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14 September 2009, 16:09

First Alpha of BeOS-inspired Haiku released

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Haiku logo After eight years of development, the Haiku Project developers have announced the availability of R1/Alpha 1, the first official development release of Haiku. Haiku is an open source operating system inspired by the Be Operating System (BeOS) that's specifically aimed at personal computing. According to the release announcement, the Alpha 1 release is intended to provide a stable development snapshot of Haiku to a larger base of users for "more extensive testing and debugging".

Haiku Alpha 1
Zoom The Haiku Alpha 1 desktop.
The Alpha 1 release currently includes the Firefox 2.0 port BeZilla, a mail client, a simple vector graphics application and a PDF viewer. Several multimedia applications, network and system tools are also included. Currently Haiku will only run on x86 systems and requires a minimum of 128 MB of memory, 600 MB of drive space and a 400 MHz processor.

Users wanting to install Haiku Alpha 1 should note that DriveSetup currently does not install a basic bootloader when partitioning a disk so it "requires bootman or another MBR bootloader to be manually installed on hard drives that were previously blank". As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical machines is not advised. The developers encourage users that find any bugs in the first alpha to report them on the Haiku bug tracking system.

More details about the release, including a list of known issues and missing features, can be found in the release notes and in the hardware database. Haiku R1/Alpha 1 is available to download as an ISO image, a Raw file or as a virtual machine for VMware.

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(crve)

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