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Newsflash: First Haiku distro out

OSNews.com reports: First Haiku Distribution Released! The Polish developer Grzegorz Dabrowski has released the first version of Pingwinek/Haiku, and with that he is the first to bundle the current Haiku snapshot with a bunch of applications into a distribution.

Quoted from Pingwinek
Pingwinek GNU/Haiku 0.1.0 is probably the first Haiku distribution. Beside the base Haiku system, it contains 40 packages ported from Pingwinek GNU/Linux distribution. It contains compiler (GCC 2.95.3), several simple games, SDL, Midnight Commander, ncurses.

I've prepared several screenshots of the distribution working on a real hardware. The distribution can be downloaded in a three ways: QEMU image, VMWare image and LiveCD. The LiveCD boots slowly but the games work much better then running under QEMU or VMWare. The LiveCD contains a read only filesystem which could cause some problems. The distribution doesn't have an installer which could install system on a hard disk. I think that some people will be able to do that without it. The Haiku system is still in an alpha state, so please be forgiving. Every next release should be more stable. Have a lot of fun!

Although I think it's a good thing that there are people interested in creating their own distro's of Haiku I doubt it if the Main Haiku dev's will feel the same way, from the beginning they have stated that they don't intend to release until 'When it's done'. Besides that apart from a qute name and a couple of games Pingwinek doesn't offer much more than the images available from the Haiku Build factory and it doesn't include an installer, something that any distro in the future should have. I do wonder if Pingwinek makes it possible to compile C++ under Haiku, since two of the packages included are GCC (2.95.3) and automake. I'll be testing that tomorrow.


Pingwinek showing the bundled packages and Midnight Commander

As said, Pingwinek/Haiku doesn't come with an installer, but there are vmWare and QEMU images and a Live-CD. Look here for downloads, and here for screenshots.