After just a little over 25 years of the Haiku project trying to keep the BeOS spirit alive, the team has now released Beta 6. The spicy details of what is now all better can naturally be found in the detailed release notes. Part of the size of these release notes is due to the previous beta release being two years ago, though nightly builds have kept Haiku users appeased in the meantime.
The headline features that are new compared to the previous release include the ability to run the Firefox browser and derivatives, QEMU hardware virtualization using the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor (NVMM), improved POSIX and hardware compatibility, as well as many bug fixes. Unfortunately 64-bit ARM support still has to wait a bit longer.
Naturally, such a joyful new release wouldn’t go unnoticed by [Action Retro], who decided to celebrate by installing this new release on a stack of old laptops that he bought for a dollar each. With system requirements starting at a Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM, it’s very zippy to install and boot on. As [Action Retro] noticed, a fresh install on a random 2000s Asus laptop both WiFi and audio worked out of the box.
Wrestling through his e-waste pile of laptops, the functional laptops provided a pretty good experience, making these at least an excellent target for a fresh Haiku install as a daily driver.
We looked at Beta 5 and the nightlies back in 2024, with recently attempts being made to port Nvidia GPU drivers to Haiku, with good results.
BeOS 5 requirements:
x86 CPUs or PowerPC (up to release 5.03)
needs at least 32MByte RAM
https://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/_english/bs-beos.htm
Also interesting:
BeOS was originally developed by the company Be with the former Apple coworker Jean-Louis Gasse for its own type of computer, the BeBox.
It contains 2 power PC CPUs and was equipped with maximally with 256 Mbyte of RAM.
https://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/_english/bs-beos.htm
IMHO: Haiku seems like it could profit from some further optimizations in order to run smoothly on an ordinary (normal) x86 PC,
such as a Pentium/Pentium MMX with 32 to 64 MB of RAM.
256 MB of RAM must be considered a luxury, since it’s workstation level, as it was with the BeBox.
Also, Haiku seems to rely a bit too much on VESA VBE 3, which was exclusive to later AGP and PCIe graphics cards.
KolibriOS is guilty of this, too. It wont’t run out-of-box with an S3 Trio32/64, for example.
Better support for standard PCI VGA cards with VESA VBE 1.2 or VBE 2, would be nice, thus.
Classic laptops that did run BeOS well can’t have their VGA/VBE BIOS to be upgraded to VBE 3, after all.
Just checked the specs for Zeta, a commercial version of BeOS..
ZETA OS 1.0
Developer: yellowTAB GmBH
System requirements: 200MHz Pentium (or equivalent), 32MB RAM, 8MB VRAM, CD-ROM
Recommended hardware: 1.0GHz Pentium III (or equivalent), 256MB RAM, 32MB VRAM
Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2005/08/zeta-1-0/
Here, 256 MB were the recommended amount of RAM, not the minimum.
It also ran on an ordinary Pentium (i586) no problem, as it should be expected by an OS.
Though I think it makes sense that a Pentium III was being recommended.
By the turn of the year 2000, the Pentium III was the pinnacle of x86.
It was stable, very powerful and didn’t draw too much power, either.
The CPU could use good, venerable Pentium II/III chipsets (Intel 440BX etc).
Many had an ISA slot, still and an Super I/O chip or LPC bus. And AGP, even.
It was a good mixture of old and new.
We are in 2026 with 64bit computers having being easily accessible for 24 years. Why optimize for a target that will not be useful as a daily driver in the modern world, especially when the native legacy software available is almost non-existent? Can’t use the web, can’t use modern development tools, can’t play retro games.
Dog and its balls… or because it can be used in cases of old (mainly industrial) IT infrastructure that could benefit from something like that… or because people might have a different idea about retro gaming and what it entails…
Plenty of reasons to choose from :-)
Indeed, current web seems not to be a realistic target for the minimun requirement PCs but then again, were they ever for the last 10years? Look at the RAM usage… geeez
i don’t know about ‘optimize for a target’. but i use a celeron n4000 in my lap every day and i could stand to use something much slower than that. stock debian, nothing special, nothing ‘optimized’. the ‘trick’ is that i run the browser remotely or vnc, and i think modern development bloatware is garbage :)
Hold on a minute! On paper, yes.
I’ve lived through these days and I wished it was like this.
I wished, there was an acceptance of 64-Bit OSes in mid 2000 .
(-Linux doesn’t count, it has no real binary compatibility, so it doesn’t matter; it runs on toasters just as well.-).
But both Windows XP 64-Bit editions (Itanium, AMD64) didn’t catch on.
Development tools such as Delphi or Visual Basic (not .NET) didn’t support compiling 64-Bit executables.
Even in 2007, when Windows Vista came out, the 32-Bit x86 version was the default (-which by itself was so big it nearly hit 4 GB barrier all alone-).
Users at large refused to use the 64-Bit version, because of bad driver support etc.
When Windows 7 came out in 2009, the situation slowly was going to change.
But by 2011 there were still thin clients and notebooks that had an 32-Bit UEFI and couldn’t run Windows 7 x64 in UEFI mode.
Often, their device drivers on the manufacturer’s website were 32-Bit only, too.
So Windows 7 x86 had to be installed via BIOS emulation (CSM).
So it’s not 24 years, I think. In practice, it’s more like about 15 years.
It was in the 2010s that PC platform (at large) moved from 32-Bit to 64-Bit.
A lot of users/developers were eager to support 64-Bit computing at the beginning, in the 2000s.
But after waiting for so many years, the former excitement had vanished.
Nowadays, applications are simply available as both 32 and 64-Bit binaries or just one of them.
