Haiku OS

I've been playing recently with different unix OS's, trying to resurrect some old hardware and see if I can't make some of these old machines useful again. Like at least have one as an XScreensaver-only machine to keep Natalie amused.

Some work well with OpenBSD and I've been playing with OpenIndiana a bit (stay tuned, maybe. I dunno.). But I've had some of the best luck with the modern BeOS port Haiku. Even on an original Core Duo Macbook with 2GB of memory you get a very snappy experience. It almost even plays Youtube videos, which I blame more on Youtube bloat than anything else really. I mainly just use a browser to see what's there, and then shoot the links at my TV to watch anyway, either via a browser plugin or a webpage I hacked together using the send-to-youtube.sh script.

Aside from that all the pages I use seem to work well enough. Instagram, Twitter etc run just fine as they should.

The main thing that might take some getting used to is mail. It appears, and I haven't really read up on it, that you browse your mailbox via the filesystem. Though when I click on a message this way it tries to launch a reader and fails, so I may well be doing something wrong. It also doesn't seem to support STARTTLS after a plaintext smtp request, so I'll probably have to support TLS on a separate port, which isn't a problem.

My main issue is that i can't actually get it installed and booting anywhere. My Macbook Core Duo is allergic to hard disk access apparently. Even if I install Snow Leopard and log it in, as soon as I do anything the machine just locks up with spinny beachballs everywhere forever. I have a 2010 Macbook Pro, and I can't get that one going yet either.

The Macbook is pure 32-bit, and I know there are problems with 32-bit Haiku + EFI boot, but it's being /actively worked on/ with status updates and changes to the nightly build. I can't stress how refreshing that is to see.

This is the difference between individual passion projects vs. a fed up NPM project maintainer who gets sick of companies building their billion dollar cash drawers off of his free labor. I get that too.