 Today, I'm going to do something a little different. I'm going to take a look at a free and open source operating system, but it's not a Linux operating system, and it's not a BSD operating system. Today I'm going to take a look at the latest release of Haiku. What is Haiku? Well, let me switch over to my browser. Let's go to their website here at haiku-os.org, and you can see Haiku is an open source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. It's inspired by the old BOS operating system. BOS was an operating system that I wouldn't say was popular, but it was around back in the 1990s. In the 1990s, you had a lot of really neat, interesting operating systems that kind of exploded on the scene, whereas more and more companies were trying to compete with the likes of Microsoft Windows and, of course, Apple at the time. So you did have some alternative operating systems that cropped up in the 1990s that quickly died out. Also in the 1990s, BOS was one of them. This operating system has long been dead, but Haiku started around 2001-2002 to keep BOS alive, and it's been in beta for 20 years. Now, it's been in beta for 20 years, but you have been able to install and actually use Haiku for most of that 20 years. I've installed Haiku a number of times, I would say, over the last 15 years or so that I've been using Linux. I've also been keeping up a little bit with what is going on with Haiku because, again, it's such an interesting operating system, the fact that it's free and open source, but it's not one of the Unix-like operating systems, right? It's not Linux. It's not BSD. It's not one of the Unix flavors. It's kind of its own unique thing, and I quite appreciate that. So I'm going to download their latest release, which is Haiku R1 Beta 4, and I'm going to run through a quick installation and take a first look inside Vert Manager. Now I created this virtual machine here inside Vert Manager, and one thing to note because this is not a Linux operating system or a BSD operating system or something that's well known like Windows or Mac. When you're setting up your VM in Vert Manager, what I had to do was I had to select the generic operating system or unknown operating system option because there's no Haiku option in Vert Manager or BOS option. So you have to use a generic or unknown operating system when you're setting this up. And that's usually not what you want to do, but I have tried this before in Vert Manager with Haiku, and it typically does work with that option. So we've launched into our live environment. Let's go ahead and run through the installation. So the very first screen is choosing your language. For me, obviously English is correct. So I just need to click the button here that says install Haiku. We do have a button try Haiku, which would probably just close the installer and we could play around in a live environment. But I'm going to run through the installation, and it says important information before installing Haiku. If you're installing Haiku on a real hardware, you may want to prepare a hard disk partition. Okay, so it's telling us we're going to have to partition a drive. We did not do that, obviously. So if I click continue, yeah, it's going to say no partitions have been found that are suitable for installation. Please set up partitions and format at least one partition with the B file system. So we have to partition our drive and make sure we have at least one B file system partitioned. So let's see, install Haiku. So please choose a target. And of course, this is the ISO we actually need to write to our virtual hard drive inside this virtual machine. So I'm going to click the button that says set up partitions. Okay, now we get a partition manager here. So I'm going to choose this 25 gig virtual hard drive. I'm going to go up here to disk, and I believe at first I need to initialize it. I'm going to choose Intel partition map, and it says, are you sure you want to initialize the selected disk? All data will be lost. Sure. So I'm going to click continue. Are you sure you want to write changes back to the disk now? Sure. Why not? Okay, the disk has been successfully initialized. And now what I want to do by right click, I format with the B file system. Are you sure you want to format a raw disk? Continue. And then the block size 2048 is recommended. I'll just leave that as is. I'm going to choose format, write changes. It has been successfully formatted. And I believe that's all I needed to do there. Now if I close out of the drive setup, would it get me back into the installer? It will. And let's see where I can choose now the 25 gig partition with the B file system now. And now I'm going to click begin installation. And well, that installation after that took like 10 seconds. It's already installed, right? We got the restart button. Let's see if this actually works. So let's restart. All right. All right. It says it's generating some SSH keys. I guess I just closed that notification window. And this is it. This is Haiku. So I want to search for a program to change the screen resolution. There's a couple of ways I can get into a menu system. I could right click. And if I go into this menu here desktop, and I go into system, into apps, I get a lot of programs here. I also have preferences, which is another collection of applications here. Now this menu system, the right click menu, it's got a lot of stuff in it. It's kind of big. It could be a little confusing. You could also click on the feather here as part of the dock. This is called the desk bar here in Haiku. And once again, you could go into applications and into preferences. It's just a little cleaner menu, this one here. But it's essentially the same stuff. If I go into preferences, I didn't want to open preferences like the entire category. But I wanted to go into not appearance. Appearance I believe is for colors. You have colors and fonts, which I might play with a little bit. But I'm looking for screen resolution. Here's the screen program. So let's go ahead and make this a proper 1920 by 1080. Hit apply. Let's keep these changes. And now that I've made those changes, I do notice that the fonts are a little small. So I'm actually going to change the fonts. One of the things is