While I realise the vast majority of *BeOS is run on x86 these days, several developments of late make me think that an immediate push to recruit ‘former’ BeOS PPC devs to join in and start getting the NewOS/Haiku branch up to par with the x86 branch could well be a jumpstart for both branches in the near future.
I realise it’s hard enough with just concentrating on getting one version of Haiku to the point of usability for release, but often times the faster you “roll with the punches”, the less likely you’ll “go down for the count”, and I very much would like to see this OS walk out of the ring head held high come the 15th round, I never expect it, or any other OS for that matter, to hold near the marketshare that M$ has in the past. I do see some trends building, and one that compliments the rising software/OS rebellion against M$ is it’s hardware counterpart.
It will attract not only Linux/UNIX supporters wanting to get the benefit of less competition from M$, I think you’ll see a LOT of support from OEMs wanting to escape the vannila x86 32 bit field and lessen the sway that Chipzilla has had on that for so long. Many had gone for Opteron/Athlon64 so quickly in part because of that among their reasons. It may be a burden, but it’s one that the sooner we pick it up, the less likely that it will crush us in the end. It would be hell trying to play catch-up on x86 while ignoring PPC, then when the rush to switch many will feel is already going strong, have to play catch-up all over again.
A few words concerning OEMs. I happen to work for one of the top 5 european OEMs, actually being responsible for the consumer desktop pc products.
Even though one might assume, that OEMs tend to have an issue with the dominance of both Microsoft and Intel, this is a false assumption. The driving motivation of every OEM, like that of any other legitimate business, is to make profit.
In order to do so, the product needs to appeal to a broad range of potential customers. The desktop pc market is defined and driven forward by the innovation and marketing of both Microsoft and Intel, which makes up a lot of the appeal of the category.
Therefore its highly unlikely that any tier 1 OEM is ever going to invest and/or support the OpenBeOS/Haiku efforts.
Actually even support for Linux is very minimal, even though the linux market share most likely equals the market share of apple systems. Its a niche and the investment to high in order to be profitable. And most customers, in this case retailers - keep in mind, tier 1 OEMs, except for Dell, don’t sell direct - prefer to go with the mainstream, as less marketing investment is required to actually achieve the best sell-out.
That said, I personally would very much like to see a ppc version compatible with Apple’s PowerBook line of products, the most stylish and sleek notebooks ever built
Yes, they like the fact that M$ drives the hardware sales way up every time they release a new version. I don’t think BeOS would have driven them so with it’s better use of hardware.y
Well it’s not only driving the hardware specs up, but also the fact, that both Intel and Microsoft spent trillions on marketing, practically cofunding almost every major activity.
Hom much, if any, of the code developed for OpenBeOS/Haiku could be crossed over to PPC via BeIDE Cross Development tools or other means for use on a 5.0.3 PPC system?
I was wondering how much trouble it would be to bring a PPC system up to date when Haiku can afford to spend resources on that side of the fence. I have a (few) Mac(s) running, or capable of, BeOS. While not fast by todays standard, I won’t be getting rid of them anytime soon. If we have any intrepid devs that have any Haiku-PPC questions of their own, I’ll gladly set one or two up for use as testbeds.
I’m also curious as to what all sorts of changes wiould be needed to interface the existing Haiku code to a NewOS-PPC kernel as opposed to a NewOS x86 kernel. Not the elemental diffs of x86-PPC, but since Haiku has been developed on x86 systems, iwhat the jump to a PPC kernel would entail above and beyond that , and if it will be considered worth the effort by many to bring support for older Macs along.
