Haiku is a free and open-source

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

application level compatible with the discontinued BeOS. Its development began in 2001, and the operating system became self-hosting in 2008. The first

alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...

release was made in September 2009, and the last was November 2012; the first beta was released in September 2018, followed by beta 2 in June 2020, beta 3 in July 2021. The fourth beta was released on December 23, 2022, still keeping BeOS 5 compatibility in its x86 32-bit images, with much increased number of modern drivers, GTK3 apps and

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are m ...

ported, as well as Xlib (X11) and Wayland compatibility layers. Haiku is supported by Haiku, Inc., a

non-profit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

based in

Rochester Rochester may refer to: Places Australia * Rochester, Victoria Canada * Rochester, Alberta United Kingdom *Rochester, Kent ** City of Rochester-upon-Medway (1982–1998), district council area ** History of Rochester, Kent ** HM Prison ...

, New York, United States, founded in 2003 by former project leader Michael Phipps. In the recent release cycle, Haiku, Inc. employed a developer.

History

Haiku began as the ''OpenBeOS'' project in 2001, the same year that Be, Inc. was bought by

Palm, Inc. Palm, Inc. was an American company that specialized in manufacturing personal digital assistants (PDAs) and various other electronics. They were the designer of the PalmPilot, the first PDA successfully marketed worldwide, as well as the Treo 6 ...

and BeOS development was discontinued. The focus of the project was to support the BeOS user community by creating an open-source,

backward-compatible Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especially in ...

replacement for BeOS. The first project by OpenBeOS was a community-created "stop-gap" update for BeOS 5.0.3 in 2002.

Branding and style

In 2003, the non-profit organization Haiku, Inc. was registered in Rochester, New York, to financially support development, and in 2004, after a notification of infringement of Palm's trademark of the BeOS name was sent to OpenBeOS, the project was renamed ''Haiku''. Original logo was designed by Stuart McCoy (nick "stubear") who was apparently heavily involved in the early days of the Haiku Usability & Design Team, and created mockups for Haiku R2. Haiku developer and artist Stephan Assmus (nick "Stippi"), who co-developed graphic editing software WonderBrush for Haiku, updated it and developed the HVIF icon vector format used by Haiku, as well as Haiku icon set chosen by popular vote in a contest in 2007.

Milestones

Haiku reached its first milestone in September 2009 with the release of Haiku R1/Alpha 1. In November 2012, R1/Alpha 4.1 was released while work continued on

nightly build A daily build or nightly build is the practice of completing a software build of the latest version of a program, on a daily basis. This is so it can first be compiled to ensure that all required dependencies are present, and possibly tested to sh ...

s. After years in between official releases, Haiku R1/Beta 1 was released on 19 September 2018, followed by Haiku R1/Beta 2 on 9 June 2020. Haiku's latest release, R1/Beta 3, was released on 26 July 2021. In between official releases, 'Nightly' builds (mainly meant for developer testing) are regularly listed on the Haiku Nightly page in both 64-bit and 32-bit (x86) editions.

Beyond R1

After the initial full BeOS 5 compatibility as target, in 2009 community decision updated the vision for R1 with more ambitious support for modern hardware, web standards and compatibility with FLOSS libraries. Initial planning for R2 has started through the "Glass Elevator" project (a reference to the children's novel ''

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator ''Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator'' is a children's literature, children's book by British author Roald Dahl. It is the sequel to ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'', continuing the story of young List of Charlie and the Chocolate Facto ...

''). The only detail confirmed so far is that it will switch to a current GCC release. A compatibility layer is planned that will allow applications developed for Haiku R1 to run on Haiku R2 and later. This was mentioned in a discussion on the Haiku mailing list by one of the lead developers, Axel Dörfler. Suggested new features include file indexing on par with

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

Beagle The beagle is a breed of small scent hound, similar in appearance to the much larger foxhound. The beagle was developed primarily for hunting hare, known as beagling. Possessing a great sense of smell and superior tracking instincts, the ...

Google Desktop Google Desktop was a computer program with desktop search capabilities, created by Google for Linux, Apple Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows systems. It allowed text searches of a user's email messages, computer files, music, photos, chats, Web pag ...

and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

Spotlight Spotlight or spot light may refer to: Lighting * Spot lights, automotive auxiliary lamps * Spotlight (theatre lighting) * Spotlight, a searchlight * Stage lighting instrument, stage lighting instruments, of several types Art, entertainment, an ...

, greater integration of

scalable vector graphics Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector image format for defining two-dimensional graphics, having support for interactivity and animation. The SVG specification is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium sinc ...

into the desktop, proper support for multiple users, and additional kits.

Release history

Technology

Haiku is written in

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

and provides an

object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of pro ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

. The modular design of BeOS allowed individual components of Haiku to initially be developed in teams in relative isolation, in many cases developing them as replacements for the BeOS components prior to the completion of other parts of the operating system. The original teams developing these components, including both servers and APIs (collectively known in Haiku as "kits"), included: * App/Interface: develops the

Interface Interface or interfacing may refer to: Academic journals * ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society * '' Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Linguistics'' * '' Int ...

