When you were in the computing business in the mid- to late 90’s, you have heard of BeOS for sure. It was a really advanced system at this time and was widely used for multimedia production. Unfortunately Be Inc. went bankrupt so 5.0.3 was the latest official release. There’s an unofficial successor – Haiku, which is under steady development for many years and advances almost every day. It’s even usable to some degree for daily work if you don’t need to special software:

• Web Browsing is usable, even if not complete by using the integrated WebPositive Browser, which uses the WebKit Rendering Engine. The usual pages work, including YouTube.
• Printing works as expected. I tested a LPR attached network printer with PCL6
• IRC Chatting works with the integrated Vision Client
• Reading PDF with BePDF works. The quality of the document is not as good as on Windows/OSX in terms of Font rendering, but it’s usable
• Compiling stuff with C/C++ and Java works (OpenJDK already has been ported). Python is also available.

But there are still a few things missing which are cruical for day to day usage:

1. A good CIFS/SMB Client integrated. Currently you either have the option of using NFS mounts or transfer your files using the FTP/SFTP client.
2. A productive suite. Years ago there was GOBE available but the company isn’t anymore – which leads to the last part of this blog entry.

All in all i have to admit that even if the software is in Alpha stage, it’s usable already. GOBE Productive As HAIKU aims to be 100% compatible with BeOS, GOBE works. I grabbed the copy included in the ZETA distribution and built a HPKG package which is the native Package managment format of HAIKU. It looks like:

With GOBE available you can do really serious stuff here – always with the limitation that the software is almost 14 Years old and is not as powerful as modern office suites like MS Office 2013. If you own the original ZETA version, feel free to contact me if you need the HPKG.