BOS being an operating system back in the 1990s. Screen resolutions were much, much smaller. You know, typically you had resolutions like 640 by 480 and 800 by 600. Those were kind of like the most popular screen resolutions. So screens were much, much smaller as far as the resolution. So that's why you get some of this legacy stuff where, you know, this is just too small of a font. This would hurt my eyes looking at such small font. So I'm actually going to increase all of the fonts. They were using 12 point font. Let's make it 14. Yeah. And you can see it actually did increase the font on the title windows. But the 16, let's make it even bigger just for purposes of this video just so things are a little easier on the eyes. Now the first thing you'll notice if you're new to Haiku is you do have these desktop icons here and you have our hard disk icon. So this is just the 25 gig virtual hard drive in my virtual machine. And then we have B book. Let's click this because you're probably going to need to read this. If you're new to Haiku, new to BOS and I don't know much about BOS. I never used it back in the 1990s. Really Haiku is my only experience with the B operating system. So I would want to read this book if I actually planned on using Haiku for any length of time. And you can see that this is web positive. Web positive is our web browser here. You can see we have a bookmarks menu that is all Haiku related stuff, history view, standard web browser. I've never heard of B positive outside of Haiku. But you can see this is web positive version 1.3-alpha. Let's go ahead and close the browser here. Let's see what other desktop icons we have. We have the home icon, which of course is our file manager opens in home. And home we have is three other directories here. We have our config directory, the desktop directory, which I would assume holds all of these icons. So let's click it and see. If I click desktop, nothing happens. That's very weird. If I click mail, I can actually get mail to open up. But I guess because desktop is just the desktop, nothing happens. That's interesting config. We get a separate window that opens these subdirectories here for configuration files. So that is the home directory in the file manager. We have a quick tour, which again, if you're new to Haiku, you're probably going to want to run through the tour here. So we've got these arrow keys here, which I'm assuming would just go through the chapters here. For example, the first thing we get to learn about is the desk bar, which is this little feathery icon here in the menu system and the dock here, where things get stacked on the side here. And of course, this thing is customizable. You could actually adjust the size. You could move it to different positions on the screen. You could actually make it look more like a bottom panel that you would see in something like Windows, for example. If you wanted to, for me, though, I'm just going to leave it as the default look for now. I'm actually not going to read the Haiku quick tour for now. You have a user guide. You also have our trash can as well. We should talk about installing software. How do you go about getting packages installed on Haiku? Well, one thing is if you're a Linux user, you have to understand that a lot of free and open source software that you're used to has been packaged for Haiku, but not as much as you would think. There's going to be a lot of things that you would be used to that are just not going to be here. Let me go into applications. And the first thing we want to look for is the Haiku depot. That is your graphical software center. And we get a message that says, would it be acceptable to send anonymous usage data? So they want some analytics, right? They want to know things about probably your system. Are you trying this in a VM? Are you trying on physical hardware? If you're trying it on physical hardware, what are your CPU and graphics card and things like that? I'm going to choose yes. I don't mind sending them a little telemetry if it helps them in their development of Haiku. And you can see right now it's fetching some repository information, reading repository data, syncing repositories, being the first time that this has run. This may take a second. And once it finished syncing the repository, this little window in the center, you see featured packages. I guess this is some of the most popular stuff in their software center that they're promoting here. And you can see a lot of familiar names. You got Gemp, Inkscape, Krita is in here as well. Midnight Commander, I think is in here. NPDV, NotepadQQ would be a great plain text editor for those of you wanting something simple. One of the things is if I click all packages here and go to the top of the list, ZeroAD is here, so free and open source game. Very popular game, ZeroAD. My favorite free and open source game. So I would definitely want to install that Emacs is also packaged in Haiku. And Emacs used to, Emacs only worked in the terminal on Haiku. But as of this version, GUI Emacs should work as well. So if I click on Emacs and I click install Emacs, we'll take a few seconds. It's going to give me this window. Do we want to install probably some dependencies? Yes. It apply, it's installing Emacs. You get a little progress bar here at the bottom. Now I've installed Emacs off camera on this version of Haiku. And I tried to install the DOOM Emacs framework on top of it. I can tell you that DOOM Emacs did not work. It was crashy after the installation. It just would not run. It just threw up a bunch of errors. And I think part of that is even though GUI Emacs does run, Emacs is its own ecosystem. It has its own package manager. You install all of these programs, these plugins, these extensions, are really just Emacs programs. And Emacs runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It expects you to be running Emacs on one of those operating systems. So all these third party plugins and extensions that people write expect you to be using Windows Mac or Linux. Obviously, Haiku is not Windows Mac or Linux. So a lot of Emacs plugins probably will not work. And because of that, installing a big framework like DOOM Emacs or SpaceX is probably going to break. You're