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30 posts
A complete walkthrough getting the native toolchain installed, writing a minimal Kit-based application, and building Haiku itself from source.
A practical guide to viewing and setting file attributes, building a saved query, and turning that query into a self-updating virtual folder in Tracker.
A complete walkthrough of both the graphical and command-line paths to installing, updating, and removing software on Haiku.
A complete walkthrough from downloading the image to a working desktop, including why starting in a VM is worth doing even if your real goal is bare-metal installation.
A blank screen, wrong resolution, or corrupted graphics on boot almost always traces to the graphics driver — and Haiku's safe-mode VESA fallback is the fastest way to confirm it.
A package won't install, or the system misbehaves after an update. Because packagefs never unpacks files, most of these problems are fixable by manipulating package activation directly, without touching the file system.
Haiku's driver model inherits BeOS's modular, hot-pluggable design — but as a much smaller, community-driven project, its hardware support has real, practical limits worth understanding upfront.
Haiku won't boot normally, or hangs partway through. Here's how to use the boot loader's safe mode options to isolate which specific subsystem is actually at fault.
A complete walkthrough Haiku's Deskbar (its taskbar/menu equivalent) and its multiple-workspace system — features inherited directly from BeOS, still central to how Haiku is meant to be used day to day.
A complete walkthrough backing up a Haiku installation using BFS attributes and standard file-copying tools, plus what to know about restoring packagefs-managed system data specifically.
Haiku runs on POSIX-like conventions and supports plenty of Unix software, but underneath that compatibility layer, it isn't descended from Unix at all — its kernel, API, and core assumptions come from somewhere else entirely.
A complete walkthrough creating additional user accounts on Haiku, understanding its current multi-user maturity, and what to expect versus a fully mature multi-user Unix system.
Released September 13, 2024, Beta 5 closed out nearly 350 bug and enhancement tickets, added a full GDB 15 port, and brought USB audio device support to the system.
A complete walkthrough Haiku's Terminal application and its bash-based shell — familiar to anyone with Unix experience, with a few Haiku-specific tools worth knowing about.
A live query doesn't just return files matching a condition once — it keeps the result set current automatically, as files are created, changed, or deleted, for as long as the query stays open.
No sound at all, from any application, usually traces to the Media Server or a driver-detection problem — here's how to distinguish the two and work through each.
After a design drafted in January 2011 and development under funded contracts, Haiku's packagefs-based package management shipped in September 2013 — reshaping how software gets installed on the system.
No network connectivity, or an interface that won't get an IP address — here's how to work through Haiku's networking stack from hardware detection through DHCP.
Haiku's Media Kit models audio and video processing as a graph of connected nodes passing buffers to each other in real time — the same conceptual model professional media software still uses today.
Haiku's desktop/file-manager shell has stopped responding or crashed. Because Tracker is just another BLooper-based application, restarting it doesn't require rebooting the whole system.
On September 14, 2009, eight years after OpenBeOS began, Haiku shipped its first version the public could actually download and boot — as a live CD, something BeOS itself never offered.
A walk through what actually happens between powering on a Haiku machine and reaching a usable desktop, and where things most commonly go wrong along the way.
Released December 23, 2022, roughly a year and a half after Beta 3, Haiku's fourth beta continued the project's pattern of steady, incremental refinement toward an eventual non-beta R1 release.
Released June 9, 2020, roughly two years after Beta 1, Haiku's second beta arrived as much of the world was under pandemic lockdown — with volunteer development continuing largely uninterrupted.
Installing a package on Haiku doesn't copy files onto disk at all — it mounts the package itself as part of a virtual file system, which is exactly what makes activation and rollback instant.
Haiku's native C++ API isn't one monolithic library — it's a set of separately-scoped 'Kits,' each owning one concern, that together define what writing software for Haiku actually looks like.
Haiku applications don't poll for events in a manual loop — they define Handlers, and let a Looper thread dispatch messages to the right one automatically.
BFS treats extended attributes as first-class, indexable data — turning ordinary file queries into something closer to a database lookup, decades before this became a mainstream idea.
Haiku's kernel wasn't built as a Unix variant with threading bolted on — it was designed around threads as the fundamental unit of execution from the very beginning.
How a well-regarded but commercially unsuccessful 1990s operating system, killed off by an acquisition, was rebuilt from scratch as open source by the community that refused to let it disappear.