The second beta of Haiku OS R1 has already been released and these are its changes

After one year and nine months from the release of the first beta version of Haiku OS R1 This second beta arrives that continues with the work which was retaken after the shutdown of the BeOS operating system and developed under the name OpenBeOS, but was renamed in 2004 due to claims related to the use of the BeOS trademark in the name.

For those who do not know from Haiku OS, you should know that does not use the Linux kernel but uses its own kernel, built on the basis of a modular architecture, optimized for high responsiveness to user actions and efficient execution of multi-threaded applications.

The system is directly based on BeOS 5 technologies and is aimed at binary compatibility with applications for this operating system. Minimum hardware requirements: Pentium II CPU and 256 MB of RAM (Intel Core i3 and 2 GB of RAM recommended).

OpenBFS is used as the file system. Supports extended file attributes, journaling, 64-bit pointers, supports storing meta tags and special indexes to speed up the selection in them. To organize the directory structure, "B + tree" trees are used.

What's new in this second beta version?

In the almost two years since the last update, 101 developers participated in the development of this new beta of Haiku in which prepared more than 2800 changes and closed 900 error messagesr and applications to implement innovations.

One of them is the improved display performance HiDPI, which also provides the correct scale of interface elements and the font size is used as the key factor for scaling, whereby all other interface elements are automatically scaled.

In the desktop bar there is a «mini» mode, in which the panel does not occupy the entire width of the screen and changes dynamically according to the icons placed. It has been improved automatic panel opening mode, which increases the size only when the mouse is hovered and a more compact version is displayed in normal mode.

Another change is that a interface for configuring input devices, in which the mouse, keyboard and joystick configurators are combined. Besides that added support for mice with more than three buttons and the ability to customize mouse button actions.

Improved POSIX compatibility and it carried a large portion of new graphics programs, games, and toolkits. The LibreOffice, Telegram, Okular, Krita and AQEMU applications are also available, as well as the FreeCiv, DreamChess and Minetest games.

The installer adds the ability to exclude the installation of optional packagess present in the media. When configuring disk partitions, more information about drives is displayed, definition of encryption usage is implemented, and information about free space on existing partitions is added. There is an option available to quickly upgrade Haiku R1 Beta 1 to Beta 2.

The terminal provides the emulation of the Meta key. In the settings, you can assign the Meta function to the Alt / Option key located to the left of the space (the Alt key to the right of the space will retain its purpose).

Of the other changes mentioned in this new beta version:

  • The WebPositive web browser has been updated, carried over to the new version of the WebKit engine and optimized to reduce memory consumption.
  • Implemented support for NVMe drives and their use as bootable media.
  • Extended and stabilized support for USB3 (XHCI). Booting from USB3 devices has been organized and correct operation with input devices has been ensured.
  • Bootloader added for UEFI systems.
  • Work has been done to stabilize and improve core performance. Many bugs that cause freezing or crashing are fixed.
  • Network driver code imported from FreeBSD 12.

Download

Finally, if you want to know more about it and / or obtain the image of this new version, you can do it from the following link.


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