Be. It’s not just the second letter of the alphabet, it’s the name of an operating system from yesteryear. BeOS, to be specific – and it’s coming back with a vengeance under the name ‘Haiku’:

Haiku is an open source operating system currently in development designed from the ground up for desktop computing. Inspired in the Be Operating System, Haiku aims to provide users of all levels with a personal computing experience that is simple yet powerful, and void of any unnecessary complexities.

So, if you want to play with something on your PC that isn’t Windows or Linux, you can give the ol’ Be a whirl:

Haiku is still in development, so there are no end user releases available for download yet. We do have builds available that testers and developers can download for either bug reporting or development purposes.

And yes, you can actually play with Haiku within Windows itself after downloading an image and using it with the free VMWare player. I don’t know if the OS is ready for prime time, but I’m certain that power users aplenty will enjoy the new Haiku.

[tags]haiku, beos, os x, linux, windows, os, operating system[/tags]