So, I was a Be evangelist back in the day, and briefly involved with OpenBeOS way back when. I’ve been feeling the nostalgia bug and have been trying to play around with Haiku, but I’m having a heck of a time wrapping my head around the current state. It seems like there is a lot of development still going on, and I’ve been playing with a nightly a bit in a VM as well as on an old laptop that seems pretty well supported, but I also feel like I’m missing something.
Some specific questions:
Are people really using HaikuDepot? It seems both astoundingly slow and crashes pretty regularly.
If not, how are you all installing and updating software? And where should I be looking for native applications?
What’s the state of audio and video media playback? I got audio sorta working on the laptop, but only sometimes.
What’s the best way to set up a development environment for it? Both applications and the core OS.
I saw an article that Rust and Go have reasonably recent versions available, but can’t find them?
I also have a general list of software that I was wondering if a port or native build is available:
First off, welcome back! For the other most parts, I use “pkgman” in Terminal, kinda a cli for HaikuDepot.
You can search in there with just “pkgman search foo” and install with “pkgman install foo” (but most of these things have been mentioned throughout posts in the forum.
There is a transition going on at our buildmasters (for haikuports) to beta6, so anything newly build can be tricky to install, so expect some isseus there (should be resolved in a short time I guess).
Are people really using HaikuDepot? It seems both astoundingly slow and crashes pretty regularly.
If not, how are you all installing and updating software? And where should I be looking for native applications?
What’s the state of audio and video media playback? I got audio sorta working on the laptop, but only sometimes
For #1, I use haiku depot for 95% of my software installs…I do not have issues using it.
For #2, I make and compile source code for needed things and they are a few independents that share their creations via pkg or zipped files.
For #3, it depends on your hardware. For one of my Windows XP-era laptops–everything works except for wifi, which I mitigate by using a wifi-to-LAN bridge. Most of my PCs are about 5-10 years old and they are compatible with Haiku.
As @begasus stated, the depot is not really usable at this time. I’m waiting for Beta6 release and I will migrate to it and perform the big updates then. Have fun!
If you’re experiencing slow performance or crashes, please open bug reports with detailed steps to reproduce. I don’t see those issues with HaikuDepot. It takes about 2 sec for the ~6500 packages in the “All packages” tab to populate and searching is instantaneous.
Most packages are accessible through HaikuDepot/pkgman. You can add other repositories in the Repositories preferences.
You can use HaikuDepot’s filter “Show | Native Desktop applications only”.
MediaPlayer plays back all audio and video I tried, it uses FFMPEG.
Haiku comes with everything needed for development (it’s in the haiku_devel package). There are various IDEs, personally I use the native Genio. If you’re interested in contributing to the development of the OS, see Contributing to Haiku.
If you come from BeOS, you know hardware support is a bit limited. If you have a well supported soundcard it will work ok, otherwise, you run into problems (I have similar problems on my laptop).
You can either do it from inside Haiku (with your tools of choice, I am old-style and use only vim and little tooling, but Genio is the trendy IDE if you’re more into that). Or, for the OS development you have the option of cross-compiling (Linux and MacOS are the best supported “host” systems for that. Depending on what you work on, various options are possible: running Haiku in a VM, network booting a test machine, rebooting between two partitions, live patching stuff into your running OS, …
They are in the repositories. If you can’t figure out how to install them using HaikuDepot (I can’t help you here, I never start it), the command line tool pkgman may work better for you. If you know the command you need, you can use “pkgman install cmd:rustc” to install the package containing rustc, for example (there are a few other prefixes like this, for example lib: for libraries and devel: for corresponding development files)
There has been quite a lot of work go into HaikuDepot desktop application over the last 12 months to resolve many of these problems you have eluded to but those changes are not yet released.
If you are using R1B5 (release 1 beta 5) then you’ll still be seeing a HaikuDepot with the older internal architecture. Soon R1B6 will be cut carrying the new changes. Haiku has a “nightly” build which would give you an idea of what is coming in R1B6. If you were happy to try a “nightly” build, it would be interesting to understand if the problems you are seeing are resolved by the newer software.
As @humdinger mentioned, it would be good if you can log any issues that you see in the Haiku bug tracker. Only log new issues that are not already logged. Please include steps to reproduce the problem along with any screenshots to illustrate the problem. It would only make sense to log issues about R1B6 or nightly at this stage.
Wow, I don’t know if I just had a bad nightly or some other problematic setting, but a fresh install from the latest nightly and suddenly HaikuDepot is stable, fast and almost everything is running great. I’m installing on a laptop, but I also want to have a VirtualBox setup for some dev work. Any hints for proper display scaling for a 3840x2160 monitor in VB?
Make sure to set the “graphics controller” to VMSVGA, with at least 32/64 MB of video memory. Then install the vmware_addons, and reboot. That’s not a typo… it will allow you to use the vmware_graphics driver inside VirtualBox, and allow you access a wider range of resolutions.
Warning: on modern CPUs, VirtualBox tends to work pretty poorly with Haiku if you assign too much cores to the VM.
I could assign 4 without issues when I was using a Phenom II X4, but with a Ryzen 5 4600G, using more than 2 made it really sluggish. In any case, make sure your VBox VM type is set to “Linux (other) 64 bits”, as that enables some values that tend to help (x2apic at least).