I’m still running Debian Etch because just about everything else so far has failed me. Most of the more recent Linux distributions are utterly unusable on this old laptop. But as the final days of Etch tick down, it seems all hope is not lost. Haiku OS is approaching a useful state, particularly for laptops.
According to the various notices on their website, one developer just recently got a prototype wifi stack working. It’s capable of using an Atheros card to connect to open wifi nodes. Encryption, client services and other drivers will come later. And ACPI code is progressing, but no one claims it works for many laptops yet. I tested a previous incarnation before the project was merged with others and called Haiku. Aside from the lack of drivers then, it was beautiful, and worked just fine for my habits.
What makes Haiku worth watching is it lacks none of the Unix-type boondoggles which still plague Linux. The GUI was taken from BeOS, and is vastly superior. Also, it’s a darn sight faster than all but the most ancient releases of XFree86, never mind the current X.org fork of that. For people who don’t really care all that much about eye candy, and simply want the thing to work without spending a couple hundred to a couple grand on hardware, Haiku may become one of the best things just over the horizon.
I thought about trying to contact some of the folks in the project for an interview, but I’d much rather let them code their hearts out to get it ready for at least a beta release soon. For now, they consider it in an alpha release state.
Go, Haiku!
