This is a whiteboard to jot down notes and bits of information that you might want to share with the users about alpha 1. What works, what doesn't, etc.

Perhaps this should be included in the released iso, image and vmdk zip files as a standard text file, that way when the zip file is located years from now there will be these release notes in it explaining what it is. -scottmc

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Haiku Alpha 1 Release Notes

The goal for Haiku R1 is essentially, a fully working and stable operating system. A viable replacement for BeOS R5 (and later). For Haiku R1 Alpha the goal was to be a usable version of Haiku that is self-hosting, that is, that can check out the sources from SVN, and compile them, and to enable 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 running binaries built with either GCC 2 or GCC 4. Use of GCC 4 is discouraged, as no compatibility is guaranteed with future versions of Haiku (eg, post-R1).

System Requirements

Haiku currently only works on x86 systems. Minimum memory required is 128Meg. (aldeck: please adjust, that's the smallest i tested) 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 XXXMeg 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 works fine on other machines. The problem is not yet identified.

Missing Features

Haiku does not yet have support for wireless networking.

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.

It doesn't have 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.

There's no package management yet.

List other important missing features here.

The Haiku boot manager (bootman) supports a single hard disk drive only.

Printing to printers connected via USB port or parallel port wont work, because device drivers are missing.

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.