin to rival the expense of an x86 workstation anyway. working on a single embedded system, then, you would not only need a new kernel for ARM, you would also face new limits in userland, so why even call it haiku anymore at that point?

there’s just no gain – there’s no installed userbase (you can’t install on a google nexus or on the oxygen sensor in a volkswagen).
[/quote]

At least for the present time - I agree. The devs should keep doing that good work they’re doing on the main platform.

There are quite a few hurdles remaining in the ARM world for efficient OS porting. After reading your post again, I realized part of what you’re saying relates to the lack of efficient ARM hardware discovery mechanisms. Is that a political or technical problem? Many people are working on the issue. It’ll eventually be resolved, we’ll get away from static descriptors, and we’ll have multiple-platform, single-kernel implementations just like in x86. In the meantime, if I had a hankering to monkey around with it, I’d go with BeagleBone. That could never be a general marketplace option … but ARM ChromeBook might.

3

Oh Yeah? I completely disagree, and making a gross generalization of failure for a few doesn’t make it true as a failure for all. Please be aware that if I sound animated, I am, I’m not upset or coming down on anyone. I just want to air some crap that no one seems to dare brave saying.

I’m not saying to drop all support for other configurations. I am saying have 1 or 2 specific configs as a jumping off point for people to have an idea that if they get these 1/2 configs they are guaranteed the best experience possible. And have extra tech built in to develop further goodies for the community. Hell, what do you think the BeBox was? A book on Astro-f!@#$%g-physics? No! It was a configuration that you could bet your arse was going to work the way they intended, to showcase their OS! Wow, I can’t believe people miss this before they spew some intelligence insulting malarkey at you like they’re some friggin Nobel Business Major! (I can’t believe how funny that is!)

But as usual, you’re lumping yourself into the bunch that are too busy defending something indefensible! I’m not trolling, I’m speaking as someone who has watched many companies succeed because they stop idealizing their targets, and just got down to cases and focused their attention on a few things rather than splitting it “officially” supporting 10,000,000 things. It’s called business savvy!

When even a community effort fails to realize something simple like this, it grinds them to a near standstill. Canonical is not by any means a great example in all respects, but they are the reason that so much attention has been garnered to Linux on the desktop these past 9 years. It wasn’t Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo, or SUSE… No. It was Canonical’s Ubuntu - like it or not. They applied business to a great degree to make it successful.

The Whoopee Cushion wasn’t successful because it made fart noises - it’s because it was funny as all get out to watch peoples reactions when they sat down and out from under them came a huge fart noise! Marketing and some business savvy made it a solid retail item.

I’m not saying to make more of a business out of this than there is time for or to the point of taking away from the design goals of Haiku. I am saying to stop discounting good sense as a stupid idea because a few have held on too long to their notions that led them nowhere, because like it or not, Haiku is confronting that same reality. Like it or not.

4

Outside of Linux, there aren’t many mainstream operating systems that target more than one or two platforms. MS Windows has had only a light presence in the ARM arena until recently, and may finally get into the mobile market fray in a serious way with the acquisition of Nokia. Up until now, their ARM market share has been a dismal couple percent penetration. Intel says it ships less silicon for x86 than for other architectures, and that’s been the case for awhile, so some companies are waking up to that.

Yet, finding an OS outside of Linux to run on the ARM platform is fairly challenging. I would welcome a completed ARM port of Haiku, but IMO they really have a pretty skeletal staff to be supporting the single platform they currently support. I think the ARM port may come from a small, third party group perhaps. Most of the ARM-port projects seem to be spearheaded by a spark plug personality - a zealot or two with both the talent and the ability to commit a lot of effort/creativity to the projects. Minix3 now has an ARM/Beaglebone port due to the efforts of a few people, but in the main resulting from the head-standing endeavors of one person. FreeBSD’s ARM stuff is really the result of a small group of zealots. Both efforts are some distance (not large) past the embryonic stage. NetBSD has always put an emphasis on multi-platform efforts, but I haven’t really tried them. I think ARM ports of alternative OS, traditionally x86 platforms will eventually come into being.

Until then, it must suffice to play with the myriad, but usually simple, RTOS and non-Linux embedded systems that are available for zillions of devices compliant to the ARM architecture …

5

I don’t think one can compare Canonical to Haiku. I mean - Canonical was started by a zillionaire willing to put a lot of money into the project. If Haiku had zillions, they could have a ports list as long as NetBSD!

