Hi! I’m new to So alternative OS. And I want to you know Test it.
And I just want to know how much is difference between Haiku and Syllable? I found some news but they are sooo old (from 2006) As far as i know Haiku develops extremly fast 
Which is very good.
The Only thing i know (but not sure) that syllable was ported to linux and i don’t know why it EATS my PC and lags(on VirtualBox i have over 40% cpu time).
But How much syllable works better or worse?
Frankly, I don’t know a lot about Syllable, but I’ve heard it’s a great project. They are completely different systems, however, with very little in common.
I encourage you to try out Haiku and let us know how it compares to Syllable in your experience. It’s often enlightening to hear the opinions of “end-users” when comparing alternative OSes.
^^ I did try Haiku now. I’m so Impresed! With compare to Syllable it worked so quick. (i think the boot time on virtualbox was 3-4s) It so fast. But as much is fast(like hell) it’s unstable it crashes whatever i do.
I don’t know why now it’s working and it’s not crashing (I think first 2-3 times some errors were but now seems to be ok)
And I have to q :
BIG WOW about performance. It’s WILD!
Yes, Haiku in VirtualBox does suffer from some stability issues. Which is ironic, since I find it extremely stable on real hardware.
There is no official package management, or repository yet, but you can find plenty of software to try out on Haiku in the following places:
http://bebits.com
http://haikuware.com
http://ports.haiku-files.org
(all of which are giving me problems at the moment!)
As for multi-window browse, vs. single window browse - you’ll see in the menu options there on the file manager window to change preferences, and you’ll find a single-window-browse mode and a navigation bar feature, which you may like instead.
Performance is great, yes. On my Acer Aspire One netbook, running Haiku natively it boots in 12 seconds - it’s quite fast, even on the slower Intel Atom processors
Check here for more community sites/links (some have software downloads):
I think Syllable is supposed to be quite fast. But driver support is worse than in Haiku, and running it in VirtualBox really sucks. My initial opinion is that Haiku and Syllable are spiritually similar, they are both intended to be very lightweight and fast, and to be easily used desktop OS’s. If I remember correctly, Syllable also has servers like app_server too. Both projects have decided to ditch X11. You can tell that they are different projects though, and they are not codewise compatible at all, well at least not more than Haiku and Unix are for example.
In general though, it does seem like Syllable is quite behind Haiku. Basic desktop stuff like the panel feels unfinished, there’s no real sound standard AFAIK, etc. Anyhow, they are both great projects and I am looking forward to seeing them evolve all the time. Syllable just needs a lot more developers, I think. But you should definitely try installing Syllable on real hardware. And Haiku too of course, if you haven’t already!
[ADMIN REMOVED DUPLICATE POST]
Hi Denise,
I think both projects were very wise to ditch X11.
I’ve tried haiku in a vm, and it seemed fine, although if i left it on overnight it would invariably get hung somehow.
I’m looking for a system to code on, but i can’t yet commit to haiku yet because it is still single-user, and like the OP i’m gathering information about both syllable and haiku.
It’s pretty important to be multi-user so that you can create accounts for your family so they can try out your software.
Other questions i have about it—
(1) what is copy/paste like? (x11’s copy/paste can scar somebody for life)
(2) are the windows double-buffered? That’s what the mac does, and it’s really nice because even if an app crashes, you can still see what’s written in the window (and copy it down [by hand], or whatever).
(3) does it support any kind of remote mounting of its filesystems? My guess here is that the answer must be “no”, because that probably ties in with authenticating yourself to the filesystem.
Nevertheless, this is still useful, because you may create some object—say a painting—on your haiku system, then want to edit it on another system. Or you may create some files on your system, and want to get them off while one of your family members is messing around with the computer.
(4) does it have an ssh client and server? These would, of course, not be the primary means of interacting with the system, but are very useful for secondary access when somebody else is using it.
and
(5) when do we expect haiku to go multi-user? For me, at least, that would be the time to start trying to write some application level code for it, to see if it really could be a home for a homeless programmer.
dan
[quote=california_dan] Hi Denise,
I think both projects were very wise to ditch X11.
