Quiet Board

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So this board seems like it’s pretty quiet, and I’m not really sure where these thoughts/questions should go…

Does anyone know what ever happened to the Whirlpool BeIA fridges?

I know Haiku, and BeOS before it, are/were desktop centered, but I’ve never really understood if there was any reason (aside from multi-user support) that keeps/kept them out of the server market.

As it’s been about 5 years since Be Inc. dissolved, are any of the original developers now out of their NDAs or involved in Haiku in any way shape or form?

I just re-read the ‘Quotable JLG’; is there any chance of someone pulling together fun quotes from the mailing lists, newsletters and starting something similar for Haiku?

I understand that ports are less desirable than new development, but ports can help with drivers, cross-platform communication (i.e. OpenOffice vs. MS Office). Is it even possible to make porting either from another OS (*nix) or to one easier/transparent? OSX has benefited greatly from the Linux/BSD community in terms of applications, it would be nice to be able to easily take something developed for Haiku out to the other Barbarian OSs, or to leverage the work from a larger community to benefit this one. I’m asking about technical possibility; I appreciate that licenses are a whole 'nuther kettle of fish…

If BFS is similar to a database, has anyone attempted to build an application to leverage that innate capability into a full blown dmbs? Oracle on Solaris is nice, but the datafiles are a pain, and file size limit are more than archaic. If I remember correctly, Be, and I hope Haiku; could support up to multi petabyte files. And that’s just a little bit of wrong (in the good way) even now…

Anyway, just some random thoughts; I’ve been away from the Be community for a while, and with Vista coming out thought I’d check to see what the status was on my favorite OS ever. I’m glad to have found out that Haiku is going strong and I’m finally excited about computers again.

Thank you Haiku Team!

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[quote]
I know Haiku, and BeOS before it, are/were desktop centered, but I’ve never really understood if there was any reason (aside from multi-user support) that keeps/kept them out of the server market.[/quote]

Haiku doesn’t have that focus currently. Few available server applications apart from the usual suspects (www, ftp, etc), little support for fail-safe server hardware, virtual server only as guest OS, a filesystem that doesn’t like the huge amounts of tiny files common in servers, little focus on security, little interoperability with other systems, no Java application server.

You’re better off with Linux, FreeBSD, MacOSX, or possibly Windows, if you want serve lots of clients, with high reliability and high security.

I’m sure Haiku will be nice as a simple server, though.

Travis Geiselbrecht, the originator of NewOS.
http://cia.navi.cx/stats/author/geist

The short answer is no. There is a certain amount of work and few shortcuts. Plus, popular software sees constant changes, which makes it a moving target. Look at BeZilla/Firefox.

When porting a certain application to BeOS, you first need to port the libraries and services the app depends on. If you port the common libraries and services (KDE, Gnome, X, sound mixers, clipboards, etc) you can then proceed to port the individual applications. This duplication of system services isn’t good, of course, but if the resulting applications are good and the integration is seamless enough, it can be an okay tradeoff.

I like how X window applications integrate in MacOS X. The X server is launched only when some application needs it.

It’s very possible to develop cross platform applications on BeOS/Haiku and port to other platforms, but you have to restrain from integrating too heavily. The nice features of Haiku may not be available on Linux, so it’s not necessaily a good showcase of -Haiku-. (Is iTunes on Windows good or bad for MacOS X publicity?)

Any serious, large-ish software should have its core reasonably cross platform. There are a few BeOS-examples: MUSCLE(+BeShare), HandBrake, Transmission, Gobe Productive.

[quote]
If BFS is similar to a database, has anyone attempted to build an application to leverage that innate capability into a full blown dmbs? Oracle on Solaris is nice, but the datafiles are a pain, and file size limit are more than archaic. If I remember correctly, Be, and I hope Haiku; could support up to multi petabyte files. [/quote]

A theoretical maximum. In BeOS I often get errors when trying to create large files, 1-4 Gb, even when the filesystem isn’t full. But my filesystems could be fragmented. I think Haiku’s OpenBFS has fixed some of that.

I don’t think anyone’s tried to build a relational database on top of BFS attributes. It would be a fun experiment, but I suspect it would be fragile and perform a lot worse than a file based database.