Hacker News Reader

Comment by apowell | Hacker News Reader

I remember installing BeOS when it came out. It was impressive and beautiful, and I really wanted it to catch on. I think I'll give Haiku a spin. With VMware, it'll be much easier this time around.

View on HN

except they've been doing all of their development in virtual machines, so the actual real hardware support is quite thin.

What if host systems evolved to become little more than virtual machine managers, dealing with hardware drivers and so forth - while the user-space operating system is freed from having to worry about the actual hardware being used unless it really wants to?

like acpi? that turned out wonderfully.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel

Not really. Most of the core devs run it on bare metal. So far, I've tried it on my custom built PC, a Dell Inspiron and a Toshiba Satellite. Works perfectly.

I don't really care about the BeOS / Haiku kernel. We could use Linux for all the h/w support there is. BeOS was impressive but I guess Linux can be made to play a dozen videos at the same time, too. And I usually stick with only one.

But the user space and the user interface are brilliant!

I would trade Gnome, KDE, Windows, OS X, or $NAMEIT for the BeOS userland any day, both as an end-user (wrt. UI) and as a developer (user-space API). I hope we'll have more choice in the future.

There was a project called BlueOS to do exactly that, but it appears dead now.

How about this: install Debian, 'apt-get install kvm' (okay, you'll probably have to run that through module-assistant, but still, it's only a few more presses of 'Enter' away), then run 'qemu-system-x86_64 haiku.img -m 2048'. Voila! Linux as hardware abstraction layer and virtualization engine, with Haiku running on top.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com