Software Update: Haiku R1/Beta 3

Haiku is an open source operating system, based on the concepts and technology adopted in Be Inc’s operating system BeOS in the 1990s. Its development was stopped after the takeover by Palm in 2001. At the time, that was the reason to start with OpenBeOS, which was renamed Haiku in 2004 due to trademark infringement. It is written in C++ with a modular design aimed at multithreaded environments. The third beta version of R1 has been released with the following announcement:

The Haiku Project celebrates the release of beta 3

Poetry is in motion. The Haiku Project, its developers and team members announced the Haiku operating system released its third beta release, version R1/Beta3, July 25th, 2021. Version R1B3 continues the trend of more frequent releases to provide users and developers with an up to date and stable platform to work on.

This release combines the best of Haiku’s history as a spiritual successor of BeOS and the hard work of a passionate community. It provides several new features and performance improvements that make Haiku even better.

Beta 3 includes the new Czech translation for the system and bundled applications. With this addition, Haiku is now available in 28 different languages. The Haiku Project is thankful to those who have given their time to ensure Haiku is available in a wide variety of languages ​​so the operating system can be used all over the world.

WebKit, the backend of the bundled web browser developed by the Haiku team, WebPositive, received multiple major improvements. This provides a good base for further improvements as well as an improved browsing and website rendering experience in WebPositive, which developers will continue to focus on for the next release, Beta 4 and as Haiku nears its first initial release, R1.

Additional improvements include:

• A better installation process, with various fixes to the disk partitioner (DriveSetup GUI) to make the process easier and go more smoothly.
• Improved hardware drivers, with a focus on:
  • improvements to Wi-Fi networking to match FreeBSD 13
  • audio drivers, mass storage, USB
  • performance on NVIDIA graphics cards (GeForce 6200-GeForce Go 6400).
• Significantly improved WebPositive stability and compatibility.
• Software updates can now be resumed in case of network issues.
• New and updated ports of various software, including deprecating Python 2 and making Python 3 the default version installed
• Greater POSIX compatibility
• Numerous bug fixes.

All of these improvements have been implemented for the community and by the community, to provide greater control to the end-user over the devices they use every day. A complete list of changes can be found here.

Of course, all this would not be possible without the generous donations from donors all over the world, as well as a passionate and hardworking community. The Haiku Project thanks those who have contributed with their time or with their donations.

Haiku could always use developers and volunteers, with plenty of opportunities for anyone interested to make their mark and the computing world a better place. Haiku is a free and open-source operating system for personal computing – the download is provided as an ISO file which can be burned to physical media to be installed onto physical hardware, or used in a virtual machine.