probably going to have to do some trial and error with GNU Emacs to see what extensions work, which ones don't work. For me, I'm probably, I wouldn't want to put in that much time into it. So I would probably just install Vem instead of Emacs and just use Vem when I'm inside Haiku. It looks like Emacs finished installing. And now instead of an install Emacs button, we have an uninstall Emacs button if we wanted to uninstall it. But let's go ahead and see if it launches. So if I go into the other menu here, Applications and look for Emacs. GNU Emacs does launch. You would need to know the standard GNU Emacs key bindings for anything to really do anything here. I know a little bit of the standard GNU Emacs key bindings, but I'm not going to demonstrate any of that on camera. If I right click on the desktop and go into the desktop menu and I go into System and into Apps, basically I get that same menu here. What I was wanting to look for was, let's go ahead and look for the terminal because the terminal is interesting because it says welcome to the Haiku shell. But if I echo dollar sign all caps shell, which is a variable, right? It lets us know what our shell is. You can see slash bin slash bash. So this is actually the bash shell. I don't like white background, black text. I would prefer something a little better, something a little easier on the eyes. So we've got these various color schemes. What is professional? Professional is a dark color scheme. So that would work. How it does retro look. Oh, that is very retro because you got the neon green. And so that's a very old school, like 1980s kind of look. There's midnight. We could go with something like Solarized Dark. Yeah, let's go ahead and just use that then save to file. So this is probably where you would save like to a config file, config. I don't know packages. I'm not exactly sure where I would save that to. So I'll just skip that for now. If I do a uname dash R, would it actually give me a kernel? Well, it just says one. It's the only value that it runs. If I do uname without any arguments, you can see the operating system name as Haiku. With a standard LS command, you know, the GNU core utils. Some of those commands would work here as well. Now there is a package manager with Haiku. You saw the graphical software center. That's really just a front end to there. A command line package manager, which I believe is PKGMAN. If I did that with no other arguments, it's going to tell me all the options I should have used with the command. And you can see PKGMAN full sync synchronizes the installed packages. So I guess that is like doing an update. Well, there's the update updates the specified or all packages. Let's go ahead and run the update. That's probably one of the things that you would want to do is PKGMAN space update. As soon as you install Haiku, update the system. Now one thing you will notice is I'm not going to use sudo here. Haiku is very interesting because BOS was a single user operating system. As such, Haiku is a single user operating system. Now this is very different than modern operating systems like Linux and BSD and Windows, Mac. There is no root user. Your user is just the only user. You know, there's no separate users. So there's one user. He has administrative powers to do anything he wants on the system. So I don't need sudo. I can do this update, no problem. I can uninstall software. I can install software. I can change any kind of configuration file I want. I don't need privileges. I have those privileges. Now do we want to continue upgrading these packages? Sure, why not? And you can see it wasn't that many updates that I needed to take here. It looks like maybe 20 programs had update available, including the web browser, web positive. So that might be an important security update. So I'm just going to go ahead and take it. Since these are such small programs, it should just take a few seconds for this update. And while the update is continuing to run, let me get that window back to a smaller size. One thing for those of you not familiar how this works, this square on the left hand side of the title bar, that is the close button. This is maximize, unmaximize the one on the right. And then if you double click in the center, it minimizes the window. You can get to it over here on the desk bar. If I go into tracker, you see no windows here, but you got the terminal here. But if I did this, I did not kill that terminal. It's still running the update. The terminal is here. I just click on it and I can get it back. So no harm, no foul. That's one of the things I found weird when I first tried Haiku was double clicking in many operating systems, double clicking a window will maximize it, but the maximize button is actually this button here. Double clicking it, you would think it closed the window. No, it's over here in the dock, show all, you get it back. Now let me open up a second window here. I'm going to open up the file manager again. Let me show you some really neat window management stuff. If I hold the super key, the windows key, right? I'm going to hold the super key and I'm going to drag the file manager on top of the terminal. And when I get it into a specific location, both of their title bars turn yellow. And if I release, now we have this tabbed layout, right? Where all the windows are in a single window, they're just tabbed and that is pretty interesting. I could add a third, you know, as many as I want into this tabbed layout. Let me open up something else. For example, let's open up the calculator. Why not? Once again, I hold the super key and I drag it over here until both turn yellow, both title bars turn yellow. I release it and now I have, you know, these three programs as part of this window that I can drag around all in a group. That is really, really neat. Now let me close out the file manager, the calculator, I still got the terminal open. I'm going to open up the file manager again this time. And then, instead of doing that tabbed layout, what I could do is I could hold the super key, I could grab the file manager and I could get it right next to this bar here. And essentially now we have these in a side-by-side split pane kind of view. I think they call it a tolling view