I’ve tried haiku in a vm, and it seemed fine, although if i left it on overnight it would invariably get hung somehow.
I’m looking for a system to code on, but i can’t yet commit to haiku yet because it is still single-user, and like the OP i’m gathering information about both syllable and haiku.
It’s pretty important to be multi-user so that you can create accounts for your family so they can try out your software.
Other questions i have about it— [/quote]
there is a way to build haiku with experimntal multiuser support. Though I am unsure of how it works as I just have multiple partitions on my machine. Mostly becuase I need winxp for many tasks still.given that I have a geust partition on my machine for windows. Keeps my primary install completely clean. Maybe adopting a similar approach might be more beneficial for you if data integrity is a concern.
Information about building, downloading source etc.
right click, select copy, right click paste. alot of applications support file drag and drop as well.
typicall when gdb gets invoked due to application crashing wierdness, the app window will stay open until you shut down GDB. Haiku has a jouranaling file system which aims to prevent alot of this but I am unsure of how well most apps leverage this feature. I find frequent saves to be a smart move on any alpha software and just a smart decision in general when working with things that should be critical in nature.
Not really sure what your asking here ? I have 2 haiku installs Drive A and drive B. I can acess the filesystem from either instilation on either drive. If your asking about network remote acess, I think haiku supports SSH for such things.
My suggestion would be to setup a small partition on such a machine formatted fat32. Haiku can read/write fat 32 in deffrence to your above question. It will give you a swappable cross platform acess partition fo such cases.
also you could use a USB pendrive to. Just as useful.
AFAIK yes. Theres a video tutorial on youtube about it IIRC.
[quote=california_dan] (5) when do we expect haiku to go multi-user? For me, at least, that would be the time to start trying to write some application level code for it, to see if it really could be a home for a homeless programmer.
dan [/quote]
Sometime around R2 would be my geuss although there is experimental support for multiuser. what thaat actually nets you is debateable and there been debate about it amongst computer users for years. If you sharing a signle pc and have real multiple interactive users then it makes sense. beyond that concucurrent multiuser case I don’t think theres much there.
but I wouldn’t let that stop you from developing on haiku.
Well, 1st of all, we must distinguish between Syllable Desktop and Syllable Server: the last one is Linux based, so it’s a completely different beast.
There’s an old 3ad @ Syllable forums where you can understand the differences between Haiku and Syllable Desktop: http://forum.syllable.org/viewtopic.php?t=1481
Just a quote: Syllable and Haiku are very similar. (note: SkyOS should be very similar too, but it’s closed-source and is dying -> http://www.skyos.at/)
BTW, the main difference between projects is that Haiku must be BeOS compatible, Syllable not.
This means that Syllable devs have more “freedom space” to implement new - even non backward compatible - features.
Of course Haiku have more organized structure, userbase and 3rd-party softwares (due to BeOS compatibility), so - at the moment - is the way to go…
@california_dan: what about ReactOS ?
Since I spent a lot of time with Syllable I can tell you more about it.
Fact is, Syllable is as good as dead. The main problem is, that Kaj, who is not able to write c++ code, was taken the leader-ship of Syllable, or at least he behaves like that. He wanted that syllables goes the way he likes, but since he is not able to write decent c++ code he could not implement anything, and he was thinking that he can give commands to the “real developers” like Arno, Rick, Jonas,Dee to implement his wishes. But of course they didn’t want to go the way of Kaj, because Kay wanted to see Rebol deeply integrated into syllable, they others didnt want, because rebol is not open source and because the release of rebol 3 was delayed a lot. That was about 3 or 4 years ago. And today Rebol 3 is still in alpha state!!
Since Vanders (the real project leader) was quite weak at that time, he was writing nearly no code all the time, has let Kaj to take more and more control about Syllable, and Kaj started to feel like a king, and didnt accept anything but his ideeas. He was claimed that syllable is a meritocracy and not a democracy, and so he said it is his right to take all the decissions since a certain statistics says that he was the most active person working for the project. Indeed the statistics was right, but he was on the top, because others were doing the work and he (kaj) was just merging-in the patches of the other developers. So most of the developers suddenly started to leave the project, or just not be active members anymore, they started to be quiet. And let Kay and Vanders alone. The result was, that nearly no progress was made.
