Haiku OS support

[Agentbromsnor]

Let me start off from the top: I don't like Windows 10. I already greatly disliked Windows 8 when it came out, and they seemingly only made it worse IMO. Regardless, I still have to use Windows 10 at work and I accept that this is something I just have to get used to. When I get back home I use Windows 7 Ultimate on my personal computer, but the thing is that support for Windows 7 isn't going to last and I'm not looking to upgrade to a new Windows when this expires.

 

Because of this, I have been looking around for alternative operating systems that I can potentially migrate to when that time comes. I have Lubuntu installed on my laptop and it's serving me fairly well, but lately I found another OS that has been in development for years now called Haiku. Haiku is open source and modeled after BeOS, which was an obscure but ambitious operating system from the nineties. I've downloaded one of the latest nightly builds of Haiku and fired it up on my virtual machine; I was pleasantly surprised by how fast and responsive everything is, even if it's technically still in alpha.

With Haiku development being jump-started at the start of this year, and thus the beta release slowly drawing near... Is Haiku something that you guys would consider supporting? The Haiku community I've been involved in so far is very enthusiastic, but there's no doubt that with Windows, Mac and Linux being the current front-runners, they can use all the developers they can get to get software support rolling. I noticed that Chocolate Doom has a screenshot on the website that shows it running on Haiku.

This is more or less just something that was on my mind, so please don't take this as some sort of shameless promotion. :)

[Death Egg]

Haven't heard of this OS, good compatible is it with programs from other operating systems?

[Coraline]

If Haiku is indeed modeled after BeOS, 3DGE I believe still has support (inherited from the original EDGE) so it might be worth checking out.

[Remilia Scarlet]

Haiku OS! <3  Now if only they would fix the Intel graphics driver so I can run it on my laptop (if they haven't already).

 

More source ports on Haiku would be awesome.

[Csonicgo]

3 hours ago, Death Egg said:

Haven't heard of this OS, good compatible is it with programs from other operating systems?

Yes and no. Last I used it it was using a weird hybrid of GCC 2 and GCC 4, because BeOS (the OS Haiku is based on ) had a very peculiar C compiler that required system-specific hacks to replicate with GCC. Why that isn't in the main source tree for GCC, I don't know.

[Agentbromsnor]

10 hours ago, Death Egg said:

Haven't heard of this OS, good compatible is it with programs from other operating systems?

Most of the software support comes from supporting old programs developed for BeOS. Furthermore we're at the hands of the developer's generosity to provide a Haiku build.

As much as I love Linux, I would like it for Haiku to take off in popularity so that we can have at least two viable alternatives to Windows (not counting Mac OS).

 

11 hours ago, Coraline said:

If Haiku is indeed modeled after BeOS, 3DGE I believe still has support (inherited from the original EDGE) so it might be worth checking out.

 

Really? That would be pretty great! Is there any way for me to download it for Haiku? I believe that Haiku works with "packages" for installing programs. I'm still exploring the OS and familiarizing myself with it, so I'm not sure how else to go about and install it. When I can, I would love to test it for you though!

[chungy]

BeOS really wasn't an obscure OS at all in its day.

 

As for source port support for it or Haiku, it requires dedicated people to maintain the ports. Being such a seldom-used OS (and the Haiku people not even recommending it to be a primary OS), just makes such people basically non-existent. Your best bet would be learning how to at least port software and build it for the platform.

 

It's also a very different OS design than any of the common ones today. We have Windows, Mac OS (or whatever their name this month is), and Linux. Linux is at least modeled on the Unix design and source ports for it tend to be trivial to port to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, illumos, or what have you (often just a recompile, no code changes). Operating systems like Haiku will need significantly more work to bring up into the peculiarities of the platform.

[Agentbromsnor]

28 minutes ago, chungy said:

BeOS really wasn't an obscure OS at all in its day.