6

Speaking of Mark Cuban has anyone contacted him to see how much money or coders he might be willing to donate, to getting the Haiku show on the road? Just a thought.

7

there is a target platform, it is x86. targeting a specific configuration on the market when these things come and go at the drop of a hat (which has put several vendors out of business, mind) isn’t a good decision. going from an os that can run on a wide variety of configurations so anyone can pick it up and work with it to one that needs specific hardware just to try is probably not a good idea for alpha software with enough financial backing to keep the lights on for another year, nevermind what becomes of an installed base already working with a variety of hardware when suddenly they must buy specific hardware in order to go on using this software. note also the only software vendor left targeting specialized hardware is apple, and even they’ve left behind their own specialized processors for x86, leading to a pretty sizeable community running mac os on off the shelf pc hardware.

and none of this is stopping anyone from building a touch-ui for haiku as a third-party app.

8

it isn’t a generalization – an entire industry (the vertical monopoly hardware/software vendor) doesn’t exist anymore outside of apple, and emulating it is just not a good move. the appliance computer, much as it’s been foisted upon us since the 1970s, hasn’t caught on.

9

Right, that isn’t the implication here. I understand that Haiku-OS Org isn’t trying to emulate Apple nor should they!

Anyhow, if the appliance thing really isn’t catching on then how would describe using honest to goodness technology terminology, not marketing ploys, the last 6 years of the smartphone/tablet/touch/game console verticals? Do you honestly believe that these are not appliances? They are in every sense of the definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_appliance).

You’re a very smart individual, capable of a fine argument from your perspective, nonetheless I feel that it comes from a tired mental frame. We can’t always look at past failings and continually point to the future and predict failure. If you learn nothing from others’ failings, what the hell good is a brain with memory? Look at the past, pick out the crap that we saw fail, latch on to the good ideas, and make an honest attempt at creating success because the new model forgoes the tired mental frame that caused the failure in the past!

Read my posts with a little bit of naivety for good measure look past my crappy explanations and use your imagination to fill in the gaps that I leave behind! Please. Just use your critical thinking brain that sees the beautiful blue sky, rather than seeing rain clouds that past over hours ago - or else you’ll eventually convince yourself that it’s always raining. And that is just not true. Unless you live in the UK! :stuck_out_tongue:

10

yes, i would say smartphones and tablets aren’t appliances but simply embedded personal computers (we use them for very general tasks, and if you’ve handled a low end smartphone it becomes evident the “phone” part of a smartphone is nearly an afterthought), and whatever i might consider a games console, haiku isn’t it.

ARM chips are nearly ubiquitous, it’s true – but largely in embedded and industrial applications such as, say, the onboard diagnostics system and subsystems in a modern car. where they exist in phones and tablets, they are, again, embedded systems onto which you cannot install your own software. you can’t buy a single arm processor at retail, find a motherboard with a matching socket, install RAM of your choosing, place it in a case with a power supply of your choosing and then upgrade any of those parts at will later on, so already it lacks the flexibility of the x86 platform; manufacturing an ARM system means designing an embedded system and manufacturing boards, which from the outset is prohibitively expensive and that new centralization means no one who finds out about your system online can just download software for free and try it out, instead they must put down money, sight unseen, for a custom embedded system that is still in the prototype stage, all the while building an entry level x86 workstation gets cheaper by the month; the only open ARM systems on the market are the raspberry pi, the beagle board and gumstix, which are all pretty great embedded systems entirely unsuitable to workstation tasks except when clustered in a manner better suited to a server os, at which point you begin to rival the expense of an x86 workstation anyway. working on a single embedded system, then, you would not only need a new kernel for ARM, you would also face new limits in userland, so why even call it haiku anymore at that point?

there’s just no gain – there’s no installed userbase (you can’t install on a google nexus or on the oxygen sensor in a volkswagen).

the examples in your initial post are x86 machines and again, as stated earlier, nothing’s stopping anyone from making touch-based applications.

11

You want something that’s 100% supported? Easy: get a Thinkpad. T60, T61, T400 and X200 are models that I use or used with Haiku and they work very well. Most Haiku devs are Thinkpad powered. Many of them run newer models than the one I have here, they can comment on hardware support for those.