or a grid view, but it's really interesting and I can actually resize the window, right? I can actually resize this one. It doesn't affect this resizing at all, like resize it separate. And that's just a really neat thing. I think I would use the tabbed layout a lot, the side-by-side grid layout. I probably wouldn't use that much, but it is an interesting option to have available. And for those of you wondering if I could do the grid and the tabs at the same time, I'm actually not sure, let's try it. So let me go into applications. Let me once again, I'll open the calculator and see if I hold the super key and yeah, put the calculator right there. Yeah, I got the tabs on the side, right? And I still get the grid over here as well. So pretty interesting file management stuff. I would say that's pretty high-class file management for such a old operating system. I actually, I wish more floating window managers had that kind of, especially the tabbed layout. I'm gonna go ahead and close the terminal out. The desk bar over here, we've seen the menu system. This underneath it, the second line is a sys tray. So this is like some information about the processors. We've got some system monitoring information, threads, CPU usage, memory usage. So your system monitor is right there in the desk bar. Then we have our network manager sitting in the sys tray and the volume manager in the sys tray. And of course we have our clock and then of course the tracker down here. And again, you can resize the desk bar, grab the little handle here on the side and you can make it as big or as skinny as you want. If you wanna move it, grab the other end of the desk bar. Actually I moved the task bar, the task thing to the top of the tracker. So I've already rearranged it by accident trying to move this, but you can move it around a little bit if I can, it's hard to do here in the VM but I'm trying to grab that last little part. Then I was finally able to grab the handle on the other side of that. Now I've moved the sys tray section off to the side of the menu off to the side of to the tracker. And of course I could keep playing with this and I could move these around anywhere. I could eventually move them if I wanted to, I could move them from the right hand side of the screen to the left hand side of the screen or to the bottom of the screen. So there is some customization. Now let me right click on the desktop, go to desktop and let's see if I can actually change any wallpapers. That's one thing I haven't checked on. So if I go into preferences and I go, there is screen saver here, but that's not what I want. I want backgrounds, there we go. Now the background right now is image, Haiku logo, you can see, so we got some X and Y coordinates. So should we be seeing a Haiku logo here? I'm guessing so, but for whatever reason we are not seeing it. Probably because the X and Y coordinates were a little off. Let's see if I can fix that. I had actually not noticed that that was the case. When I changed from the standard resolution, that small resolution to 1920 by 1080, of course the Haiku logo got pushed off to the side, but I could play with that a little bit to try to get that centered or what have you. So I could eventually get that to where I wanted. I'm a little too far down, I think, on the X coordinate there. Maybe a little too far on that one as well. I could keep playing with that. And of course we could play with the background, which is just this color here, right? RGB values for the color. And if you wanted to, you could actually choose other for an image. I could go into artwork if there's really no other images here. I'm sure there's probably wallpaper packs available in the Haiku repository for installation. And of course, you could always go grab wallpaper packs off the internet. I keep a wallpaper pack on my GitHub. Git is installed out of the box on Haiku so I could quickly get clone my dotfalls, which has a lot of wallpapers, and I could get a nice wallpaper pack here installed if I wanted. So that's just a little bit of the latest Haiku. This is Haiku R1 beta four. Again, Haiku, it's a BOS clone, essentially. So BOS was operating system back in the 90s, still under development as Haiku OS. Been in beta for about 20 years. I know a lot of people, when they see projects like Haiku that's been in beta for 20 years, React OS the same way it's been in beta for like 20 years, when are these things gonna see an official release? I think the beta moniker, the beta label that they're putting on this is a little overblown. I think this is about as ready as it's ever going to be as far as it's usable. You can get a lot of standard software like LibreOffice and YMP and Emacs. A lot of the stuff you wanna use, I'm sure that you can probably find a better web browser than web positive, I haven't looked actually. But could you use this? Could you actually install this on a machine and actually live in it? You could, there would be some limitations, obviously hardware limitations might be a problem. I'm not sure how good the Haiku kernel supports everything, but for somebody like me that has very basic needs, I could probably install Haiku on some of my test machines. And I have actually installed Haiku on some of my physical equipment before. And it's been okay. You know, it's not something, it's not gonna be my daily driver, but it's one of these operating systems. It makes me happy every time I look at it. And it's one of these operating systems that I'm interested in. You know, every time they get a new release, I wanna check it out. I hope you guys check it out as well. Before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Brian Gabe James Matt, Maxim Mimic, Mitchell Paul West, while you bald on me, Alex, Armored Dragon Chuck, Commander Ingrid, Dioche, George Lee, Marstrom, later, Yon Alexander Paul, Peace, Art, and Vador, Polytech, Reality, Surrealize, Red Prophet, Roland, Steven, Tools, Devler, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Haiku would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, wanna see more videos about free and open source software like Haiku, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace. And yes, I checked. The Fish Hill is available in Haiku.