Now many years ago, Vanders is stick “burned out”, and he doesn’t contribute nearly no code since many years, and Kaj is not able to write c++ code, just Anthony used to fix some bugs, but his activity is also quite low. Kaj killed syllable, by not giving them the freedom to develop syllable in the direction that most developers wanted. He behaved like a dictator and so he was left alone. The result can be seen simply: Look in the changelog of the last 3 yearsand you will see how empty it is, most of it is just bla bla like: Adding a boot option, translated a word, changed icons… and so on, adding wallpapers.
In fact Syllable started to die when Kaj released Syllable server, which wad nothing to do with Syllable, it was just a Linux distribution. And today it’s the same, it’s just a linux distribution. Kaj surprized us all with it, but just Vanders liked the idea, all other developers didn’t like the idea, but Kaj continued with it.
Now if you look at the homepage of Syllable nearly everything you see there are news about “conferences”, a few conferences every year. This is the contribution of Kaj. Perhaps he feels boring, or he wants to feel important and then he organizes a conference. How knows, perhaps it’s indeed benefical for his ego, but I don’t understand how he can go and present syllable so many times at conferences, and without coming with new improvements. He is not ashamed?
For Syllable it is very hard to write to write more advanced applications based on the syllable api, because its api is very poor and full of bugs, Haiku is imcomparabel more advanced.
I remember how Kaj reacted when Alpha1 of Haiku was released, he said something like: I tried haiku, and what i like about it, is the boot logo/screen.
If I’m not wrong, the latest “development-build” of syllable is more than 1 year old, in contrast, Haiku brings about every-day a few development-build (nightly), (look at haiku-files.org)
Syllable even doesn’t have a bug-tracker!!!
Today every little open-source project has a bug-tracker, syllable doesn’t!!!
What Kaj can give you, are just dreams/illusions of how great Syllable will be in future. Nothing more.Syllable is clinically dead, but kaj holds it alive, because he can not accept that he spent to many years (10 years) of his life for nothing.
california_dan, copy and paste in Haiku is great. I prefer Haiku’s over other OS’es.
Multi-User in terms of more than one person using the same machine at diffirent times, then multi-boot is the way to go right now. Bootman makes it very easy to set-up a diffirent partition for each user today.
Multi-User in terms of more than one person using the same machine at diffirent times but all booting into the same partition then having a logon screen that determines thier /home directory was available as an addon for BeOS, I never tried it for Haiku-OS but expect it may not be that hard to set if needed.
Multi-User in terms of more than one person using the same machine at the same time is very unlikely as I believe the idea is the user has the entire machine at thier finger tips when using a desktop OS.
Multi-User in terms of rights management to diffirent parts of the OS is lightly supported already (try deleting or moving a file in the system folder) and I expect there will be more of that type of thing added AFTER Release 1 is delivered. HaikuFS already lets you set owner/group assignments to files but I don’t think many the OS/programs re-inforces the assignments at yet, but I could be very wrong here as I have always used the default settings only.
Thanks everybody for all the informative comments.
I think the creators of Haiku made an inspired decision to reimplement BeOS, first, because it is such a good model to start from, and second, because it is not a moving target. I think what the creators did is sort of like what the creators of the GNU project did in building their versions of the unix tools.
So, given my admiration of Haiku, anything i say below about what i would find useful is not meant as any kind of suggestion of the way Haiku should grow, but only what i personally consider important in choosing a platform to write applications on. Clearly having a well-thought out api is extremely important, and Haiku has that automatically. (And it also obviously has a great community.)
One more preliminary remark is that i am not trying to stir up anything with syllable, i just joined this thread because Denise Purple’s post had a lot of resonance with me.
Now, i should respond to all of you since you were so kind to respond to me.
Marco (forart.it): thanks for the summary and the links. Regarding ReactOS, i am considering it.
