What is Haiku?
HAIKU is an open source operating system currently in development. Specifically targeting personal computing, Haiku is a fast, efficient, simple to use, easy to learn, and yet very powerful system for computer users of all levels. Additionally, Haiku offers something over other open source platforms which is quite unique: The project consists of a single team writing everything from the kernel, drivers, userland services, tool kit, and graphics stack to the included desktop applications and preflets. While numerous open source projects are utilized in Haiku, they are integrated seamlessly. This allows Haiku to achieve a level of consistency that provides many conveniences, and is truly enjoyable to use by both end-users and developers alike.
What’s so good about Haiku anyway?
The key highlights that distinguish Haiku from other operating systems include:
Specific focus on personal computing
Custom kernel designed for responsiveness
Fully threaded design for great efficiency with multi-processor/core CPUs
Rich object-oriented API for faster development
Database-like file system (BFS) with support for indexed metadata
Unified, cohesive interface
Why Haiku?
The Be Operating System introduced progressive concepts and technologies that we believe represent the ideal means to simple and efficient personal computing. Haiku is the realization of those concepts and technologies in the form of an operating system that is open source and free.
Read the General FAQ Take the Screenshot Tour
Who is behind Haiku?
Haiku is developed by a growing community of volunteer developers from all around the world. Additionally, Haiku also exists thanks to the dedicated support of a fervent and friendly community, and that of Haiku, Inc., a non-profit organization founded by former project leader Michael Phipps with the purpose of supporting the development of Haiku as well as the growth of both the community and the Haiku platform.
Discover the Haiku Community
Check out Haiku Contributors at GitHub
Installation Guide
Before Installing
Download Haiku
Burning your Haiku CD
Haiku on a USB flash drive
Welcome to the Haiku installation guide! This document will help you install Haiku on your computer, guiding you through the Haiku installation one step at a time. Depending on your hardware configuration, the installation process can take as little as 15 minutes.
Preparing a Partition for Haiku
Currently, Haiku cannot resize existing partitions; therefore, you either need to already have an empty partition where you can install Haiku, or you need to create one using a third party tool. If your current OS comes with a partitioning tool, try to use that. Otherwise, you can use specialized tools like the freely available GParted LiveCD. A standard install of Haiku requires about 700MB of disk space, so the partition doesn't need to be huge. However, you may want to leave some room for stuff, so 2GB may be an appropriate partition size.
Whenever your disk has multiple partitions, you will also need a boot loader such as GRUB to be able to boot into Haiku (and any other systems that you may have installed in the remaining partitions). In some cases, it is also possible to use the Haiku Boot Manager.
Let's Start the Installation!
Insert the Haiku Installer CD into your CD-ROM drive and power up your system.
1. After a few seconds, you should see the Haiku boot splash screen.
2. This panel (depending on your hardware it can take a while to appear) lets you set the system language and keymap.
Then you decide to either install Haiku on a partition by clicking Run Installer or try out Haiku by booting to the desktop directly from CD by choosing Desktop (Live-CD). Run the Installer.
3. Before the Haiku Installer starts, a notice is displayed. It contains information regarding prior partition setup (as described above) and GRUB setup (as described further down in this guide). Click on Continue to proceed to the Installer.
4. If the following alert pops up, it just means that no partitions with the Be File System (BFS) have been found. Acknowledge with OK.
5. When there is no BFS partition available, or if you want to use a differently formatted partition, you use the DriveSetup partitioning application. Click on Setup partitions… to start DriveSetup.
6. Haiku's partition manager DriveSetup shows the disks and partitions that have been identified.
7. In this example, there already are two primary partitions. One of about 9 GiB using an Ext2 File System, and another one of 2 GiB with a FAT32 File System. There are also two extended partitions that are still empty. These partitions have been previously prepared using a partitioning tool.
Now selecting the partition you want to install Haiku on. As soon as you click on a disk, its partition layout will be graphically represented. You can then also choose the partition by clicking on it in the layout graphic. The currently selected partition is marked by a blue border in the layout graphic.
8. To initialize a partition to the Be File System, make sure the right partition is selected, then use the menu Partition | Format | Be File System….
9. An alert will pop up to ask if the initialization should be started. If you are still sure you have the right partition selected, click Continue, otherwise Cancel the initialization.
As the alert says, you can still abort initialization before writing any changes to disk later.
10. Now you enter the name for the new partition, or simply leave the suggested "Haiku". You can also select another blocksize; the default of 2048 should be fine for most uses, though.
Click Initialize to continue.
11. If everything still looks fine, click Write changes, otherwise abort with the Cancel button.
12. The partition has been initialized with the Be File System. Click OK to close this notification.
13. You can now see the file system type and name has been updated in the list. Also, the graphical representation should now bear the correct name. The partition setup is now complete.
Close DriveSetup by clicking on close widget on the left upper corner of the yellow window tab.
14. The Installer window re-appears and should now show an updated list of target partitions under Onto. Now choose your freshly initialized partition (or a pre-existing one if you already had one) as the installation target.
15. The volume with the name Haiku has been chosen as the target for installation. Click on Begin to start the installation.
16. The installation process collects some information before starting to copy data. This can take a few seconds.
Soon after, packages start to be copied and a progress bar with a file count is displayed. While the copying is taking place, it is always possible to quit the process by clicking on the Stop button.
17. When the copying process is finished, you can quit the installer by clicking on Quit. The install CD will be ejected, and the system will restart after a few seconds. Do not forget to remove the Haiku CD from your drive.
Note that the Installer will take no steps to integrate Haiku into an existing boot manager menu. The Haiku partition itself will be made bootable, though. From the Tools menu you can launch the Boot Manager that puts a menu in the boot sector to choose what operating system to boot.
Boot Manager isn't yet tested very well and still has a few restrictions that it will complain about if they aren't met: the menu can only be installed on your first harddisk and there has to be a 2KiB space after the Master Boot Record (MBR).
You don't need to run Boot Manager if you already use a bootmanager like Grub, in which case you have to add Haiku manually, or Haiku runs exclusively on your machine. The Boot Manager panel will guide you through installing or uninstalling the boot menu.
