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).

Missing Features:

Haiku does not yet have support for wireless networking.

DriveSetup does not install a basic bootloader. This requires bootman to be installed on hard drives that were previously blank.

It doesn't have an up-to-date web browser (Firefox/BonEcho 2.x) (there is an experimental flash port not officially supported/maintained).

USB Keyboards attached to OHCI do not work in Kernel Debugging Land (KDL).

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.

System Requirements:

Haiku currently only works on x86 systems (or 64bit processors in 32bit mode). 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.

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

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