A little less than a year ago we reviewed Haiku Release 1 Alpha 1 and it was pretty damned impressive. With one glaring problem: No WiFi. Nearly a year later, we finally get our grubby little hands on Alpha 2…

As you may or may not know Haiku OS Alpha 1 was recently released. It is a full featured and improved clone of the old BeOS. OSNews has a nice review starting with a bit of history.

The second alpha release of the Haiku desktop, open source, operating system, successor to the earlier BeOS, is now available to download

Haiku is a free operating system and an alternative to Linux. It celebrated its seventh birthday on 18 August, and it's still being actively developed. Haiku is nowhere near being considered a finished product, but it's now stable enough for everyday use. Most importantly, it's very interesting.

BeOS was one of those promising operating systems that never really managed to gain any kind of market share. The Haiku project has taken it upon themselves to continue the development of BeOS, and has slowly been making their way to a version 1.0 release.

Haiku OS, the nine year old project to develop an open-source BeOS-compatible operating system, is hoping it will receive a new OpenGL stack this year. The Haiku project, like X.Org, will be participating in this year's Google Summer of Code project where the search engine giant pays many student developers to work on code for various open-source projects.

The ReactOS team has released version 0.3.7 of its Windows NT compatible operating system. This release along with the rest of the 0.3.x series is still considered alpha quality software.

Except for those operating systems that are still gaining their foothold (Haiku, Syllable, ReactOS), it seems as though we are becoming increasingly platform independent.

When I started my tenure as marketing lead for the Haiku project in 2006, my highest priority was to renovate the project's Web site. Haiku had been using a custom-coded site which was showing its shortcomings as the project and the community grew in size.