It took the developers nearly six years to move from alpha 4 to beta 1, but it's finally here - Haiku R1/beta1 has been released. Haiku is a free and open-source general-purpose operating system inspired by the defunct BeOS. The most notable change in this release is the introduction of a package management system: "After nearly 6 years since R1/alpha4, Haiku R1/beta1 has been released. ... By far the largest change in this release is the addition of a complete package management system. Finalized and merged during 2013 thanks to a series of contracts funded from donations, Haiku's package management system is unique in a variety of ways. Rather than keeping a database of installed files with a set of tools to manage them, Haiku packages are a special type of compressed filesystem image, which is 'mounted' upon installation (and thereafter on each boot) by the packagefs, a kernel component. This means that the /system/ hierarchy is now read-only, since it is merely an amalgamation of the presently installed packages at the system level (and the same is true for the ~/config/ hierarchy, which contains all the packages installed at the user level), ensuring that the system files themselves are incorruptible."