 

As for source port support for it or Haiku, it requires dedicated people to maintain the ports. Being such a seldom-used OS (and the Haiku people not even recommending it to be a primary OS), just makes such people basically non-existent. Your best bet would be learning how to at least port software and build it for the platform.

Since Haiku is still in alpha at this point, I think it would be crazy to recommend people to use this as their primary OS...

The developers have said that they're looking to make Haiku a valid alternative to Windows.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sTwDpHVDY

 

Of course it's going to have a different learning curve compared to Windows or Linux, but the incredibly performance I've seen in Haiku alone is enough for me to support this.

[Altazimuth]

I've looked at Haiku in the past, and it certainly intrigued me. From my personal standpoint as a source port dev, I'd quite like to be able to get Eternity to work on Haiku, but it's a question of cost-benefit. How long initial porting takes and how long maintenance takes compared to how many users will even use the port on said OS is a huge deal, especially given there's other jobs that require doing, and that often have more tangible results.

 

EDIT: Went to #haiku-3rdparty on Freenode; the (exceptionally helpful) person who was there said it might "just compile", given they already have working SDL1.2 and SDL2 ports, and gave some various advice one commands I need and such. Only thing I'm unsure about is MIDI synth.

 

EDIT 2: Apparently Chocolate Doom got ported to Haiku already https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports/blob/master/games-fps/chocolate-doom/chocolate_doom-2.2.1.recipe

Edited May 28, 2017 by Altazimuth

[Rachael]

BeOS? True Unix? Sign me up!

 

It will have to be a base operating system on one of my machines, though. I might be able to do that with my olde laptop from back in '03.

 

I will try, if I can, to get at least GZDoom working on Haiku when it goes beta. It all depends on the state of the packages and the code. Likely there will not be many code changes required to get GZDoom to run on it, but if there are I will be willing to try and port them.

 

I might also be able to port 3DGE as well - but I cannot make promises about that. 3DGE uses a build system that's still a bit harder to get used to than ZDoom's.

[Altazimuth]

@Rachael I'll document my Eternity porting process here, probably on this comment, so that people in the future can refer to it for some level of help. A small aside, one thing that bugs me about ZDoom, Eternity, and other such ports on Linux, is that many can't work their way into the package manager, due to copyright resources (most notably the Wolf 3D dog). A replacement of those assets with something using a permissive licence would be invaluable for the various ports that use them.

 

EDIT: Seems to run reasonably fine out of the box, just gotta do the following before building with CMake using Unix Makefiles:
 

setarch x86
pkgman install devel:libsdl_x86
pkgman install devel:libsdl_mixer_x86
pkgman install devel:libsdl_net_x86
pkgman install lib:libsdl_1.2_x86
pkgman install lib:libsdl_mixer_1.2_x86
pkgman install lib:libsdl_net_1.2_x86

Also had to grab hardware acceleration (see https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports/wiki/Common-Issues-when-Porting-Games)

Edited May 28, 2017 by Altazimuth

[Remilia Scarlet]

7 hours ago, chungy said:

It's also a very different OS design than any of the common ones today. We have Windows, Mac OS (or whatever their name this month is), and Linux. Linux is at least modeled on the Unix design and source ports for it tend to be trivial to port to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, illumos, or what have you (often just a recompile, no code changes). Operating systems like Haiku will need significantly more work to bring up into the peculiarities of the platform.

Haiku is at least partially (or mostly) POSIX compatible.  So at least there's that.

[Agentbromsnor]

8 hours ago, Altazimuth said:

I've looked at Haiku in the past, and it certainly intrigued me. From my personal standpoint as a source port dev, I'd quite like to be able to get Eternity to work on Haiku, but it's a question of cost-benefit. How long initial porting takes and how long maintenance takes compared to how many users will even use the port on said OS is a huge deal, especially given there's other jobs that require doing, and that often have more tangible results.

