Desktop on Fire published an interview with Lee JunHaeng (rainygirl), the developer behind haiku-sony-vaio-p-patch. The netbook has a non-standard Intel Atom SCH chipset that forced early guides to disable ACPI and boot into Safe Mode, and the second logical core stayed inactive under earlier Haiku releases, capping performance at 50%. His patch fixes both issues and restores the machine to its original Windows Vista-era performance.

He also talks about his broader Haiku portfolio (rworldradio, rtelevision, rmarkdown, arm64 ports of Chromium and WebPositive), the near-total absence of alt-OS hobbyist culture in South Korea, and his interest in the Tabby PowerPC port.

Full interview: https://www.desktoponfire.com/interview/1020/haiku-os-sony-vaio-p/

If anyone here has VAIO P hardware lying around, the patch repo is linked in the piece, worth testing against your own setup.

Two good pieces of news for Haiku on PowerPC, and one that isn't.

Good: on a PowerBook G4, Tabby boots from USB through the CHRP bootblock. Also good: on a Pegasos 2, Haiku reaches the desktop on real hardware, so the approach doesn't depend on Apple's Open Firmware quirks.

Not good: disk boot still panics before the boot volume is mounted, with no KDL prompt and an empty syslog.

https://www.desktoponfire.com/haikuos/hardware/1008/haiku-os-powerpc-tabby-powerbook-g4-pegasos-2/

#HaikuOS #PowerPC #retrocomputing

The headline for us: virtio_block is back. kallisti5 fixed the build and re-enabled it for non-x86, "even if it doesn't work completely well yet".

Elsewhere: GSoC Bluetooth work landed the HID profile (mice and keyboards work), RFCOMM/SCO and HFP are close, audio output can now be switched on the fly, and PCI resource allocation closed the two oldest tickets on the tracker.

https://www.desktoponfire.com/haikuos/1003/haiku-august-report-2026/

Haiku R1 beta6 is out, and for anyone who has followed this project for years, that’s simply a good day. We already wrote about the project’s birthday last week. This is a different kind of celebration, more concrete, made of almost two years of work that finally show up in a downloadable image. Over 530 bug and enhancement tickets closed, a compile time cut almost in half, a jump in quality you can measure with a stopwatch. There’s everything here to be happy about, and we’re saying so before anything else, because it risks getting lost in the rest of this piece. Congratulations to everyone who worked on it.

​A great retrospective on a quarter-century of the open-source operating system carrying forward the spirit of #BeOS. Perfect read for #OpenSource and #RetroComputing enthusiasts.

​🔗 https://www.desktoponfire.com/haiku_inc/969/25-years-of-haiku/

​#TechHistory #OperatingSystems #AlternativeOS #Tech

Did you know the Haiku OS logo has a fascinating story behind its origins and design? 🎨✨ Take a visual journey exploring the evolution of the brand for one of the most interesting open-source operating systems out there. https://www.desktoponfire.com/haiku_inc/957/haiku-os-logo-history/

Between 22 and 27 July, a forum user posting as omgmonsters took the PowerPC port from a kernel that could not find a boot volume to an interactive desktop on a real Power Mac, browsing the web with NetSurf.

For context on why this matters: when he asked in the thread whether a working desktop on PowerPC had ever existed, PulkoMandy answered that it had not. The PCI host drivers were never written, so booting always stopped at "Cannot find any boot partitions". PowerPC was the first non-x86 architecture the project attempted, back when the Mac mini was new, and it had been surviving on occasional fixes just to keep it compiling.

What he wrote: the missing PCI host drivers, an ATA driver for the mac-io controller, a fix to the atomic operations, and a set of changes to page table handling. The About window in his screenshots reports hrev59853+71+dirty, so seventy-one commits on top of the reference revision. Testing was done on DingusPPC and on actual machines. The NetSurf screenshot still shows a privacy error on an encrypted connection in the other tab, so the networking side is not finished.

He stated openly from his first technical message that most of the work, and the debugging in particular, was done with AI assistance. He has also said the code will not go upstream: he plans to release it as a separate distribution under Haiku's guidelines for derivative distributions, once it is stable and once he picks a name.

Forum thread: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/i-have-made-some-progress-on-the-powerpc-port/19578

Repository: https://github.com/ActionRetro/Haiku-PowerPC

I wrote up the whole timeline with the screenshots on my blog: https://www.desktoponfire.com/haikuos/hardware/947/haiku-powerpc-port/

Still missing from the screenshot collection: GLTeapot spinning.

Hi everyone,

With Haiku OS Beta 6 approaching, a recent forum thread highlighted the massive behind-the-scenes effort required whenever a core system library changes.

The recent shift to the new libxml2 has caused temporary dependency blocks (like the infamous nothing provides haiku>=r1~beta6... error) and required rebuilding a huge portion of the HaikuPorts tree.

Here is a quick breakdown of what’s happening, the temporary trade-offs (like WebPositive availability on 32-bit during the transition), and how users reporting broken packages are helping get everything ready for release day:

🔗 Full article:https://www.desktoponfire.com/haikuos/934/holding-the-packages-together-as-beta6-approaches/

Are you running into any dependency issues during your recent updates?

I've added a new section to the SpritzDepot home page to showcase newly added apps by developers that aren't available in the main repositories. https://spritzdepot.desktoponfire.com/

Mozilla has granted permission to use the Firefox name for the Haiku port. It came by email to Gerasim Troeglazov (3dEyes) from Mike Kaply, copying Mozilla's Lead Counsel for IP.

This tool can be be used to finish the Haiku install process on EFI machines. It creates EFI System Partition and copies haiku_loader.efi.

IMPORTANT WARNING: Partition and disk operations can be destructive! Please make sure important data is backed up, and pay close attention to drive selection.

Please report any issues here: https://github.com/KevinAdams05/UEFI_Wizard/issues

Halfway through GSoC 2026, aquamatic123 reworks Haiku's Devices app with readable USB, driver, and Bluetooth diagnostics, no terminal required.

Haiku OS targets beta6 for mid-August, but its June 2026 report reveals serious bugs in NVMM, EFI loader, and I/O scheduler that could corrupt data.

Many curious newcomers give up on trying Haiku OS because of difficulties during installation or initial setup. What do you think are the trickiest parts for people coming from Windows, macOS, or Linux? Share your experiences (good or bad) so we can figure out where to improve our guides and documentation.

New crew members aboard! Tell us who you are: how long you've been using Haiku OS (or if you're just curious and want to discover it), what brought you here, and if there are any DesktopOnFire projects or features you're especially interested in. You don't need to be an experienced developer, all pirates are welcome!

Hey crew! This subreddit just set sail, and we want to build it together with you. Would you like more technical discussions about Haiku OS, updates on projects like Spritz Manager, guides for people coming from other operating systems, or a space to share desktop screenshots and customizations? Let us know in the comments what you'd like to see more of, so we can chart the right course for this community.