Which one doesn’t really matter that much anymore,
because 64-Bit Windows can run both Win32 and Win64 executables.
The ARM version even has x86/x64 emulation built-in.
Strictly speaking, 64-Bit CPUs did already exist in public in early-90s.
For example, the Alpha AXP had both a 32-Bit and 64-Bit mode, but Windows NT kept 32-Bit addressing across all platforms.
Same goes for MIPS R4000, another 64-Bit CPU from early 90s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R4000
Haiku OS does not need to be optimize more to run on old x86 Intel/AMD systems. There is no reason for it. (Older) Hardware is cheap. I been picking up old systems (6/7th gen Intel i3/i5/Xeon desktops and workstations) for free all because it “cant run Windows 11”. Early this year I bought a 20 Core 40 Thread (Dual 10 Core Xeons) with 32GB ECC RAM, 512GB NVME, NVIDIA Quadro T1000 4GB for aroudn $350. There are plenty of machines around that you can get for free or cheap(ish).
No point of running it on older systems for any reason. There are plenty of smaller operating systems for this or just get an old OS and install it on the system. Even if it is a need. Haiku is going to do nothing for whatever that need is.
It’s nice to keep older systems going. But sometimes there is no point. Only real use is in industrial where some systems cost too much to replace or retrofit. You are going to run whatever Windows OS or Linux OS it had. You are not going to spend your time and company time trying to get a random ass OS running on it and getting software and drivers ported to it and run.
I beg to differ. These “old x86 Intel/AMD systems” are industry standard hardware.
Both x86 emulators and VMs do use them as reference hardware.
Let’s take Virtual PC 2007 for example:
BIOS: Generic AMI BIOS
Chipset: Intel 440BX
Sound card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16
Network card: DEC 21140A 10/100
Video card: S3 Trio64V+
Source: https://computernewb.com/wiki/Virtual_PC_2007
(In VPC 2007, there’s also proprietary sound emulation for Vista guests I think.)
Or let’s have a look at Bochs/Qemu:
The “-pc” setting.. Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996)
The “-isapc” setting.. ISA-only PC
The “-microvm” setting.. “The Micro VM is designed to be a minimalist PC which does not have a PCI bus or ACPI. ”
The “-q35” setting.. Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009)
Source: https://computernewb.com/wiki/QEMU/Devices/Machines#i386/x86_64
Emulated soundcards are Adlib (ISA), SB16 (ISA), GUS (ISA), es1370 (PCI, AudioPCI), cs4321a (ISA, WSS).
The only “modern” ones are AC97 and HDA, which are standards rather than specific hardware.
Source: /wiki/QEMU/Devices/Sound_cards
Emulated graphics are..
“vga” and “isa-vga” (synthetic, VGA and VBE 2.0)
“cirrus” or “cirrus-vga”, which emulates a PCI VGA card (Cirrus Logic GD5446)
“isa-cirrus”, which emulates an ISA VGA card (Cirrus Logic GD5446)
The Cirrus has VESA VBE 1.2 in ROM, at best.
The rest are pass-through types, modes rather than hardware.
/wiki/QEMU/Devices/Video_cards
Emulated network cards are..
“-nic rtl8139” is an Realtek 8139C+Fast Ethernet
“-nic e1000” is an Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop Adapter
“-nic pcnet” is an AMD PCNet-Fast III Ethernet Adapter
“-nic ne2k_pci” is an Novell NE2000 Ethernet card
“-nic ne2k_isa” is an Novell NE2000 Ethernet card from the late 1980s
Further more, there are pass-through types and various intel models (i82551 and other i82xxx).
Source: /wiki/QEMU/Devices/Network
Here’s Virtualbox:
Motherboard: PIIX3 or ICH9
Input: PS/2 mouse and keyboard, USB drawing tablet
VGA: synthetic, VBE 3 ?
Storage: IDE (ATA), SATA, SCSI (LSI Logic and BusLogic), SAS (LSI Logic)
Ethernet:
AMD PCNet PCI II (Am79C970A)
AMD PCNet FAST III (Am79C973), the default setting
Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM)
Intel PRO/1000 T Server (82543GC)
Intel PRO/1000 MT Server (82545EM)
Paravirtualized network adapter (virtio-net)
Source: https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/virtualbox/6.0/user/emul-hardware.html
VMware Player 4..
VMware SVGA II, Intel Pro/1000 and AMD PCnet, AudioPCI/ES1371 and HDA
Storage: LSI Logic Logic / BusLogic SCSI or standard IDE/SATA
Motherboard: Intel 440BX AGPset (82443BX)
Southbridge: Intel 82371AB (PIIX4)
As well as Intel 82093AA I/O APIC and National Semiconductor PC87338 Super i/o chip
Source: LLM
My point simply is that standard hardware should always been properly supported as a first priority. 🙂
Also because it’s being available by development tools, such as emulators or VMs.
Oh, and I think no OS should be more demanding that Windows 98SE or Mac OS 8/9,
unless there’s a proper justification (Unix being one, maybe, due to its archaic design).
If an OS needs more than 500 MB of HDD storage or 64 MB of RAM for a standard installation, then it’s bloatware. Simply as that.
(And that’s already very generous, I think.
For comparison, a normal Windows 95 intsallation required 40 MB of HDD space.)
Because both Windows 98SE (-or Win2000-) and MacOS 8/9 already had supported all the various technologies required for a modern digital life as we know it.
Latest drivers and optional software excluded, of course.
They can take up tens of gigabytes on if they like to.
I only mean the heart of an operating system;
that covers the API, kernal, memory managment, plug&play and certain protocols (network, USB HID class etc).