[openbeos] Re: openbeos Digest V8 #104
- From: "François Revol" <revol@xxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:54:13 +0200 CEST
> >> 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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