Haiku OS Advances With New Official Release

The Haiku operating system, which seeks to be free software and implement compatibility with the BeOS platform, has now experienced its third official release in ten years of development. Haiku R1 Alpha 3 is this new official release and it offers a lot of changes.

Among the features catching our attention for Haiku R1 Alpha 3 include:

- Improved read/write support for the Btrfs, exFAT, and EXT4 file-systems (along with EXT2, EXT3, NTFS, and UDF).

- Enhanced hardware support for video drivers, ACPI, IO/APIC, network, and USB.

- Gutenprint is providing greater printer support.

- Improved MediaKit support.

- A new IMAP implementation.

- The secondary and experimental compiler have been updated to GCC 4.4.4. While GCC4 is available, Haiku still recommends using GCC2 as their GCC4 implementation isn't finalized and its APIs may break before becoming stabilized.

- Improved window management controls.

- Overhauled user-interfaces for various Haiku applications.

- Support for PAE (Physical Address Extensions) to support more than 4GB of system memory.

The complete list of changes can be found in the Haiku release notes. Sadly, not found in this release is Haiku support for Gallium3D, WPA wireless networking encryption is still missing, package management is still being developed, and various other issues. With the GCC4 support still not being recommended, it's also still probably too early to get the Phoronix Test Suite up and running under Haiku to see how this BeOS-like operating system performs.