, App and Support kits. * BFS: develops the Be File System, which is mostly complete with the resulting

OpenBFS The Be File System (BFS) is the native file system for the BeOS. In the Linux kernel, it is referred to as "BeFS" to avoid confusion with Boot File System. BFS was developed by Dominic Giampaolo and Cyril Meurillon over a ten-month period, star ...

. * Game: develops the Game Kit and its APIs. * Input Server: the server that handles input devices, such as

keyboards Keyboard may refer to: Text input * Keyboard, part of a typewriter * Computer keyboard ** Keyboard layout, the software control of computer keyboards and their mapping ** Keyboard technology, computer keyboard hardware and firmware Music * Musi ...

and

mice A mouse ( : mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus' ...

, and how they communicate with other parts of the system. * Kernel: develops the

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learn ...

, the core of the operating system. * Media: develops the audio server and related APIs. * MIDI: implements the

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and re ...

protocol. * Network: writes drivers for network devices and APIs relating to networking. * OpenGL: develops OpenGL support. * Preferences: recreates the preferences suite. * Printing: works on the print servers and drivers for printers. * Screen Saver: implements screen saver function. * Storage: develops the storage kit and drivers for required filesystems. * DataTranslations: recreates the reading/writing/conversion modules for the different file formats and data types. A few kits have been deemed feature complete and the rest are in various stages of development. The Haiku kernel is a modular

hybrid kernel A hybrid kernel is an operating system Kernel (computer science), kernel architecture that attempts to combine aspects and benefits of microkernel and monolithic kernel architectures used in computer operating systems. Overview The traditional ker ...

which began as a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

of NewOS, a modular monokernel written by former Be Inc. engineer Travis Geiselbrecht. Like the rest of the system, it is currently still under heavy development. Many features have been implemented, including a

virtual file system A virtual file system (VFS) or virtual filesystem switch is an abstract layer on top of a more concrete file system. The purpose of a VFS is to allow client applications to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way. A VFS ...

(VFS) layer and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support.

Package management

, Haiku includes a package management system called "Haiku Depot", enabling software to be compiled into dependency-tracking compressed packages. Packages can also be activated by installing them from remote repositories with pkgman, or dropping them over a special ''packages'' directory. Haiku package management mounts activated packages over a read-only system directory. The Haiku package management system performs dependency solving with libsolv from the

openSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open source RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0. Additionally the project creates a variety of tools, s ...

project.

Compatibility with BeOS

Haiku R1 aims to be compatible with BeOS at both the source and binary level, allowing software written and

compiled In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

for BeOS to be compiled and run without modification on Haiku. This provides Haiku users with an instant library of applications to choose from (even programs whose developers are no longer in business or have no interest in updating them), in addition to allowing development of applications to resume from where they had been terminated following the demise of Be, Inc. This dedication to compatibility has its drawbacks though — requiring Haiku to use a forked version of the GCC compiler, based on version 2.95, released in 2001, which is now years old. Switching to the newer version 7 of GCC breaks compatibility with BeOS software; therefore Haiku supports being built as a hybrid GCC7/GCC2 environment. This allows the system to run both GCC version 2 and version 7 binaries at the same time. The changes done to GCC 2.95 for Haiku include wide characters support and backport of fixes from GCC 3 and later. This compatibility applies to 32-bit x86 systems only. The PowerPC version of BeOS R5 is not supported. As a consequence, the ARM, 68k, 64-bit x86 and PPC ports of Haiku use only the GCC version 7 compiler. Despite these attempts, compatibility with a number of system add-ons that use private APIs will not be implemented. These include additional filesystem drivers and media codec add-ons, although the only affected add-ons for BeOS R5 not easily re-implemented are those for

Indeo Indeo Video (commonly known now simply as "Indeo") is a family of audio and video formats and codecs first released in 1992, and designed for real-time video playback on desktop CPUs. While its original version was related to Intel's DVI video s ...

5 media decoders, for which no specification exists. R5 binary applications that run successfully under Haiku () include:

Opera Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librett ...

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

NetPositive NetPositive (often called Net+) is the default web browser for the discontinued Be Operating System (BeOS). It includes partial support for JavaScript, but no CSS support. It was originally developed as a stop-gap measure because no browsers had ...

, ''

Quake II ''Quake II'' is a 1997 first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Activision. It is the second installment of the ''Quake'' series, but not a direct sequel to '' Quake''. The game's storyline is continued in its ...

'', ''

Quake III ''Quake III Arena'' is a 1999 multiplayer-focused first-person shooter developed by id Software. The third installment of the ''Quake'' series, ''Arena'' differs from previous games by excluding a story-based single-player mode and focusing prima ...

'',

SeaMonkey SeaMonkey is a free and open-source Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code, which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape ...

