I’ve downloaded prior images and played with Haiku from time to time. My most notable argument was the nascent networking stack that did not like to play well with any of my network cards. Well. They fixed it. And for the most part I was surprised with the progress the team has made in the past couple of years.

The gui feels a little prettier. The speed of the OS seems to have improved greatly and the app selection, while still small, is adequate to get a good feel for what BeOS was supposed to be.

Since I was running this all in Virtual Box, there were a few caveats I’ll share. My optimal VBox configuration was set up with about 1.5Gb of RAM (the most I would dedicate to it), 32Mb video memory,  3D Acceleration set to ‘off’, and the Intel 10/100 Networking card set to use NAT.

I played with the configuration a bit and found that the 3D Acceleration feature was a significant-enough penalty to performance to leave it disabled. Processor optimization settings for AMD/Intel didn’t seem to have any noticeable effect on performance.

One thing I do love about Ubuntu (a la Debian) is apt-get. With Haiku’s POSIX compliance, it would be nice to see a port of the apt tool for updating and installing software and libs. A tool like apt is something I would hope to see somewhere in the pipe after they get a full, working wi-fi stack.

Another, possibly nicer option would be to just use git in a centralized app community. Couple git with jam and you have a nice way to manage software updates, compiling and code sharing.

To get a copy of the Haiku image or to learn more, click here.