Haiku OS, a hobby OS that I've been watching for over 8 years released their first Alpha last week. In between work, wife stuff and being sick I found some time to tinker with it on a variety of hardware:
- Pentium II 233Mhz w/ 128MB Memory
- AMD 3200XP w/ 768MB Memory
- Pentium 4 2.0Ghz w/ 768MB Memory
- Thinkpad X61 (Pentium T7300 @ 2Ghz) w/ 2.0GB Memory
I installed BeOS 4.5 and 5.0 on the first 3 systems and compared it to Haiku OS Alpha 1 and found the performance to be a little less on Haiku's part, but I believe that is due to debugging being enabled in the release and usage of gcc 2.0. I installed a few applications and found everything to be working, but having a FireFox 2.0 port shipped with the Alpha was just perfect. I could almost use the OS as-is, if they would get Flash working of course :)
I've gotten so taken by Haiku (BeOS) again, that I started tinkering. I setup a build system today and started compiling a few images using gcc4 only and found it felt more responsive. That could just be me on one system, but either way I think I now have something I can tinker with. Haiku's goal is to be BeOS 5.0 compatable with R1 and that will only be a gcc2+gcc4 hybrid release so it will be some time until they are solely focused on gcc4 (or whatever compiler they go with for R2+) so I'm pretty much on my own making my own personal 'distro'. I'm really curious about application distribution + installation theory. Plus I want to see how small I can get the base OS. So far I have a 78MB install but that's with a bunch of stuff still enabled. With how well this is designed and coded, I bet I could get it to run in under 32MB memory and 50MB HD.... ah something to shoot for. I haven't been this excited about alt OS stuff in a while!