 

EDIT: Went to #haiku-3rdparty on Freenode; the (exceptionally helpful) person who was there said it might "just compile", given they already have working SDL1.2 and SDL2 ports, and gave some various advice one commands I need and such. Only thing I'm unsure about is MIDI synth.

 

EDIT 2: Apparently Chocolate Doom got ported to Haiku already https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports/blob/master/games-fps/chocolate-doom/chocolate_doom-2.2.1.recipe

I've read that Chocolate Doom should run on Haiku, but I'm still not sure how to install it... I'm still trying to get a handle on how to manually install things on Haiku without simply using Haiku Depot.

@Rachael@Altazimuth
I'm really glad you guys are interested in working with Haiku in the future! Especially GZDoom is something that would make up a good chunk of my "gaming library" annex "game developer suite", if you can call it that. I also think that it would probably be a good promotion for the Haiku team, seeing as there is still a large player-base of Brutal Doom fans out there.

[fraggle]

With a bit of work I imagine you'll probably be able to get most SDL-based source ports running on Haiku. It's the "bit of work" that's the key thing though.

 

It's great that you're interested in trying out OSes like this and I don't want to dissuade you, but for something like this that's experimental there's probably going to be a lot of learning you'll have to do.

[Rachael]

Considering, theoretically, ZDoom already works on FreeBSD, I can't imagine it's a huge amount of work to port to Haiku, so long as the API's remain similar.

 

SDL and OpenGL aren't very likely to change cross-platform, and as long as that remains the case getting it to work on Haiku shouldn't be too much of a problem.

 

In fact, my only real worry is how well does SDL actually on Haiku, currently.

[Maes]

It's interesting how OSes ended up being just:

1. Windows-based, which is pretty much the last mainstream non-UNIX based operating system on the market. A dinosaur, in this respect, even carrying vestiges of MS-DOS within it.
2. UNIX-based (yes, this even includes Mac OS X, which is nothing more than a pretty-packaged "Unix for the masses", and Android to a large extent. Even stuff like the new "Amiga" platform!).

Truly different OSes that are not derived from the one or the other in some way are few and far between nowadays. Of course that's a plus for developers, as you don't have to look for excessively obscure tools, and some core platform development principles are valid throughout the spectrum, but that doesn't mean that proper or up-to-date dev tools or libraries for a specific platform will always be easy to find.

[Rachael]

Linux is not Unix, so it would definitely count as its own category. Both are POSIX compliant and one was made to mimic the other, but in the end they are very different cores and operate very differently under the hood.

 

You'll find more similarities between Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Haiku than you'll ever find with any of those previous 3 and any Linux variant.

 

As for Windows - yes, sadly, you will find some vestiges of MS-DOS within it. The archaic drive lettering system, for one. Backslash path separator, for another. I can understand keeping it for compatibility but I think going forward even Windows should transition to a / root-based file system scheme.

 

Unfortunately, Microsoft decided that our computers should operate more like phones or tablets, so they created a completely pointless new application interface, instead of fixing some of Windows's most glaring shortcomings (which they were doing a good job of starting to overcome in the Vista-7 era).

[Maes]

I was using the "UNIX" or "*NIX" moniker as an umbrella term for OSes with the following common traits:

• An "everything is a file" philosophy.
• Case-sensitive file system.
• Primarily command-line/terminal-based user interfaces, with an X11 or similar window manager on top of that, in case there's a GUI.
• Multitasking, multi-user, with a UNIX-like security model (users, superusers, groups etc.) for resource access.

Perhaps I should have used "Unix-like" or "Linux-like", as of course nobody expects to find a true, binary-compatible descendant of Bell Labs' or AT&T's Unix among those modern OSes. Still, SOME sort of compatbility at least at a source code level exists: if you find some ancient C program with an equally ancient Makefile somewhere, chances are that it will compile and work "as is" the first time on a modern "Unix like" system, rather than on Windows.