In more detail: i am looking for a platform to write gui applications for, but with requirement #2 being no X11, and requirement #3 being that it has a good api. (Requirement #1 is that it be free—i used to program on NeXTstep which was awesome, but then it disappeared. Eventually some relative of it reappeared in Mac OS X, but in some ways it is quite different, and you certainly can’t recompile your old code without practically rewriting every line. I do not want to be burned by that again.)
AFAIK, that means possible platforms for me are Haiku, Syllable, ReactOS, or AROS (Amiga descendant).
The thing that worries me about ReactOS is i think they may have a moving target (windows)—sort of like GNUstep (the moving target there being Cocoa, and GNUstep isn’t cast as an OS in any event, but as a layer of some sort). It is very hard to hit a moving target, of course, especially if the target doesn’t want to be hit.
But i would be grateful to be corrected on any point about which i am wrong.
cipri: thanks for being very forthright. If you’ve already written anything up about whatever is wrong with the syllable api i’d be interested in a link to it (it might be too far off-topic to go in a Haiku forum, and i don’t want to wear out my welcome, and of course i also don’t want you to write anything up just for me). I would of course also like to hear what Kaj and Vanders have to say (but again, not in a Haiku forum). Just as a side remark, i have two coworkers who are very smart, and have very similar politics, but diametrically opposed viewpoints about certain languages and programming practices. (And they’re both good people also, friendly with everybody including each other. But man they disagree about language X and the way to program in it.)
Fredrik (tqh) — thanks for the copy/paste testimonial. I use X11 at work, and every day, after all these years, and knowing all the tricks, i still make at least one copy/paste blunder.
thatguy: thanks for the info about the experimental multi-user support, and also for the video by Leszek Lesner. When Leszek was showing the help for rsync (rsync --help), you could see that one of the lines was rsync --daemon (i.e., rsync in server mode). I’m not sure if Haiku supports it yet (because it could be that when it was ported, http://ports.haiku-files.org/, they just left the help intact).
But if it did support rsync --daemon, it would probably also support having an ssh server (the video showed only the ssh client).
Having an ssh server would be enough for remote access to the file system (and maybe just as good as nfs).
IMVHO this is important when you’re developing, so that (e.g.) you can take a quick look at what kind of files your users are producing with your software. It’s just very very handy to be able to quickly snoop around on another machine without getting up out of your chair to go interact with it: you don’t want to interrupt whatever they’re doing, or change the state of the gui, etc.
And for modern machines, which for a few hundred bucks have gigabytes of ram and terabytes of disk and execute thousands of times faster than machines 20 years ago did, any decrease in performance from having somebody remote in should be so small as to be not perceptible by a human. (I mean, telnet was available long before 1990, and even in that era, just remoting in and taking a look around would be a very light load. Today you’d do it with ssh, but the additional computational resources consumed would be miniscule.)
Regarding the double-buffering of windows, that’s not exactly the same as a window hanging around because of gdb. The idea is that when an app paints, it paints into a secondary buffer which then goes in the window. So if the app suddenly gets very slow or crashes, you don’t ever get a half-painted window. (On X11 systems you can see half painted windows in linux/firefox, for example, if some javascript or something goes crazy and consumes all the bandwidth so that firefox doesn’t have a chance to paint in its window. Sometimes shaking the window back and forth shows this effect. But in a double buffered system this doesn’t happen.) It’s not like it’s the most important thing in the universe, but given how capable our hardware it is a definite nice-to-have.
Thanks for the other info and suggestions.
Earl: Thanks for the info about multi-user, and the possible interpretations of it.
For the reasons i gave thatguy above, i don’t think the console user should have to take a hit in performance in order for a secondary user with a different account to take a look at their work on a remote terminal. It wouldn’t be reasonable for the secondary user to get a gui----that would be a slippery slope down to X11.
But i think being able to remote in and have simple terminal type access is very useful in a number of situations (e.g., if you have a bunch of machines in a lab, for example, the admin or teacher may want to flip through them ---- even in the context of a single user it may be useful to remote in and terminate a run away process that was locking up the gui).
So i guess we’ll just see what the multi-user support turns out to involve.
