Haiku OS in 2015

Discuss how to promote using FLOSS to make music.

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danboid
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Haiku OS in 2015

Post by danboid »

After not having used it for a couple of years or so, I thought it was time to try the Haiku OS again. Considering the number of developers the project has and the other factors involved, I think its made good progress since I last checked it out, even if I won't be ditching Linux as my main OS any time soon. Wifi is working nicely now provided you have supported hardware and the package manager makes installation of the OS hyper-fast (I mean 10 seconds fast), installing new software is super-simple and you can now quickly and easily roll back to older versions if an OS update goes wrong. In my case, the reason I can't switch is because Haiku currently lacks any decent multitrack audio recording software although you can already create electronic music under Haiku with the likes of LMMS (once a couple of bugs are ironed out) supercollider, BAE and Milkytracker.

Instead of me writing a more complete report of my return to Haiku I've decided I'll do a video on the state of Haiku shortly - shortly being after the MAME port has been updated. I'm hoping such a vid will inspire more open source developers and enthusiasts to give it a go because for a number of reasons - such as its low resource usage, high responsiveness and superior integration I think its better than Linux, the BSDs and the other other options currently out there but what use is an OS without the apps?

You can get a good idea of the sort of stuff I'll be covering in this video by checking out my recent glut of posts to the Haiku forums:

https://www.haiku-os.org/community/foru ... nder_haiku

https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/lmms_probs

https://www.haiku-os.org/community/foru ... nd_scribus

https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/12046

and from https://www.haiku-os.org/community/foru ... ility_list

System76 Gazelle Pro
Processor: i7-4700MQ
Version: 49132
Comments:

WORKS: Ethernet, wifi, internal sound, USB, touchpad, SAMSUNG 840 EVO SSD
DOESN'T WORK: HDMI, webcam, SD card slot and my (external) USB audio devices

Haiku doesn't boot if I have my USB audio devices plugged in and I have to do a little magic trick (boot w/ fail-safe graphics, then change the screen settings, save and then revert them to the desired settings) to get graphics working without blacklisting the Intel GFX driver but apart from that Haiku runs great!
danboid
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Re: Haiku OS in 2015

Post by danboid »

I have a few updates to share with those who are still interested in music creation on alternative OSs - what now that Linux is sooo very mainstream! ;)

There is a multitrack recording and MIDI editing app in the Haiku ports archive called Hyperstudio. I've got it to build and install but I've not been able to get it to do anything. Its author abandonned it about 6 years ago but that doesn't matter so much now as this afternoon I got ecasound to build under Haiku. Unsurprisingly, ecasound doesn't have any support for Haiku's native sound system so I've had to build it against OSS, which Haiku can use as a fallback sound system. The main disadvantage with this at the moment is that OSS only supports sound output and not input for USB audio devices so recording with OSS (under Haiku or the BSDs) is pretty much restricted to PCI and onboard devices as it stands. I'll have to try one of the ecasound UIs like Tkeca with it.

I successfully compiled the latest git version of LMMS but it still has the same prob of not being able to move or select multiple notes. It looks like we're waiting on the Haiku Qt5 port before this will be fixed.

Its not audio production related A few days ago I got AdvanceMAME running perfectly under Haiku including sound, full screen video and USB joypad support. AdvanceMESS is on its way too.
danboid
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Re: Haiku OS in 2015

Post by danboid »

I have got JACK 0.124.1 to build under Haiku although only with the dummy backend currently.

Haiku (and JACK) can use OSS although it doesn't look like the Haiku developers want any OSS apps or libs in their repos so JACK would require a new Haiku mediaserver backend. Alternately, there is another project I've yet to try called libjackcompat which is written from scratch to use the mediaserver although its currently deemed experimental.

https://bitbucket.org/haikuports/haikup ... e/233/jack
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