The Haiku Project, whom I wrote about earlier this year, have released version R1 Alpha 1 of their operating system.
It’s a very exciting milestone, both for me as a fan, and for them as developers. Despite being usable for a couple of years now, and having the ability to run many legacy BeOS applications, it has had no major milestones or releases made. Now that they have made a release, I hope the momentum they create will help them to follow the old adage, Release Early, Release Often.
If you haven’t heard of or tried Haiku yet, I would highly recommend it. The OS isn’t packed with bling; nor does it run the latest games with the highest FPS. What it is, though, is an awesome OS with a simple easy-to-use GUI, with a POSIX-compatible shell, built on top of a hybrid kernel (very microkernel-like), which means it always remains responsive, even under heavy load. Haiku can give you responsiveness and real-time-ness that you will never see under Linux, nor OS X or Windows.
R1 Alpha 1 release images have been built with GCC 2.95.3, not the more modern GCC 4. This has been done to ensure binary compatibility with legacy BeOS applications. It comes as a CD image, a raw image (for writing straight to a hard disk or USB flash drive), and a VMware/VirtualBox VM for those that only like to get their toes wet (see the downloads page).
