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The death of BeOS was an incredible shame. I sometimes wonder what modern operating systems, developer interfaces, and hardware hacking tools (remember the geek port?) would be commonplace today if this weird tangent in computing history had really taken off. An Ars Technica article about the open source BeOS "Haiku" project caught my eye today, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that BeOS development is still alive and kicking.
I've only been playing with it for a few minutes, but it's up and running nicely in the Q virtual machine (QEMU port for OS X). There are nightly disk image builds available for download, and QEMU will boot directly from any of the RAW image downloads. So far everything seems to work reliably.
One thing that isn't completely functional, however, is the drive setup utility. This is a drag, since there's only a few free MB available on the downloaded disk image. Unless you go through the trouble of preparing a BeOS boot volume from within a separate Linux virtual machine, you won't be able to install much of anything. Can any Be hackers comment on a command line method for formatting and preparing a boot image?
Haiku poetically resurrects BeOS - Link
Haiku Operating System - Link
You might want to look at the Haiku Weekly Super Pack image. It can grow up to about 10 gb of free space and it also comes with a ton of extra software that isn't included with the nightly builds: http://www.haikuware.com/view-details/development/app-installation/74-weekly-super-pack-feb9th-r23934
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larger image file.
as the makebootable command doesn't work at this time with Qemu image files one needs a larger file that is bootable.
Download and expand http://www.bebits.com/app/2680, BeOS R5 Personal Edition for Linux
run Qemu with both the haiku.image and image.be files as hard disks...
qwmu -hda haiku.image -hdb image.be
Right click the desktop and mount "Personal Edition"
open a Tracker window in Haiku and select all folders... from the file menu select copy.
Open the Personal Edition with a Tracker window and from the file menu select paste. select overwrite all.
reboot qemu...
qemu image.be
Haiku is now booted on a 500mb partition.
This can be much easier if one has a working BeOS or Zeta install, but it works.
now type in a Terminal:
"wget http://haiku.mlotz.ch/links-0.99-Haiku.zip" to get a text based links browser. ( copy the expanded file to /boot/home/config/bin and then type links in a Temninal to launch the browser.)
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