[openbeos] Re: openbeos Digest V8 #104

Nicholas Blachford wrote:


DarkWyrm wrote:


This could probably be a nice niche market for Haiku, considering its
low hardware requirements, if someone had sufficient interest in writing
for the hardware.


I think it's a wide open market so has good potential.
Contrast that to the desktop where Haiku is not likely to ever be anything beyond a small 2nd league player. I don't mean that in a nasty way, but given that Linux has never even made a dent what hope has anyone else?
This echoes very strongly of Be's focus shift. I'm not an expert on marketing, and though I'm not sure, I may be the only former Be employee on the list, but Be (in my humble opinion) made a grave error with that focus shift and bid for the internet appliance market. It wasn't the shift itself, but the fact that they/we made no commitment whatsoever to BeOS after that point especially in light of the release of BeOS 5 PE. I had just been hired by Be a week or two before the focus shift announcement, and I was manning the info@xxxxxx email address until months after the release of R5, and the amount of interest was staggering. There are still emails that ended up in my account that I never read because I was too overwhelmed.
To summarize my wandering thought process, I think it would be a mistake to try to target Haiku at the mobile market, though supporting it (provided sufficient developer time) is a good idea. There's nothing stopping anyone from making a mobile distro of Haiku if the appropriate architecture is supported, perhaps it could even become an official distribution at some point. 
Someone new would probably need to
step up for work on it to begin, and I don't know the details  of
Haiku's kernel-level architecture, but I have a feeling that there'd be
more than a little work required to get it running on ARM.



The Haiku kernel was based on NewOS, how far away from it has it moved?
I ask because there's a partial ARM port in the NewOS source tree.
If Travis is still working in his usual methodical way, I doubt there would be too much difficulty in integrating the changes. I have no kernel experience, but I can't imagine it would be too much more difficult than adding the new code and some #ifdef ARCHITECTURE/#ifeq ARCHITECTURE ARM or similar statements.
Of course, now with the Intel Nano processors in the market, mobile computing doesn't necessarily mean mostly ARM any more. 

Just my $0.02...
Raymond

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