But see, the hardware comes and go way too fast for us to pick a single platform. We’d have to target a new computer every year, or live with something underpowered. Doing custom hardware is of course not an option: do it if you want, but don’t expect Haiku Inc. to engage in hardware manufacturing.

Anyway, it’s not like most of developer’s time is spent writing drivers. We have something that runs fairly well on a wide range of hardware. The PC world is much more unified now than it was 20 years ago. We have 3 different families of graphics cards (AMD/NVidia/Intel) and only need to write and maintain 3 drivers. We have only one sound card architecture (HDA). Network is a bit more diverse, but we use FreeBSD drivers there, so that’s not any problem for us. USB is also quite standard, a single driver to rule them all.

12

+1

I have a thinkpad x61 and it works great. Upgrading to an x230 in a couple of weeks, hopefully that will also work well.

13

I made no reference to ARM - anywhere! Besides, ARM doesn’t have the capabilities of x86 hardware. Why do you keep bringing it up? Do you want Haiku on ARM?

You can’t install the firmware from your LG Touch Fridge onto your nexus nor on the oxygen sensor in a folksvagen either. Just like you wouldn’t replace your broken dishwasher with a meat grinder! What’s your point?

This is exactly the type of tired old argument based on deflection, misconstrual, and finally assuming the sentinel task of defending the supposition of ideals borrowed from a distilled core group, assigning self-significance to the values expressed in refuting all arguments, plights, common sense, offering the initial presenters no other course but to simply walk away.

And really, again, you’re going to continue down the path of rejecting the accepted worldwide truth of the term appliance? Here it is so you don’t need to move your mouse. :smiley: You’re welcome.

Computer Appliance Definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_appliance)

“A computer appliance is generally a separate and discrete hardware device with integrated software (firmware), specifically designed to provide a specific computing resource. These devices became known as “appliances” because of their similarity to home appliances, which are generally “closed and sealed” – not serviceable by the owner. The hardware and software are pre-integrated and pre-configured before delivery to customer, to provide a “turn-key” solution to a particular problem. Unlike general purpose computers, appliances are generally not designed to allow the customers to change the software (including the underlying operating system), or to flexibly reconfigure the hardware.”

Yet, we the consumer (some of which are developers in this case) find ways to hack these devices and reconfigure them to our liking.

I think I was abundantly clear when I stated that "PCs of the past were very personal things - but now, I want “appliance PCs” all over my house. I don’t want logins, I don’t want OS X, I don’t want iOS, I don’t want Android, I don’t want Win8… I don’t want anything that “Phones Home”.

Just the same I will clarify that a bit: I meant “as similar as possible” to an appliance, or to be used as one would use an appliance.

14

Check my spelling (Kurzweil). You might be able to tell I’m not a big fan. But - I should get the man’s name down correctly. Truthfully, I think some of Kurzweil’s stuff is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and maybe even a matter of promotion. I mean, he is an author of fictional novels. I bet he was really surprised when nobody questioned his concept of the singularity. But - hey - the concept is in step with Google’s desire to be the “singular” source of knowledge for all things in the universe. Maybe it got him hired!

There is a convergence that I don’t disagree with - and that is the meeting of the two main processor worlds. As Intel tends slowly towards lower power consumption and 14 nm technology, ARM processors are gaining desktop power at the expense of more power drain. They’ll meet in the middle somewhere, and batteries will get better to keep up.

15

If your argument with the HP Envy is simply form factor, I don’t think you’re going to enthuse many of the Haiku staff to do a touchscreen interface redo (yet). Touchscreens on mobile devices are now seen as (almost) a matter of necessity, albeit the blackberry doesn’t do too badly without them. The value of putting touch on a desktop seems less compelling to me. Some of that mindset is just a reflection of the fact that I spend most of my time with a keyboard. A whole new generation of smart phone users has become more comfortable with the touch screen than the keyboard, and in the future they will dictate the desktop (or appliance) form factor. It’s coming, surely, but right now it’s a fairly small market share. I’ll probably never want one, as I don’t subscribe to Googlethink, appliances everywhere, and delegating all of my decisions to the machine. My brain needs a reason to exist. Neither will I follow Kurtzwell into the singularity, since I know the difference between my consciousness and an unconnected copy. In the future, the powers that be will use some-such as the new packaging for the coolaid.

