Anyone remember the "Be" Operating System (BeOS) ??

I actually liked Debian back in the day. I always felt their pakcage management was better than Red Hat's.

I usually ended up building Linux (and BSD machines) from raw source using a cross-compiler and then rebuilding the system within itself...self-hosting.

Last Edited by AkashicRecord® on 09/23/2020 04:40 PM

I honestly didn't know there was a joke about that. My question was meant seriously... of course I understand those CPU's are very weak compared to what's out there today, and probably not compatible with a lot of things you'd use.

But what do you think about Devuan, its successor?

Oh yeah, fun stuff. Went to their dev conference once. Gasse was a character, there is no way in hell SJ would’ve gotten along with him 🤣

That's all new to me, I'd have to take a look.

The Beowulf cluster joke was kind of the late '90s equivalent of "but can it run Crysis?"

I'm rather curious how Haiku would fare on a modest Chromebook...

LOL i do IT stuff and when co-workers ask me if i could take a look at their laptops i still find stuff like this...

easy fix tho lol

Been there once and can add to your & While attending 'A' school at Naval Station Great Lakes across the border in IL, my classmate and room mate hooked us on playing D&D after class and weekends. Well anyway, we decided to go to Chicago one weekend to a D&D convention where we met Gary Gygax, the inventor of D&D. When he found out we were stationed across the border and liked to play his game, he invited us up to Kenosha to play with him...so the next weekend, I got to play D&D with GG and he trained my friend as a DM, who went on to receive multiple awards in tournament play.

WTF?

You met Gary Gygax???

Successor? Debian is still around and quite alive and well. I run a few Debian desktops around the house as daily drivers.

Yep, played D&D in his basement and on his porch a whole weekend, with him as DM and using his figurines, maps etc. My roommate whom he trained, went back almost every weekend until we graduated. 'A' school.

This is great! I'm a long-time early adopter who, over the past few years, have grown less and less interested in the chase. Best thing I ever did, was switch to Mac in 1998, but I no longer identify with the Apple culture.

This looks really interesting!

One thing which, to this day, is still unmatched by no other operating system is the "scriptability" of the entire GUI as a whole.

There is a sorely undocumented command curiously named "hey" which allows for fully scripted and programmatic control of...everything. You have to see it in action to truly appreciate it. It allows for quite a bit of end-user expansion to already developed applications without needing to recompile (or even touch) the application's source code.


Another boon for this OS design (BeOS and Haiku both) is how fast and easy you can drill down on any specific thread (even kernel level) and change scheduling priority on the fly. It adds a very real-time aspect to what isn't explicitly a real-time operating system...

The Be file system is also somewhat fantastic. It's more of a relational database than a file system.

While the Linux community was busy trying to figure out how to move from EXT2 to EXT3, there was this Be file system here all along...

TRON was just a movie

"The Truth of JAL123"

Reportedly, there were 17 top engineers of TRON, OS system indigenously developed by a professor of Tokyo University. It is said that TRON at that time was so advanced (comparable to current Google Chrome) and free that the entire Japanese public sector was to adopt TRON OS. Then the entire echelon of TRON engineers were killed by the JAL 123 crash, and Microsoft instead took over and dominated the Japanese OS market thereafter.

[link to fourwinds10.com]

In 2004, the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara mentioned "TRON was once killed by the former Minister of International Trade and Industry, Ryutaro Hashimoto, because he was at that time under the pressure of United States."[12] This story is supported by an article on a website dedicated to the TRON Project,[13] citing Microsoft's lobbying against it. The result was the threat of a Super-301 (complete stop of import based on section 301 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988) against everything related to TRON, including products from the companies selling computers running TRON OS variants. This led to many companies dropping TRON in fear to lose the possibility to export to the United States.[14] According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, from the point of view of the United States trade officials in the 80s and early 90s, the TRON project was seen as a plot brought up by the Japanese bureaucrats to "control the world" and a potential threat to American dominance in computer technology


[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]


A old git

Well, I'm posting on this thread from Haiku at the moment, and I've spent the last couple hours going over tons of software in the default Haiku repository.

