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Haiku R1 Alpha 1 Release Notes
These are the release notes for Haiku R1 Alpha 1, our first official release. For this first alpha release, we strived to provide a usable version of Haiku that is self-hosting, that is, that can check out the sources from SVN, and compile them. We have tried hard to make this release as good as possible. Still there are a few known issues and missing features, some of them collected below. Please keep in mind that this is alpha software, which means it is not yet feature complete and still contains known and unknown bugs.
Another goal that has driven the release of the Alpha 1 was to provide current and future Haiku developers a (mostly) stable operating system to work on their software projects. Therefore we have included the basic build tools, along with clients for cvs, svn, git and hg. This release of Haiku is capable of building and running binaries using either GCC 2 or GCC 4. The use of GCC 4 is discouraged however if not absolutely necessary, as no API compatibility is guaranteed with future versions of Haiku.
System Requirements
Haiku currently only works on x86 systems. Minimum memory required is 128MB. If compiling Haiku within itself, 1GB of memory is recommended. Haiku has been tested to work on CPU's as slow as a Pentium II 400MHz, and requires as little as 600MB of drive space.
Known Issues
The ATA stack in use by Haiku has known issues with some chipsets. If your system fails to boot with the "did not find any boot partitions" message, please try to disable DMA in the safemode settings of the bootloader. To enter the bootloader menu press space as soon as Haiku starts to load (before the splash screen appears). In any case, please report this issue to our bug tracker (see below).
It is known that Haiku doesn't even begin to load on some media/BIOS combinations. The symptom for this specific problem would be that the system stalls or resets before the splash screen comes up. This has been observed when trying to boot from some USB sticks in combination with some BIOSes. It is possible that the very same USB stick or CD works fine on other machines. The problem is not yet identified.
LiveCD and first boot performance: After an initial installation or a boot into LiveCD mode, some background tasks are executed to finish the installation setup. This is known to degrade performance. On harddisk installs this usually is not a problem as the tasks are done quickly. In LiveCD mode and also when booting from USB the performance hit is more prominently visible due to the usually bad seek performance on CDs and the slow write back of small files on USB devices. Since the CD is read-only, this setup takes place on every start of the LiveCD. On writable media it will only be done once, so further boots shouldn't experience the same delays.
Font rendering in this release is not optimal. Due to the uncertain situation about patents, the official release has disabled code, which is known to be patented. This sadly includes hinting code used by FreeType that would provide better looking font rendering if enabled. Once the situation is better understood and a decision has been made these technologies might get re-enabled for official releases.
The hda driver for HD Audio devices is known to fail with at least some VIA and nVidia devices. Some newer codecs are also not yet supported.
The LiveCD does not support filesystem queries.
Missing Features
Haiku does not yet have support for wireless networking.
There's no package management yet.
The Haiku boot manager (bootman) supports a single hard disk drive only.
DriveSetup does not install a basic bootloader when partitioning a disk. This requires bootman or another MBR bootloader to be manually installed on hard drives that were previously blank.
Some USB mass storage devices are not supported. There are different protocols for USB mass storage and currently only transparent SCSI is supported. Most current USB sticks make use of this protocol and should work. Some, mostly older, USB sticks and some USB CD-ROM drives do use different protocols however, so they may fail to boot Haiku or may not be recognized if plugged in.
Haiku ACPI support doesn't provide PCI resources configuration yet. When possible, please set the BIOS option "PNP OS installed" to No.
Haiku doesn't come with an up-to-date web browser (Firefox/BonEcho 2.x).
USB keyboards attached to OHCI or to USB 2.0 hubs do not work in Kernel Debugging Land (KDL). They need to be connected to UHCI root ports to work in KDL. Also note that when entering the kernel debugger by means of a panic it is possible that the keyboard does not work. To work around this issue you can manually enter the kernel debugger once and leave it again to enable the USB keyboard.
Printing to printers connected via USB port or parallel port wont work, because device drivers are missing.
Source Code
The source code of Haiku itself, the source code of the required build tools and the optional packages (except for closed source ones) is made available for download at: http://haiku-files.org/files/releases/r1alpha1/sources/
Reporting Issues
There are over 1000 open tickets on Haiku's bug tracker and over 3000 closed items. If you find what you believe to be an issue please search our trac to see if it has already been reported and if not file a new ticket: http://dev.haiku-os.org/
For more help see the 'Welcome' link on the Haiku desktop, or visit the website at haiku-os.org.