Another thing to consider is that developers are glued to keyboards, and develop an inherent dependency on them. They naturally don’t relate as easily to a finger pointing environment.

I do like the Haswell processor in the Envy (ten watts of power dissipation compares favorably with the high-end ARM at six or eight watts).

16

I have to say, you make some great points here R.S.!

The touch aspect of computing is not for playing games, answering emails, or the day in day out kind of mundane work we need to accomplish. I’m totally fine with Mouse and Keyboard myself and prefer them to slugging out emails. It’s for a/v media - Not print media. I don’t even really care if Haiku ever has a web browser, because it’s not why I would spend my time in Haiku! A/V is where Haiku really shines for me. I HATE and I do mean hate windows, osx, linux for having become exactly this web browser back end. Haiku still has that great feel of everything being a little application that does its own thing NEVER touching the web broswer, and the only thing everyone wants from Haiku is a better browser and a few other little touch ups. Nostalgic to death. Puke!

My gripe is that old and mid-line computers seem to be of great fanfare with most hobby os users. I don’t see that Haiku is trying or claiming to be a hobbyist os. From everything I have read and understand about of Haiku they would like to be more than that.

I’m trying not to go down the path that everyone else is going down. I believe that the focus is in the wrong place! That’s all.

I guess I’ll stop bugging everyone now. Thanks for hearing me out.

17

I guess if we can’t kick ideas around, we won’t be very creative. So - all ideas should be heard. Even Kurzweil’s. I mentioned him as an author of fiction, but I think he has been referred to as an author of current science extrapolated, or futurist writing. I guess that’s stuff that could be true someday, but is not true yet. It’s not exactly fiction, and not exactly not (fiction). Did I just use three negatives? I suppose the separation is intent. Kurzweil intends that his stuff will someday be true, while the fictional author never intends that the story be true. While it’s obvious that some of the things he writes are already true, I find myself in disagreement with a few of his tenets, and especially with the long range extrapolations. Touchscreens though - they’re OK - for certain things.

I agree that the browser has become very invasive to the OS. The current situation (not on Haiku) is deplorable. Chromium defaults to “track me,” “control my mouse,” “contol my webcam,” and “control my microphone.” Tis a bit ridiculous. I hope Web+ never does that!

18

I am just a user but I thought I would chime in just a little. As for me I would love to see Haiku pick some ‘brand’ for lack of a better word. Maybe Asus or something and if enough money could be gotten to get the devs that kind of hardware at least of we would have something that was supported. I don’t want too see Haiku only support one thing and a lot of people will say it supports x86, but the driver issue is something that can’t be ignored. It will be almost impossible for Haiku to support all chipsets currently available. So, I would like to see some focus on some subset, maybe even AMD APU as it is a smaller target and seems to be more open source friendly then intel. It is just a headache to try to find hardware that isn’t years and years old to run Haiku on.

Just my 2 cents.

David

19

I have a X220 tablet and Haiku runs on it well. There are a few things not working though.

Sound, wireless & the touchscreen. I help run a TuneTracker radio station and would like to get these last things working to help support the station.

With most of the developers running Thinkpads are any running on the X220 and can help me?

20

conflated your arguments with ronald’s for some odd reason, sorry, this thread happens roughly every two weeks.

[quote]This is exactly the type of tired old argument based on deflection, misconstrual, and finally assuming the sentinel task of defending the supposition of ideals borrowed from a distilled core group, assigning self-significance to the values expressed in refuting all arguments, plights, common sense, offering the initial presenters no other course but to simply walk away.

And really, again, you’re going to continue down the path of rejecting the accepted worldwide truth of the term appliance? Here it is so you don’t need to move your mouse. :smiley: You’re welcome.[/quote]
oh sweet, insults.

i already wrote those things you want – targeted applications (appliances have very specific application, you know), a touch interface – can already be done, on hardware that is already supported.

why does your want have to preclude mine? as it is, right now, we can both get what we want, and even with a focus on a specific configuration (like, say, mac os), other configurations become supported because everything is standardized. i can go on swapping out parts in desktops and workstations, and you can go on hacking unibody x86 tablets. it’s a beautiful thing, really.