The Haiku Project is proud to announce the availability of Haiku R1A2, its second official alpha release. Haiku is an open source operating system that specifically targets personal computing intended for desktop use. Alpha 2 is a stable development release and a milestone on the way to the upcoming Release 1.
Eight months ago the Haiku Project released its first alpha, making many aware of its presence. Alpha 2 is the direct result of the contributions of many volunteers from around the world. With it the project hopes to entice more people to contribute, growing the project and reaching the goals for R1, and beyond.
The Haiku developer team is excited to have this improved version available to a wider audience and more extensively tested, and invites the public to help improve the quality of Haiku.
Notable Changes Between Alpha 1 and Alpha 2
WiFi support with WEP encryption introduced
WebPositive – a native Webkit based browser
New Locale Kit allows localization/translation
Improved USB mass storage performance
ACPI enabled by default
Bash command-line shell updated to version 4.x
Message Signal Interrupts (MSI)
Increased POSIX compliance
Increased performance