Home : Articles : Installing Haiku
September 2009 saw the first official alpha release of Haiku, a lean, BeOS-like free open source operating system. Although it's never seen a public release until now, this system has been around for about as long as Linux, and the length of the gestation period really shows in the quality, which is stunning.
What's really exciting about this OS in my opinion is that it's not Linux, and not even much like it. Don't get me wrong - I love GNU/Linux and I suspect it's going to be my primary OS for some time yet - but the idea of a serious desktop operating system driven by a coherent vision and built to be tight and responsive has really grabbed my attention.
As the fortune cookie says, "UNIX is many things to many people, but it has never been everything to anybody." Haiku is everything to a single user, and that's something genuinely different. Playing with alpha 1 has done something I didn't really expect: it's made me seriously consider the possibility that Unix-like systems may be outclassed on the desktop.
Downloading and installing Haiku is very simple, but here's a quick step by step guide anyway, in case it helps anyone get started. This is definitely the most exciting OS release this year.
Downloading Haiku
The download page offers direct HTTP downloads from plenty of mirrors around the world but if you can spare a little bandwidth, help spread the load: use bittorrent and seed for as long as possible. It's an easy way to make a small contribution to this exciting project.
The file is a ZIP archive containing an ISO image which will fit comfortably on a CDR, but of course if you're just installing on a VM you can just use the image directly.
Creating the VM
First, you'll need a new virtual machine to run Haiku on. I called mine Haiku and set Operating System to Other and Version to Other / Unknown:
... and gave it 512Mb of core:
and a new (dynamically growing) hard disk image with a size limit of 5Gb.
These settings are way over the minimum requirements; the release notes say you'll get away with 128Mb of memory and 600Mb of drive space, but you'll certainly need more disk space than that for the default install and more memory never hurts (the release notes suggest at least 1Gb if you intend to compile Haiku on itself).
Booting from the CD Image
Mount the CD image:
... and you're ready to boot into Haiku. Start the virtual machine and Haiku will boot with a splash screen far too pretty for an alpha release:
Then ask you if you'd like to boot to the desktop, or head straight for the installer:
I have to be honest and admit I actually couldn't wait to meet Haiku at this stage and went for the desktop, but for the purposes of this quick guide I'll pretend I was very purposeful and follow the more direct route. You can run the installer from the desktop, though, so it's not much of a detour if you'd prefer to go that way.
Installing the System
The installer starts off with a suitably frightening welcome message:
Most of the message is bootloader related advice for real hardware; for this VM setup life is pretty simple so you can just click Continue. You'll receive a perfectly normal informational message:
Just OK this and click Setup Partitions. You'll see two volumes; the bottom one is the CD and the top one is your virtual hard disk. Click your hard disk and choose Parition: Initialize: Be File System ... to place a partition on the virtual disk.
Note: if you wanted to create multiple partitions, you could use Partition: Initialize: Intel Parition Map ... and then create partitions inside there but for simplicity's sake I'm going to skip that stage (and get away with it, too).
You'll be asked to confirm:
Click Continue and you'll be prompted for a partition name and blocksize:
I went with Haiku for the name and left the blocksize at 2048. When the partition editor for an operating system I've never seen before says something is Recommended I tend to trust it. Click Initialize and confirm writing the changes:
Confirm and you'll see this:
Close DriveSetup by clicking the box on its tab. Back in the Installer, choose your new Be filesystem:
and then click Begin and the install proceeds:
Now's a good time to go get a coffee; the installer will get on with it for a good few minutes without needing your input. When it finishes, it looks like this:
Click Write Boot Sector to 'Haiku' and then Quit and your VM will reboot cheerfully from the virtual hard disk. You're there!
Quick Introduction
The real joy of Haiku is the ease of use. It is its own system and not an imitator, so it feels unfamiliar at first, but to be honest there's not much to point out, and nothing you wouldn't figure out in about 3 seconds. Here's the desktop on a fresh install:
Nice and minimal! There's just a little cluster of self-explanatory icons in the top left corner. From left to right, these:
- Open Tracker, the filesystem browser, pointing at the filesystem root
- Open The Be Book in the BeZilla Browser
- Open Tracker pointing at /home
- Open BeZilla with an introduction to Haiku
- Open the Trash - a familiar concept if you've ever used any desktop environment
Apart from the attractive Haiku logo (the desktop background), the only other feature is the DeskBar, which is Haiku's equivalent to the familiar Taskbar and Main Menu.
The feather is the 'start button' equivalent, which opens the main menu. Under that you'll see a pair of small bars showing your CPU and memory usage, with a clock beside them. The rest of the DeskBar shows current tasks and lets you manipulate them.
Exploring the menu and running stuff is probably the best way to get aquainted, so just a few quick tips that I think will be particularly useful and then I'll leave you to it!
Glitches with the Browser
I find that when I double-click BeBook or Welcome I get a spurious extra window showing the Welcome page every time. Obviously no big deal but it can be a little confusing when you double-click BeBook and Welcome pops up over it.
Also, the default window position is a little unhelpful when you first open the Welcome page; the window's tab is off the screen. If this happens to you, use the lower right corner of the window to reduce the window height a little, then hold Ctrl+Alt and drag anywhere in the window to move it down a bit.
Your Keyboard Layout
If you're not using a US keyboard, you'll probably want to fix that. You can do this via Menu: Preferences: Keymap.
That's it for now!
I've just started exploring Haiku myself so I'm afraid that's it for the first instalment! There's lots of good documentation available already on Haiku's website and I'll be back with more as soon as I get the chance to dig a little deeper in there and write it up.
