second beta release of the operating system . Initially, the project was created as a reaction to the closure of the BeOS OS and developed under the name OpenBeOS, but was renamed in 2004 due to claims related to the use of the BeOS trademark in the name. To evaluate the performance of a new release several bootable Live images (x86, x86-64). The source code for most of the Haiku OS is distributed under a free license. , with the exception of some libraries, media codecs and components borrowed from other projects.
Haiku OS is designed for personal computers, uses its own core, built on the basis of a modular architecture, optimized for high responsiveness to user actions and efficient execution of multi-threaded applications. For developers, an object-oriented API is presented. The system is directly based on BeOS 5 technologies and is aimed at binary compatibility with applications for this OS. Minimum hardware requirement: Pentium II CPU and 256 MB RAM (Intel Core i3 and 2 GB RAM recommended).
OpenBFS is used as a file system, which supports extended file attributes, journaling, 64-bit pointers, support for storing meta tags (for each file, you can store attributes in the form key=value, which makes the file system look like a database) and special indexes to speed up retrieval by them. B+ trees are used to organize the directory structure. From the BeOS code, Haiku includes the Tracker file manager and the Deskbar, which were open-sourced after BeOS left the scene.
In the nearly two years since the last update, 101 developers have contributed to Haiku, producing over 2800 changes and closing 900 bugs and feature requests. Main :
- Improved performance on screens with high pixel density (HiDPI). Provided correct scaling of interface elements. Font size is used as a key factor for scaling, depending on which the scale of all other interface elements is automatically selected.
- The Deskbar panel has a "mini" mode, in which the panel does not occupy the entire width of the screen, but dynamically changes depending on the placed icons. Improved the auto expand mode of the panel, which increases the size only on mouse hover and displays a more compact version in normal mode.
- Added an interface for configuring input devices, which combines mouse, keyboard and joystick configurators. Added support for mice with more than three buttons and the ability to customize mouse button actions.
- Updated web browser , which has been migrated to the new release of the WebKit engine and optimized to reduce memory consumption.
- Improved POSIX compatibility and ported a large portion of new programs, games and graphical toolkits. These include LibreOffice, Telegram, Okular, Krita and AQEMU applications, as well as FreeCiv, DreamChess and Minetest games.
- The installer now has the ability to exclude when installing optional packages that are present on the media. When configuring disk partitions, more information about drives is shown, encryption is detected, and information about free space in existing partitions is added. An option is available to quickly upgrade Haiku R1 Beta 1 to Beta 2 release.
- The terminal provides emulation of the Meta key. In the settings, you can assign the Meta role to the Alt / Option key located to the left of the space (the Alt key to the right of the space will retain its assignment).
- Implemented support for NVMe drives and their use as bootable media.
- Extended and stabilized USB3 (XHCI) support. Loading from USB3 devices has been adjusted and correct work with input devices has been ensured.
- Added bootloader for systems with UEFI.
- Work has been done to stabilize and improve the performance of the kernel. Many bugs that caused freezes or crashes have been fixed.
- Network driver code imported from FreeBSD 12.
Source: opennet.ru