..::B:R:A:D::..

I was a huge fan of BeOS and was extremely dissappointed by the slow demise of Be and its eventual sale to Palm. Ever since the death of Be I have been closely watching the various attempts to keep the dream alive. Many projects have come and gone in an attempt to recreate the magic of BeOS but one has always remained in the background steadily working on what many said was an impossible feat.The Haiku project, formely known as OpenBeOS, has made some tremendous progress after years of development. The goal of the project is to create a new OS that is source and binary compatible to BeOS R5 (the last official release by Be). Yesterday I downloaded one of the daily builds as a VMware disk image. You can find the daily builds here: Haiku Images.

I then used this online VM Builder I found a little while ago to create the needed VMX files to boot the disk images with VMware Player.

It was amazing to see “BeOS” boot up once again. Since Be open sourced Tracker and Deskbar before their demise it has been possible for Haiku to incorporate that into their project. They are now able to run Tracker and Deskbar on top of their new kernel so you are presented with the old familiar desktop!

It’s pretty cool to see many of the old Be apps run. Many of the preference apps still don’t work or are buggy but it’s a great start.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Other OS. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.