Everybody: thanks again for all your information, ideas, and suggestions, and i hope you all get a lot of value out of your experience with Haiku.
dan
Indeed? So presumably the first thing you will be doing is removing DragonflyBSD from that list of hybrid kernels since, according to you it’s “not possible to change from one kernel type to another” yet DragonflyBSD is merely a fork of FreeBSD, and remains similar enough for large bodies of code to move between the two.[/quote]
Never said not possible just that you would have to rework things in the kernel. Things would work differently. Code would have to change accordingly. The bigger the kernel (lines of code), the harder this would be to get done.
Kernels are taught in this one course:
http://www.physicsarchives.com/index.php/courses/176
You can also search for other textbooks to confirm what I link to above.
A short, similar overview is found here:
From the searches I have done they all say pretty much the same thing. They also list BeOS as hybrid kernel.
There are books out there that say the same stuff as you find in that Wikipedia article. Look for them and read them.
Just because Linus does not agree with stuff does not mean he is right. Why would Microsoft drop their monolothic OSes (DOS, 9x/ME) and move to hybrid (NT) kernel? Or classic Mac OS with monolithic kernel moving to hybrid kernel with OS X?
microkernels give the best security, stability & least amount of bugs but slower performance.
monolithic kernels give the best performance but more bugs, less secure & stable.
hybrid kernels take the best from both and give good security, stability & less bugs with very good performance.
Microkernel Approach:
http://genode.org/documentation/general-overview
Today only Linux & BSD still remain monolothic while all other current OSes are either hybrid or microkernel.
But i think being able to remote in and have simple terminal type access is very useful in a number of situations (e.g., if you have a bunch of machines in a lab, for example, the admin or teacher may want to flip through them ---- even in the context of a single user it may be useful to remote in and terminate a run away process that was locking up the gui).
On the Amiga it was possible to point the shell/terminal to a serial port (I did it myself) making it possible to use CLI-only programs/functions on a serial terminal. I think it maybe possible to do this in Haiku if you rewrite the terminal program to use the serial port.
Maybe that would be a good program to start up with on Haiku if you are interested.
Hi Earl,
I think this sounds like an interesting project, although i guess these days it would have to be something over USB since i don’t think you typically get serial ports on modern computers?
However, because remote access is so important to me i’m not sure i’d want to jump in on a platform that didn’t have the ability to ssh in to begin with. I guess it would depend on what other features were already present or reasonably could be expected to make it worth while to do preliminary development on remote access.
But since you mention that you had programmed something similar on the Amiga, that surely means that you were more than just a casual Amiga user at one time — and that at some point you made the decision to use Haiku in preference to an Amiga derivative (such as AROS).
If you wouldn’t mind telling, i’d be very interested in knowing what the factors were in your decision. For example, was it just the case that you got a BeBox and really liked it and at the time Amigas were not readily available, so it is a sort of historical accident? Or is there something specific about Haiku or Be that is technically better than Amiga and its derivatives?
Thanks in advance for any info.
[quote=california_dan]
For the reasons i gave thatguy above, i don’t think the console user should have to take a hit in performance in order for a secondary user with a different account to take a look at their work on a remote terminal. It wouldn’t be reasonable for the secondary user to get a gui----that would be a slippery slope down to X11.[/quote]
What your really asking for is remote adminstration capability. Which has nothing "in terms of design" to do with the whole multiuser concept. The problem is adding that inherently makes any operating system utilizing it that much less secure. If you instance the deamon full time it will consume some level of resources. The amount depends on the amount of data and protocal it is supporting obviously.
[quote=california_dan]
But i think being able to remote in and have simple terminal type access is very useful in a number of situations (e.g., if you have a bunch of machines in a lab, for example, the admin or teacher may want to flip through them ---- even in the context of a single user it may be useful to remote in and terminate a run away process that was locking up the gui).[/quote]
again what your asking for a remote desktop feature of sorts. but if the GUI on haiku locks up, typically its becuase something is doing bad bad things to the kernel in general. You have to understand that the haiku GUI isn’t a bolt on afterthought like it is with the linux model of designing things. It is all integrated well from the ground up. At which point a reboot is likely going to be your only cure. AFAIK there isn’t a way to restart the GUI. also with the way haiku handles resources etc, GUI lock ups even with severly misbehaving applications is extremly uncomoons, about the only time I have seen the user GUI hang is becuase of driver failures. Beyond that applications just crash and the OS generally humngs along about 99% of the time.
