Haiku OS: Alpha 1 released

The Haiku OS project site has published the first version ISO so I immediatelly went to the download page of the Haiku OS site, since I’m a big pro of the haiku idea. Downloading the iso (with sourceforge mirror) only took 10 minutes, but it isn’t nice of them to zip it (like an iso in itself isn’t good enough)

Preparing Virtualbox with pretty much everything standard (for an OS not known by Virtualbox that is):

• 256 MB ram — I assume it will be enough
• 2 GB HDD — Said in the installation instructions to be sufficient

The iso mounted in Virtualbox really did a nice bootup time, installer could use some work, especially since exiting (square box left-above) the installer / setup actually makes the total system do nothing anymore (it should reboot, or failsafe to desktop imho). Total setup time seems to have come down to 10 minutes, extremely fast!

In the end, there’s got to be large credits for the installer being so straight-forward. In the end, if one reads the installer instructions as they pop-up in the process, one can install with ease. Most files seemed to be html files, which is quite funny ^^

Also, having an OS with 16835 files is seriously nice. Don’t really know if I should say this, but at the moment, it’s the smallest OS I’ve got in my entire Virtualbox setup. And I will most certainly play around with this one a _lot_ considering I hope it will become what I always wished for in the Desktop Linux experience.

What is also quite amazing imho is the fact that python, perl, and more are installed by default. Because I believe scripting will become more and more common in the real world, this can go the correct way!
Having played around with this some, taking some (loaded) screenshots, etc… I think Haiku OS has gone a long way, but still has very long to go. Positive points (for now):

• Extremely fast boot-time, and a no-nonsense approach to the whole deal
• Having the BeOS ideas and not trying to re-invent things seems to have effect

Negative points (points to work on):

• alt-tab feature, or something more obvious than the Deskbar to switch between applications

These points and conclusions are what I saw on first-impression. And I like what I see at the moment! Although the project has a long way to go still, it seems to gain momentum every time I try it, and I hope to start developing for it soon myself (although I prefer developing for servers :P)

Share this post, help Haiku gain even more momentum, try things out and comment here (or directly on the haiku site)