Hello! I’m new here.
At first, sorry for my poor english.
I’m little confused. So I have some questions:
Is Haiku a stand-alone system? Or it need some BeOS stuff (e.g.: device drivers)?
Is Haiku FULLY open sourced?
And what about Tracker/Deskbar? They’re not open sourced, right?
Is Haiku updated frequently?
The entirety of Haiku is not complete yet (getting very close though), but as each kit is developed seperately it is possible to replace a number of the BeOS kits with Haiku ones. When all are completed you will eventually end up with a complete Haiku system after replacing all BeOS components.
It is fully open source too, it uses the MIT licence (and there are a couple of components that are GPL, though nothing that is essential for the system). Tracker and Deskbar are both in the Haiku tree atm, and in fact Be actually opensourced them if I’m correct.
Keep an eye out on sites like Studio-33, BeOS News and such for updates. They’re not often reported on this site unless they’re fairly major, but as I’ve been keeping up with the svn logs I can tell you they’re moving forward in leaps and bounds 
So Haiku is:
-Completely open sourced
-Actively developed
-Not standalone currrently, but it will be soon
And Tracker/Deskbar is open sourced.
Right? :roll:
Yep. Sorry, I get carried away with my responses 
-Not standalone currrently, but it will be soon
In my opinion, Haiku is "standalone" - meaning it can be compiled, installed to an HD, and boot and run entirely on its own with no additional "closed source" code running at all.
It doesn’t run 100% stable, and certainly doesn’t have super-great hardware support, but I have loaded it successfully in VMWare, and stand-alone on several computers now.
Because it is binary compatible with BeOS R5, you can even run some BeOS apps directly on Haiku without recompiling them.
And wich kernel is used in Haiku? Is it a heavily-modified Linux/FeeBSD kernel? :roll:
It’s based on a kernel called ‘NewOS’ written by one of the former Be engineers. It was forked some time ago so is probably quite different in parts by now.
Okay, thanks!
Now another question - it’s BeOS related, but I don’t want to start a new topic:
If the BeOS bootloader fails, I get a list of the terminated processes. Once I’m noticed a VERY strange procedure, called “Psycho_killer” (or PsychoKiller, I can’t rememeber clearly). What the HELL is this?
Taking a wild guess I’d say it’s probably a process/thread from the kernel whose sole job is to remove and cleanup after threads/teams who have recently died. Someone has to take care of it so you have a seperate thread looking after that house keeping. But yeah, just a guess …
There are some other really interesting names if you are able to run Process Controller in BeOS, but I wont spoil the ‘surprises’
Yes, the Be engineers was very creative in naming things, threads being no exception. This has spread to a lot of 3rd party apps as well, my favourite is in the Vision IRC client.
... my favourite is in the Vision IRC client.
What it is? 
If I remember correctly it was ‘I need a monkey’ or something like that 