All,
Most interesting, an alternative to the chaos of Linux. A fresh start is what the open source world needs. But I can’t find much ‘overview’ or FAQ information about a few questions I have:
-What language is Haiku written in?
-How (dis)similar is it to Linux?
-Is multiple monitor support there yet? If ‘yes’, then I’ll be giving it a try, that’s for sure. I’d like to contribute to the right project as well.
Haiku is written in C++
It is not very similar to Linux, it has a different filesystem. Large Linux apps are not easily portable, no Libreoffice yet for example.
Hi,
You can check out the language breakdown of Haiku here: http://www.ohloh.net/p/haiku/analyses/latest/languages_summary
Linux and Haiku are both either Free-Libre or Open Source Software. That is pretty much the similarities.
Haiku runs on the unrelated (non-*nix) Haiku/NewOS kernel but does makes use of the same GNU software that Linux uses.
If you check out the Haiku ports website, you will see that there is a lot of software that is normally found on Linux that has been built for Haiku.
As you might of guessed, Haiku’s API is not from the Linux world and Haiku’s GUI takes a rather different design philosophy to Gnome and KDE. But if you install QT for Haiku, then most smaller QT apps can compile with little or no changes.
However porting software to use Haiku’s api and norms can become rather problematic and a lot of cross-platform software isn’t nearly as cross-platform as the makers assert.
So it uses GNU tools? For me that makes it ‘linuxy’ but of course that the ‘surface’ of the thing. I see you have zsh ported, that’s nice. If I can drive it like linux as far as the same shell, then that’s a big help in learning. But what about multiple monitors? Not yet?
No multi monitor support yet AFAIK.
Using some opensource softwares that are used on linux doesn’t make haiku a lnuxury thing that you called. I suppose then that using kde is a windowsery kind of thing?;
I strongly recommand you to read the BeOs entry on Wikipedia. Then after that read the entry on Haiku. You will see no “linuxery”. Haiku isn’t a posix based. Within this community we all contribute to a single os called Haiku unlike the fragmentated community of the linux distribs, they focuse on doing their own thing instead of helping the linux based os to go foward. That’s why i do hate linux for that fragmentation. Haiku, i hope, will never become as fragmentated as linux is.
[quote=Setlec]Using some opensource softwares that are used on linux doesn’t make haiku a lnuxury thing that you called. I suppose then that using kde is a windowsery kind of thing?;
I strongly recommand you to read the BeOs entry on Wikipedia. Then after that read the entry on Haiku. You will see no “linuxery”. Haiku isn’t a posix based. Within this community we all contribute to a single os called Haiku unlike the fragmentated community of the linux distribs, they focuse on doing their own thing instead of helping the linux based os to go foward. That’s why i do hate linux for that fragmentation. Haiku, i hope, will never become as fragmentated as linux is.[/quote]
“linuxy” isn’t meant to be an insult, only to point out that certain things will be familiar to a Linux user. If zsh is there, and the GNU/linux tools are there, then Haiku is “linuxy” in the way that I mean it. In the OS world, the more we take the best of each other’s ideas, the better for everyone. Anyway, I agree with you that Linux is far far too fragmented and I hope that Haiku avoids that. Once you have multi-monitor support I’ll give it a try and a contribution.
Setlec, what is to stop people from making different flavors and spins of Haiku? As most of us know, Haiku is released under a free software/open source license. That means people can make distributions of Haiku, or even fork Haiku entirely! They could not call it Haiku since that word is copyrighted as well as the logos and other artwork included in Haiku.
I do sincerely hope that neither of those possibilities happen! If people want Haiku to look or behave differently, then all we need to do is to work on theming Haiku and work on new artwork, wallpaper, sound notifications, new tracker add-ons etc. That way when the package manager gets implemented, people could create “meta packages” that download whatever themes, artwork, sounds, addons etc. that fits the style the user is looking for!
The problem with the GNU/Linux/DE OS is there are hundreds of different projects and foundations working on different parts of the system in virtual isolation. The GNU people work on their system, not knowing or caring what the Linux kernel people are doing! The Xorg X-server people are coding seperate from what Gnome and KDE people are doing and with different coding styles and languages! Linux is like a house of cards being built from the top, bottom and every side all at the same time! That being bad enough, it is being built by different people with opposing views on how to get stuff done!
Haiku on the other hand is being developed by one team. Yes there are many people who work on the system, but fundementaly, at the end of the day; they all have the same goal and official coding style! Haiku is being developed and targeted for the Personal Computer, the Desktop. This allows the devs to focus on a certain subset of hardware! With the boot loader, kernel, runtime loader, servers, kits, tracker and the deskbar all developed by the same team with the same goal and with the same coding style, all of the fluff and layers associated with Windows, Mac OS X and even Linux, do not exist on Haiku.
BeOS forever!
I don’t know what you mean by “Posix based”, you make it sound as if Posix is a operating system and not a standard and specification for operating system design. If you mean that Haiku isn’t Posix compliant, then most main stream operating systems aren’t. Linux is only a little bit more posix compatible than Haiku and work is being done to narrow that gap when the standards co-align with Haiku design philosophy.
ddavid has it exactly right IMHO. No, we can never and should never attempt to create any sort of ‘lock’ on respins or even forks of Haiku. But what can be done is to create a new, unified platform that is good enough that there is little motive to fork, and what forks do happen will be minor. Right now Linux is in chaos, the only ‘center of gravity’ is the kernel itself, and maybe the GNU toolset (which is obsolete and horrible to use). Above that, anything goes.
Haiku is pretty POSIX compliant. That is one of the main reasons *NIX CLI software can generally be ported to it quite easily. It also can use *NIX shells (bash/tsh etc) but doesn’t have much else UNIXy about it - none of the audio, network, GUI etc APIs are the same. No /proc or /sys interfaces, no udev, different directory structure in general, drivers are quite different and its a micro kernel (+ network stack), more advanced filesystem, no ‘everything is a file’ philosophy etc etc.
On the other hand it has some stuff that helps ported - Qt and OpenJDK were ported for example, so Qt and Java programs are pretty easy to port over. SDL is also there. And it uses gcc/binutils and standard shells, so *nix/nux users wont feel so out of place.
EDIT: Oh, BTW, I think multi-monitor works on some chipsets, but definitely not the majority. Doesn’t work on my intel, but perhaps some ATI boards (more work has been put into ATI drivers). I’ve definitely seen screen shots of it working somewhere.
[quote=Munchausen]
EDIT: Oh, BTW, I think multi-monitor works on some chipsets, but definitely not the majority. Doesn’t work on my intel, but perhaps some ATI boards (more work has been put into ATI drivers). I’ve definitely seen screen shots of it working somewhere.[/quote]
Cool. I’ll keep an eye on Haiku, and when it supports multi on Nvidia, then I’m going to give it a try for sure. As it is, I’m so addicted to having three monitors that I just can’t live without it.
Too bad there’s no compatibility layer between Haiku and Linux, so that people could run Haiku and still have their expected apps. Rather like WINE does between Linux and Windoze. Then, over time apps get ported native, and eventually it’s all new.
Is there some doc that gives an in depth discussion of Haiku design philosophy? It interests me that that std. Linux shells work (which means that all those APIs must be compatible), and the GNU tools work (ditto), yet the ‘higher level’ APIs are different.