which pc will be the next bebox?
bebox， it sounds too old and few in the market.
so，is there any pc near to the new bebox?
If it does not exist, we will have to try. Someone with enough free time and knowledge of KiCAD and FreeCAD could design the next HaikuBox.
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Be gave up pretty quickly on the idea of making their own hardware. Maybe we should learn from their mistakes, and use what’s already available instead of embarking into making custom things?
What do you mean by “near to the Be Box”? Is it about the CPU meters on the front? Having a coat of blue paint? The MIDI ports? The GeekPort? The PowerPC CPUs? Or is it just about the OS that runs on it?
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I think that people have a fake idea of what was really a Bebox. They tend to think, and it’s natural, that dedicated hardware means that all will work like a charm. Actually, the real picture is quite different.
If you check threads were people try to revive a Bebox, you will see that it can be a lot of work to find a CD drive or a graphics card that will work. Be certainly started to make hardware too early and bases of the system itself were not even stable. So, you can’t always install latest BeOS version on a Bebox because, it was made for a too old version and, hardware is not matching.
My ‘Haiku Box’ is a HP T520 thin client - I think thin clients are a ‘cool substitute’… 
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HP t520 is the year 2018.
we can vote the “haikuBOX” every year.
just like, when the first day of the year 2019, we can announce “HP T520 thin client is the haikuBOX of the year 2018”.
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The problem is that manufacturers are sometimes changing specs without changing name of the product. For a windows user, if you change a codec chip or the wifi chip, it is not a drama. The global design stays the same, features stay the same, why change the name? So, you will have people very disappointed because they expect that this model will work but this particular revision of hardware will not.
Let’s imagine that it is not the case and hardware doesn’t vary. People will mostly buy the recommended hardware and rarely test others. Less testing, less bugs solved. As result, hardware support will decay.
Somehow, risks are higher than benefits expected.
Whatever the misconceptions about what BeBox stood for, I think this would be an important part of what a HaikuBox could/should be. Good hardware support from Haiku.
In a thread concerning ARM someone mentioned that one potential reason Haiku has not ended up running on ARM SBCs so far is that there’s constant change and different ones don’t share that much in common so even if Haiku was close to running on one, that one was soon forgotten and there was no point continuing work.
I don’t think this is entirely true in that had Haiku gotten up and running on one of the Raspberry Pis it would still be no problem buying most of the older models even as new and they are still being supported after all these years. But this is pretty much exclusive to RPi. Probably a better explanation is that Haiku runs on whatever the people working on Haiku find interesting and have time to pursue…
If one was to go for this idea of a HaikuBox meaning a hardware platform that is very well supported, it would probably make sense to pick something that is going to stay available for a long time, another thing that would help is if everything about the product line would not just change completely over every iteration. PCs may be offering that but they also present the issue of being having fairly complex hardware and there probably not existing a suitable complete system that is in wide use and going to stay in production for a long time.
Well, you could take the old specs and modify things a bit for modernization:
Old specs:
http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/products/bebox/dual603spec.html
You’d want to look at joysticks, MIDI IN/OUT, serial ports, floppy, CD/Bluray burners, etc. If someone likes Pro Tools or Cakewalk, adjust adapters as needed. As for the LEDs, there are various displays for the eye candy.
Beyond that is the Geekport.
Now, look at modern PCs and adapt so most users can use the fanciful features. Don’t forget Wacom tablets, web cameras and other wizardry gadgets.
Most users use the portability of laptops, but an expandable workstation like the Bebox seems desireable. Use something on the scale of compatibility supported by the lead Haiku kernel developer(s) as a baseline.
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With RISC-V CPU or course.
VisionFive 2 etc. GPIO port can be considered as an alternative to GeekPort.
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The Raspberry Pi at the time was a bit special: it was the only machine still using ARMv6 CPU when everyone else had moved on to ARMv7, which is MUCH easier to work with. So we decided to focus our efforts on more modern hardware (at the time we had selected the BeagleBoard as a good and relatively cheap machine to work with).
Support for more recent and more reasonable models of Raspberry Pi will surely come some day… but indeed this depends on someone actually working on it.
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The problem with the geekport was, no one really knew what to do with it. Sure it was cool, but what do you actually do with it? In modern times, Arduino makes that more obvious, but back in the late 90’s there was no Arduino and most people who owned a BeBox (me included) never attached anything to the geekport.
The blinkenlights are cool, but they are pretty much geared to a machine with dual processors, so they really do not scale well.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved my BeBox, but I also let it go because it was no better than a Mac running BeOS, and Macs far surpassed the BeBox for performance. Also - try getting a BeBox fixed in 2007, let alone 2024. I saw it as something with a finite life and a diminishing value.
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Of course the specific way the blinkenlights were set up does not scale but I don’t see a big problem with coming up something similar in spirit. You could use a LED matrix and have some level of flexibility when it comes to how many cores are being visualized while preserving a fairly similar look unlike with an LCD which obviously would accommodate even more variety.
Maybe - but none of that captures the neatness of the blinkenlights. They were very cool looking. I think using a few strips of programmable/addressable LED’s and setting that up to split the CPU cores over the strips would be the best way to make something that is in the split. You can then have 2 lines still, but split the activity in to segments of the LEDs. That is how I would do it anyway,
I think one more obvious way is just one led per cpu core, and make it brighter with higher cpu use. This gets us ready for machines with 64+ cores in the future 
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Or use 512 LEDs and then you have future proofed yourself for 5 - 10 years, and every core gets at least 4 LEDs. Or just don’t have blinkenlights. Maybe you could use the blinkenlights to show memory pressure? That might work.
The BeBox was characterised by:
- too many ports - just too many. 4 serial ports!!!
- the geekport, which was mostly useless
- blinkenlights - for a very specific number of CPU cores
- fairly good audio for the time
- columns on the front.
I think it is possible to make something that nods to the legacy, but given that most ports these days can be emulated over USB, the look is probably as good as it gets.
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If I were making one, I’d look at home computer designs of the 70s and 80s and try and come up with something neat looking. I’d like to move away from cubes. It’s why I like the Atari VCS 800 so much.
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Maybe give a nod to the RPi 400 style of design…
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it sounds good. except the power of the CPU.
if only libreoffice, it is good enough.
basicly , the Haikubox should have the best compatibility with Haiku. and it must be powerful to burden all function application. for example, blender.
WiFi and vedio card should be supportted.
still, i think it is the best way to pick one of the thin pc or mini-pc .