Vision Vision, Visions, or The Vision may refer to: Perception Optical perception * Visual perception, the sense of sight * Visual system, the physical mechanism of eyesight * Computer vision, a field dealing with how computers can be made to gain un ...

and VLC. Driver compatibility is incomplete, and unlikely to cover all kinds of BeOS drivers. 2D graphics drivers in general work exactly the same as on R5, as do network drivers. Moreover, Haiku offers a source-level

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

network driver compatibility layer, which means that it can support any network hardware that will work on FreeBSD. Audio drivers using API versions prior to

BeOS R5 BeOS R5 is the final version of BeOS from Be Inc. It was released in March 2000, and came in two varieties: Professional and Personal. R5 was the 4th major release of BeOS for a public audience, and the 6th since it left developer-only stages ...

are as-yet unsupported, and unlikely to be so; however, R5-era drivers work. Low-level device drivers, namely those for storage devices and

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

adapters, will not be compatible. USB drivers for both the second- (BeOS 5) and third- (BeOS Dano) generation USB stacks will work, however. In some other aspects, Haiku is already more advanced than BeOS. For example, the interface kit allows the use of a layout system to automatically place widgets in windows, while on BeOS the developer had to specify the exact position of each widget by hand. This allows for GUIs that will render correctly with any font size and makes localization of applications much easier, as a longer string in a translated language will make the widget grow, instead of being partly invisible if the widget size were fixed.

System requirements

R1/beta1

* MINIMUM (32-bit) // RECOMMENDED (64-bit) * Intel Pentium

P5 (microarchitecture) The Pentium (also referred to as P5, its microarchitecture, or i586) is a fifth generation, 32-bit x86 microprocessor that was introduced by Intel on March 22, 1993, as the very first CPU in the Pentium brand. It was instruction set compatible ...

Pentium 4 Pentium 4 is a series of single-core CPUs for desktops, laptops and entry-level servers manufactured by Intel. The processors were shipped from November 20, 2000 until August 8, 2008. The production of Netburst processors was active from 2000 ...

* Memory: 256 MB // 512 MiB (2 GB needed to compile Haiku within itself) * Hard disk: 1.5 GB // 2 GiB

R1/beta4

* MINIMUM (32-bit) // RECOMMENDED (64-bit) * Processor:

Intel Pentium II The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture (" P6") and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors (27.4 million in the case of the mobile Dixon with 256 KB ...

; AMD Athlon // Intel Core i3; AMD Phenom II * Memory: 384MB // 2GB * Monitor: 800x600 // 1366x768 * Storage: 3GB // 16GB

Reception

Recent reception

Thom Holwerda from

OSnews OSNews is a computing online newspaper. It originally focused on operating systems and their related technologies that launched in 1997, but is now aggregating consumer electronics news. The content is managed by a group of editors and the owner ...

wrote on R1/beta4 release:

The improved support for
HiDPI Pixels per inch (ppi) and pixels per centimetre (ppcm or pixels/cm) are measurements of the pixel density of an electronic image device, such as a computer monitor or television display, or image digitizing device such as a camera or image scanner ...
looks amazing, and definitely a must-have in today’s world of 4K displays... The number of ports has increased by a lot thanks to X11, Gtk+, and even Wayland compatibility... Wine has also been ported to Haiku, using a Haiku-native windowing and input backend. And much, much more. Pretty good way to start Christmas.

Historic reception

Jesse Smith from ''

DistroWatch DistroWatch is a website which provides news, distribution pages hit rankings, and other general information about various Linux distributions as well as other free software/ open source Unix-like operating systems. It now contains information ...

Weekly'' reviewed Haiku in 2010: Rebecca Chapnik wrote a review of Haiku for MakeTechEasier.com in 2012. Dedoimedo.com reviewed Haiku Alpha 4 in September 2013. Jeremy Reimer wrote a review for ''

Ars Technica ''Ars Technica'' is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, sci ...

'' in 2013. His review of Haiku Alpha 4 mentions that: Jesse Smith reviewed Haiku again in 2016. In October 2018, Jack Wallen reviewed Haiku with an extensive coverage of community statements in

Linux.com Linux.com is a website owned by the Linux Foundation. The goal of the site is to provide information about the developments and changes in Linux and related products. Linux.com offers free Linux tutorials, news and blogs, discussion forums and ...

: "''To BeOS or not to BeOS, that is the Haiku''" As of 2018, the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

has included Haiku in a list of non-endorsed operating systems. They state the reason being because: "Haiku includes some software that you're not allowed to modify. It also includes nonfree firmware blobs."

References

External links

*
Haiku Inc. company website
* * *
Hardware List
hardware compatible with Haiku (at Besly) {{DEFAULTSORT:Haiku 2002 software BeOS Free software operating systems Free software programmed in C++ Object-oriented operating systems Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media Self-hosting software Software using the MIT license X86 operating systems