HAIKU

Michael Reed wonders if he’s met the 90s-style desktop of his dreams with Haiku, an open source re-creation of the BeOS operating system.

Credit: https://www.haiku-os.org

OUR EXPERT

Michael Reed led a wild life as a younger man. The BBC Micro, Acorn Archimedes, Amiga, DOS, OS/2, Windows, Linux were his hangouts.

Haiku is an open source operating system that seeks to recreate the now-defunct BeOS operating system of the mid-90s. BeOS was a desktop operating system that was designed to be highly adept at media work. It had a friendly and responsive user interface centred around personal computing. Examining Haiku in its current state, we were pleasantly surprised by how feature-complete, fast, stable and well-supported this alternative operating system is. The user interface is a mixture of modern and classic ideas.

Good design decisions were made when BeOS was originally conceived, and when you add in the improvements that the Haiku team have made, the result is an OS with fairly modern underpinnings. It offers the features that we expect nowadays such as preemptive multitasking, multithreading and virtual memory. It also benefits from ports of many modern applications and utilities.

Tricky installation

At first, we couldn’t get the installation tool on the Haiku live ISO (www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku) to work properly. Indeed, the tool itself recommends that you use GParted to set up the partitions, which we did under Ubuntu Linux to create a 50GB partition temporarily formatted to FAT32. We also set the flag of this partition to ‘boot’ to make it bootable.

LEARN YOUR HAIKU

1 Find your files and folders

Tracker is the file manager of Haiku. Start typing in it to filter files and folders.

2 Multi-purpose drop-down

The Deskbar combines an application switcher, launcher and a status area.

3 Launch your programs

The application launcher makes use of category folders.

4 Program widgets

Replicants in Haiku are a type of widget that can run in a window or on the backdrop.

5 Get tabbing

The small title bars can be used as tabs when you overlap windows.

6 Simple folder controls Nice, chunky window decorations and scrollbars, like in the 90s.

We were then able to use the Haiku live ISO image to complete the installation of Haiku and add the Haiku bootblock to the partition. Overall, the installation required a certain amount of expertise mixed with trial and error to get the system operational. Alternatively, you can gain a flavour of what the operating system offers by selecting the ‘Try Haiku’ option, because it can work as a live ISO.

The first time we ran Haiku, we noticed a series of icons that display the current stage of the boot process. It’s a shame that most Linux distros don’t offer an at-aglance summary like this during boot. The boot itself was fairly fast, and set a precedent for what is a fast operating system in most situations.