Also haiku is more of a microkernel/modular kernel design then Linux is. Linux is definatively more monolithic kernel “even though its become modularized to some extent” and many of its applications are as well. I have had audio driver fialures that simply cuase the media server to just shut down. Nothing bad really happens. Where as with a linux OS audio drivers crash and it can bring the whole system down. The design of Haiku is inhereted from BeOS which had a more crash proof design then most commercial operating systems of its day. While things can and do crash, they rarely take out the OS and thanks to the aggresive premption model used by the kernel, even when things go south in really bad way it rarely cuases a problem where you can’t use the application force shutdown acess ctrl-alt-del keys to bring it under control.
[quote=california_dan]
So i guess we’ll just see what the multi-user support turns out to involve.
Everybody: thanks again for all your information, ideas, and suggestions, and i hope you all get a lot of value out of your experience with Haiku.
dan[/quote]
I wouldn’t wait and I am not. There are plenty of utilitys that meet the needs you describe having, without carrying all the complexity and problems of a “conccurent multi user system” right now.
My advice would be to setup a Haiku install and take a look around. As to your comments about the API. the BEAPI “by default the Haiku API” is very good and if you need something where QT runs very well, the www.qt-haiku.ru site has a very good quality QT port for haiku that integrates extremly well.
look over at www.haikuware.com for applications etc. theres a good bit of stuff and most of it is of reasonable quality.
If you want some remote admin capability, VNC is available:
[quote=thatguy]
Also haiku is more of a microkernel/modular kernel design then Linux is. Linux is definatively more monolithic kernel “even though its become modularized to some extent” and many of its applications are as well.[/quote]
This simply isn’t true. Haiku does not have a microkernel, it has a monolithic kernel, the same as Linux. Further Linux is more modularised, largely because the far greater hardware support has made it necessary to narrow things down more. For example, in Haiku there is one huge file for all HDA codecs. If you don’t have a Realtek chipset Haiku will load workarounds for Realtek bugs anyway. The Linux kernel automatically detects which HDA codec you have and loads one of about a dozen different driver modules specific to a brand of codec. This means more hardware support with less waste.
The Haiku audio drivers are conventional monolithic drivers and as a result just as vulnerable to serious consequences if there are bugs in them. Worse, because Haiku’s “new driver API” still isn’t finished after all these years, many of the drivers don’t do proper resource reservation, meaning that a user who mistakenly has two drivers for the same hardware (as happened all the time with Haiku audio) can expect misbehaviour or crashes as both try to access the device simultaneously.
[quote=NoHaikuForMe]
This simply isn’t true. Haiku does not have a microkernel, it has a monolithic kernel, the same as Linux. Further Linux is more modularised, largely because the far greater hardware support has made it necessary to narrow things down more. For example, in Haiku there is one huge file for all HDA codecs. If you don’t have a Realtek chipset Haiku will load workarounds for Realtek bugs anyway. The Linux kernel automatically detects which HDA codec you have and loads one of about a dozen different driver modules specific to a brand of codec. This means more hardware support with less waste.[/quote]
do you ever shut up. haiku is a hybrid kernel and far more compartmentalized/modular then linux. If you want to argue with the devs you can, but considering they wrote it and thats what they refer to it as being. I will take there word on it over yours.
also the comparison can be made on sheer size, the linux kernel " the raw kernel" is massively larger.
BTW hardware support is great, if it actually works, with linux it rarely works correctly.
Really they are ? thats news to me becuase I can delete them while the system is running and geuss what, nothing happens. the media server shuts down and throw a debug warning. Thats about it.
try that on a linux system and get back to me.
there is a issue with opensound and native drivers. But thats more of a problem with open sound and they can coexist just fine. In haiku selecting a driver is as easy as opening the media prefernces and selecting the driver and restarting the media server. I think you knowledge of the audio capabilitys is generally overstated.
but you likely didn’t know that.