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Comment by mntmn | Hacker News Reader

Incredible progress, very cool! I used BeOS back in ‘99 and loved it. Applications were straightforward to build with C++ and the BMessage system. It had a great little community, even in Germany (“BeGeistert”!). Does Haiku run on ARM nowadays?

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Yes:

https://download.haiku-os.org/nightly-images/arm/

It's even buggier than the x86 version though, and you don't have any software beyond what you compile for it yourself.

I thought the ARM version didn’t have a GUI yet...

The Application Server is in progress, but it builds. The problem is that on x86, you can fall back on the BIOS w/ VESA to display video; while ARM lacks that functionality. If you can find/build a video driver it should Just Work(tm).

You can see the current video drivers here:

https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/build/jam/images/...

Which are all x86/amd64-based. The RPi would actually be relatively simple to throw a framebuffer video driver together for, though:

* https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/s...

* https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/wiki

* https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi/tree/master/video01

Err ... no? The problem with the ARM port is the lack of device drivers, and the fact that there is no userland/syscalls ABI set up yet at all. So there's still a lot to be done here.

BeOS in '99 what a glorious time to be alive! Such potential, it's been 20 years in the making!

was the OS api that better ? I only saw bits of the [db]FS part, it was lovely.

It was built with threading in mind throughout, which was unusual for the time. Remember, it took until C++11 until threads became part of the language.

It was one of those OSes where you could move the video window around without artifacts/frame drops. Took a while until Linux achieved the same.

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