After two years of development and a week after the project turned 25 years old, the sixth beta release of the Haiku R1 operating system has been published. Originally created as a reaction to the closure of the BeOS operating system, the project was developed under the name OpenBeOS, but was renamed in 2004 due to claims related to the use of the BeOS trademark in the name. To evaluate the performance of the new release, several bootable Live images (x86_64, x86 1.4 GB) have been prepared. The source code for most of the Haiku OS is distributed under a free license MIT, with exceptions for some libraries, media codecs, and components borrowed from other projects.
Haiku OS is targeted towards personal computers, utilizing its own kernel built on a modular architecture to optimize responsiveness to user actions and efficient execution of multi-threaded applications. Developers are provided with an object-oriented API. The system, directly based on BeOS 5 technologies, aims for binary compatibility with applications for this OS. The minimum hardware requirement includes a Pentium CPU and 384 MB RAM (Pentium 4 and 512 MB RAM recommended, 2 GB RAM if running build b).
Haiku OS uses OpenBFS as its file system, supporting extended file attributes, logging, 64-bit pointers, meta tag storage, and special indexes for faster retrieval. The system incorporates the Tracker file manager and the Deskbar panel from BeOS, both of which had their source codes open sourced after BeOS ceased development.
Key innovations in the latest release include:
- Support for current releases of Firefox and Mozilla technology-based projects such as LibreWolf, Waterfox, Floorp, and Iced