Haiku OS finally reaches the beta
Haiku OS, a project born from the ashes of BeOS, reaches the beta stage after sixteen years of development. The official launch is scheduled for mid-September, although the stable version is still far away.
Not many will remember BeOS, an operating system born of the homonymous Be, Inc. and condemned to failure by Microsoft’s commercial policies. Although it has definitely disappeared from the scenes, the vision at the base of the project has remained alive thanks to the Haiku project, which represents a re-implementation of BeOS in the open-source form. Sixteen years after the project was founded, Haiku now reaches the beta phase.
The latest official release of an alpha dated back to five years ago: Haiku’s progress is slow, due to the limited number of developers compared to other well-known open source projects. The latest technical reserves at the launch of the beta have fallen, and it is now necessary to perform the tests to verify that everything is working properly and correct any bugs.
According to the schedule published on the official blog, the first beta release candidate should arrive on August 25, while the final release should take place between 10 and 18 September.
There are still some problems, such as the inability to boot from a USB drive inserted in a USB3 port, but will not be resolved before the beta launch.
Haiku OS could become, over time, a reference operating system for the recovery of old machines that are no longer serviceable in any other way, given its extreme lightness. The release of a stable version may still take several months or even years and its usability for a wider audience is still limited.
You can download the installation image from the official project website.
