[openbeos] Re: openbeos Digest V8 #104

> >> 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.

Well, Be had to choose, since I suppose they didn't have enough ppl to 
handle both, but indeed that ended up as a bad idea.
Also because the market and tech wasn't ready for it back then.

> 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.

Just like m68k, doing it doesn't mean it will be actively supported.

> >> 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.
> 

From what I've done on m68k I'd say it's not too hard as long as you 
target arm with mmu. mmu-less ones aren't worth it.

> Of course, now with the Intel Nano processors in the market, mobile 
> computing doesn't necessarily mean mostly ARM any more.

Which is funny because XScale is just what intel made from their arm 
licence...
and as I heard, they made sure it wouldn't be too fast to avoid 
competing their own cpu :)

François.

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