Needless to say, I'm more than impressed, and I'm still only at the letter "K"

There are some VERY slick KDE/Qt apps that run on Haiku, and many Linux users will probably have seen them before. (I had no idea that the KDE team developed such a bad ass image editor...It's up there with Gimp!)

It's basically about that systemd thing (if that's what it's called?). They are taking a new road.

I know Debian is still alive (as opposed to Ian, one of the founders of Debian - the "ian" part of "Debian" - who died in a police jail cell) but the Devuan developers claim they took a better road by dropping systemd (don't ask me what exactly it is) which appears to have been a bone of contention... or a source of trouble, if you prefer... so Devuan might potentially be its successor.

So what's up with this Haiku... is it in the fact the old BeOS ressuscitated and given an upgrade?

You actually knew that guy?

lol

I remember those old D&D books... being somewhat interested in mythology, they were quite fascinating and in fact even his name itself seemed to me somewhat curiously reminding of mythology....

It's been around for several years now though. At that time I was more into Linux than Windows, that's how I came to know about it. Now I have been Windows for more than a year again, but I got basically forced because of games... maybe not the best decision.

Oh, Slashdot...
That place really went downhill

Be was great technically peaking, but it turned out to be impossible to sell a competing OS. Not surprising, since you can hardly give away Linux to this day.

Who killed Be OS?

Be inc.

They received an offer from Apple, but they didn't take it, because they wanted a lot more money for it. More than Apple was prepared to pay.

And so Be died, instead of becoming the base for the sorely needed reboot of Mac OS.

Instead Apple picked up Next OS, and got Steve Jobs back with it.

Wouldn't say I knew him but stayed at his house a whole weekend once playing AD&D. My friend whom he trained as a DM, had a signed 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide by Gary. Lucky bastard. To me at the time, Gary was just another person but my friend whom had been playing since the game was released, adored him.

For the most part, yes.

The 32-bit release supports legacy BeOS R5 code (but uses an old GCC2 compiler.)

The 64-bit release uses a newer compiler platform at the expense of losing the backward compatibility.

The was I feel about that is basically:



Not many need the legacy support. Let the old code die, because now we have something shaping up to be substantial. (There are also PowerPC, Sparc, and ARM targets, so it isn't just Intel.)


There wasn't a major release of the OS in years until they dropped the recent Beta(s) and started doing nightly builds again. Someone's been busy..

Last Edited by AkashicRecord® on 09/24/2020 10:23 AM

VIDEO DRIVERS

...that is the primary issue (for now) if you are trying out Haiku. I kind of wish the Dev team would just use their fail-safe VESA video driver on first boot (at least) and then give the user an option to keep it that way, or probe / test the display for a suitable driver (if any) and continue from there.

Right now you'll probably need to hold Shift and go into the boot options and select the fail-safe video driver. After install, you have to uncomment a specific configuration line in a startup settings file to keep this enabled, and this is not good for a "dumb" user or newbie.. This whole issue could be rectified a lot better in many ways.

It's all (mostly) documented on their web page, which is excellent by the way, so make sure you at least have a passing glance at the installation guide, because it also has a lot of troubleshooting info.

Last Edited by AkashicRecord® on 09/24/2020 10:32 AM

So, I timed the Haiku boot sequence on this junker machine and it took about 30 seconds in total. An additional 10 seconds or so for power on self tests and BIOS messages, etc., so that's not too bad... (And I have a lot of shit already installed on this thing.)


I tried timing the shutdown time from pressing the Power button, but it was too fast I couldn't actually clock the fucking thing. (It took less than one second.)

Last Edited by AkashicRecord® on 09/24/2020 11:17 AM

That's some funny shit... video drivers were needed to play a game, or use software drivers to see what was was on screen, differentiated by sight.

Yeah, the installation and running on "newish" hardware can be a pain. That's why I wish the VESA driver was default. It works pretty damn good for the time being. But, this is a beta, and targeting new hardware is obviously difficult...i mean hell, these guys only have about a $10K yearly goal for donations...

I wouldn't peg Haiku as a gaming OS by any means, but there is a lot there lurking in the shadows.

For retro gaming, it is actually quite complete. You can essentially play any classsic console, arcade, or DOS game if you like.



Last Edited by AkashicRecord® on 09/24/2020 01:17 PM