 

In any case, this form/architecture of OS seems to have dominated nearly everything today, except, as we already mentioned, for Windows' stronghold on the consumer desktop market. I already heard the "Windows should become UNIX or Linux-based in the next release" argument before, been hearing that ever since Vista (or XP?) but that just ain't gonna happen.

[Rachael]

Really? It would not make any sense for Windows to be based on Linux/Unix. My proposal was merely to change the file system naming scheme, to help with cross-platform compatibility and also to allow for chroot jails. :P (Even though that's technically already possible on Windows - but not without some hurdles)

 

(I probably should mention just for the sake of correctness in my previous post, Windows' current resource locator system actually originated in CP/M, not DOS - though it was DOS that added subdirectories and the \)

[Agentbromsnor]

Just to post a little update regarding Haiku itself. This is the beta 'milestone' that keeps track of all the tickets:
https://dev.haiku-os.org/milestone/R1/beta1

One of the developers has also written on Reddit a few days ago that he hopes the beta will be out by the end of the year. Hype!

PS: What is this "SDL" I keep reading about?

[Remilia Scarlet]

SDL is the "Simple DirectMedia Layer".  Essentially it's a library that gives you access to the graphics, audio, and input systems of your computer.  If I make a game using SDL, then it ends up being that much easier to port to other systems.

[Death Egg]

Added Haiku support to the Comparison of source ports page on the Doom Wiki that I try to keep up to date. Yet another place to help advertise this unloved OS. If any developers wish to correct any of the info please go ahead and do! I only put down what I know from here.

[Rachael]

I'm actually going ahead and downloading a copy of Haiku now (a dev build). I'm hoping that getting both 3DGE and GZDoom working on it will be as simple as building it - if there's any compile errors I'll do what I can to fix them. This comes with the assumption that the API code is largely unchanged from Linux for both ports - but if not, hopefully it won't be too much trouble to figure out what's wrong and tweak/adjust libraries and dependencies as needed.

Unfortunately, this OS will obviously suffer the same weaknesses as Linux does - including dependency hell. Seeing only a 400 mb download is not hugely encouraging - but I hope that's enough to present the needed packages for this whole thing.

[Rachael]

Alright - so far - I've discovered that Haiku does not include SDL source files in the package manager. That presents a huge problem - one that we might be able to overcome simply by directing prospective users to download SDL from elsewhere, or simply 'link' it directly from the GZDoom repository and let CMake find it, but it may still require the OS packages to be installed. I'm hoping that dev packages start becoming more common in Haiku's repos - they're really needed. Luckily CMake is easy to install, so that's one big hurdle out of the way.

 

[bytesplash]

2 hours ago, Rachael said:

Alright - so far - I've discovered that Haiku does not include SDL source files in the package manager. That presents a huge problem - one that we might be able to overcome simply by directing prospective users to download SDL from elsewhere, or simply 'link' it directly from the GZDoom repository and let CMake find it, but it may still require the OS packages to be installed. I'm hoping that dev packages start becoming more common in Haiku's repos - they're really needed. Luckily CMake is easy to install, so that's one big hurdle out of the way.

 

Are you looking for the SDL devel package in Haiku?

[Rachael]

I couldn't find that on the package manager. Is it someplace else?

[riderr3]

Haiku sounds so weeaboo... I hope better someone make a proper source-port for PSP (PrBoom+ may be?). I have 2 PSP's and if I had the knowledge about coding/porting for PSP, I would try.

[Maes]

3 hours ago, riderr3 said:

Haiku sounds so weeaboo.

At least it's not Gentoo, which is pure rice.

[bytesplash]

On 6/4/2017 at 4:20 AM, Rachael said:

I couldn't find that on the package manager. Is it someplace else?

pkgman install devel:libsdl

or you can install it from HaikuDepot. (Ensure you check the devel packages from show in the menu)

[TDRR]

Something you could try, is "ReactOS", it supports programs from Windows NT onwards (And the iso is just 100MB!).

However, it's in development, so better create a new partition.

https://www.reactos.org/es