Relive the days of BeOS

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.

- Michael Reed

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.

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.