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
