Jim Salter
Earlier this month, the Haiku project released the second beta version of its namesake operating system, Haiku.
Haiku is the reinvention of a particularly ambitious and forward-looking operating system since 1995: BeOS Inc. by BeOS. BeOS was developed to take advantage of Symmetrical Multi-Processing (SMP) hardware using techniques that we take for granted today: core-scheduled preventive multitasking, ubiquitous multithreading, and BFS, a proprietary 64-bit journaling file system.
BeOS: Apple’s operating system that never was
Most of those who remember BeOS remember him for his failed attempt to become Apple’s primary operating system. The platform was created by Jean Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive who wanted to continue the work he had done on the discontinued Apple Jaguar project. In its early days, Be developed the machine for its own hardware, called the BeBox, a system with two AT&T Hobbit processors in which BeOS’s unparalleled attention to SMP efficiency could shine.
Unfortunately for Be, AT&T discontinued the Hobbit in 1994, a move that perhaps should have been anticipated by Gassée, given that Apple had originally reached out to AT&T to develop the Hobbit, but then abandoned it because it was “riddled with errors.” .. And expensive “. In the struggle to find a new hardware platform, he moved on to the PowerPC architecture. The company went through eight hardware revisions in two years before giving up on designing its own hardware.
The next step for BeOS was Apple’s common hardware benchmark platform. Apple urgently needed an update for the old MacOS Classic, and briefly the tech industry was excited about the possibility that BeOS was Apple’s next operating system, but Gassée and then-Apple CEO Gil Amelio couldn’t agree on a price. . Gassée demanded $ 300 million, but Amelio would not go to more than $ 125 million. Following stalled negotiations, Apple’s board decided to bring founder Steve Jobs back into the fold by purchasing his NeXT.
This was the beginning of the end for BeOS, which spent another four years looking for a home, first distributed on Power Computing Mac clones, then on Intel x86 computers, and even a free and stripped down “Personal Edition” designed to appeal to the consumer interest, which could run on Microsoft Windows or Linux. In 2001, the BeOS rights were sold to Palm, largely ending the original BeOS saga.
Although Be, Inc sold the rights to BeOS to Palm in 2001, its community had no intention of abandoning the project: it founded an OpenBeOS project the same year. In 2004, Palm sent a trademark infringement notice regarding the name, and the project changed its name to Haiku.
Back to the present: Haiku R1 / Beta 2 installation
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Protip: “initialize” here should really read “format”.
Jim Salter
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A huge variety of partition types are available here. The options here refer only to the type ID, not the formatted file system.
Jim Salter
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When Haiku asks you to “initialize” a Be File System partition, what it really means is “format”. Back to the partitioner!
Jim Salter
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Right-clicking on the new partition, then selecting Format-> Ser File System is the step we skipped before.
Jim Salter
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Success! Now we can click on “Start”; From here, we are literally just a minute away from a fully installed Haiku system.
Jim Salter
In June 2020, nineteen years after the birth of OpenBeOS and sixteen after its name change to Haiku, the project released its second beta distribution. The project still adheres to the compatibility of previous applications with BeOS from the 1990s, although only in its 32-bit version, which I did not test.
The Haiku installer is easy to use, if you know what you are doing, but that warning is important. There is a live desktop option, but I immersed myself directly in the full hardware installation on a new Haiku virtual machine, and it was a bit frustrating.
Disk partition is necessary and completely manual. The installer tells you that you will need “at least one partition [initialized] with the Be “file system, but otherwise it leaves you alone. Inside the partition manager, there are no clues about” Intel Partition Map “vs” GUID Partition Map “, or if a GUID partition map will also need a partition of boot the BIOS.
It’s also not clear that creating a “Be File System” here just means setting up a type ID on a raw partition and not enough to allow the installation to continue. After creating the partition, you need to select and format it – the installer will not do this for you and will not warn you why the installation cannot continue.
Once I found out, I used a GUID partition scheme, created a 1000MiB BIOS boot partition, mapped the rest of my 32GiB virtual disk to a BFS partition, and formatted it. The main installer stopped complaining that it couldn’t find a valid installation target, and the rest of the installation was completed in a minute or less.
Listing image by Jim Salter
