Warms my heart that we still have a user using mutt for email on Birdhouse Hosting (though he's struggling to get it configured for SSL and non-standard ports). Not only that, but he's doing it with BeOS! Kicking it old-school, baby.
Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
You know, even with its quirks and strange bugs, I still miss Beatware's Mail-It. I used that app for years for all of my email.
You know, even with its quirks and strange bugs, I still miss Beatware's Mail-It. I used that app for years for all of my email.
You know, even with its quirks and strange bugs, I still miss Beatware's Mail-It. I used that app for years for all of my email.
Must be Pete ;) he dual-boots BeOS and Haiku, and I think he said he was working on mutt recently.
Must be Pete ;) he dual-boots BeOS and Haiku, and I think he said he was working on mutt recently.
Scott, wow! I never in a million years thought the user would be identified. You just blew my mind. But yeah, his use case is that unique.
And yes, Mail-It was a good little client! Though I didn't miss it till you mentioned it Dean.
Ya know, with the urges I've been having lately, I'm sorely tempted to decommission my Windows gaming computer and install Haiku–maybe even dual boot with BeOS, if the hardware is compatible. Hmmm…
Nice. A config option would be to use something like fetchmail locally, and dump into Mutt from there. Ahhh, Mail-It, I miss that wackily subdued color scheme.
Dean, I've never actually tried Haiku. Kind of curious, in a morbid kind of way. The only thing that's really in the way is time.
Nate, I'll suggest that to Pete if he isn't able to solve it, thanks.
I have followed the development of Haiku since day one, and I appreciate what the developers are doing and what they have given and continue to give to the community. I've taken each of the Haiku alpha releases for a test drive as they've become available, and a few of the nightlies along the way as well. Overall it has seemed like a pretty good project, but for whatever reason, it just doesn't have the "feel" of BeOS yet to me, and maybe it never will. I really want to like it the way I once did BeOS, but last time I tried it out, it still wasn't there. I'm not sure where the problem is–and it might be that the problem is with me.
Scott, I recently found an old .zip file of mail and contacts from a BeOS machine so I loaded up Haiku on a USB thumb drive so I could read them easily. Pretty nostalgia-inducing even though I haven't had time to really check it out beyond that.
Dean, could it be the fact that when it came out, Windows and MacOS were so bad, and current hardware so slow, that BeOS really stood out? I'd guess that the bar has been raised very high by OS X especially, but also by Windows 7, and even recent Ubuntus, that BeOS/Haiku feels like a piece of history rather than revolutionary. I think a lot of the motivation for BeOS' existence has been erased since then.
Mike thanks for the recommendation. Will Haiku boot on a Mac? Or in VirtualBox?
I booted it directly from the USB drive on an old Windows laptop – didn't try it on the Mac.
Haiku works in vmware, virtualbox and a few others. The VirtualBox support should be better soon, as we had a Google Summer of Code student work on the VirtualBox support. As for the feel of BeOS in Haiku, I agree is doesn't have that same feel. In the Alpha3 release we forget to turn off the serial debugging, so it may feel a bit slower than it should be, which may or may not change the feel of the system. It's good to hear people are giving it a try out with each new release. Be sure to provide bug feedback so that it can be even better one day.
http://www.haiku-os.org/blog/scgtrp/2011-09-05_vbox_guest_additions_slightly_late_final_progress_report
Here's where you can get it:
http://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku
+Dean Coffey Check Haiku out on your hardware and if there's anything that's not quite supported, check Haiku's trac to see if there is already a ticket for it and if not, open one. If your hardware is a mac then it's probably won't work yet, although I hear that is getting closer to working as well.
Next time you fire it up try out stack and tile, it was developed at the University of Auckland.
S&T in action
Scot, I think your observation has a lot to do with it. I remember learning something new about the OS and its capabilities daily–and usually being surprised/impressed/amazed. When others would ask me why I didn't have a newer/faster computer, I'd ask them if they'd like to do some side-by-side testing, and usually it would end with them asking, "Why can't my newer computer do that?" or something similar about speed/apps/"coolness". Of course it didn't hurt that I devoured most of the info I could find related to BeOS, and tweaked-tweaked-tweaked for performance. As a matter of fact, I still have a certain "Bible" sitting on my bookshelf, and I still get it out and thumb through every once in a while–it was my favorite Christmas present the year that I received it. :)
+Scott McCreary I have a system with Alpha 3 installed, and IIRC all of the hardware works acceptably. Somehow I missed the info about the serial debugging being on in A3, so that might explain a bit of my frustration and wondering why I didn't see the same level of improvement that I had seen from A1 to A2. I think I should download a nightly soon, and pop it onto the Haiku box and see how it does.
I remember the quote from Intel CEO Andy Grove: "I had no idea my hardware was capable of this kind of performance."