I just had the distinct pleasure of running HaikuOS on my desktop PC a few minutes ago. It actually booted into a stable, pretty, semi-usable desktop. What's the big deal, you ask? Well if you don't want to buy a Mac and don't want to deal with all of the crap that Linux foists on you, then HaikuOS is naturally the project to keep an eye on. In case y'all don't know, it's an open source clone of BeOS. There are still some real holes in terms of the subsystems, but they have come a long way in the past four years. IMO, it would be safe to say that they have covered more ground in those four years than Linux did in its first four years.

To give it a shot, download either BeOS Max Edition or BeOS Developer Edition. Install one of those on a partition you can spare, then take the latest image from Sikosis and copy it from a Windows or Linux partition onto the main BFS partition. Mount it with this command mount -t bfs haiku.image Haiku. Then format a second partition, copy all of the contents from the Haiku image you just mounted over to the new BFS partition and update BootMan. Sounds a little technical, but it's a lot faster and more trouble-free than installing Linux or Windows. Be warned, though. BeOS Developer Edition defaults to French in the installer. Neither the Developer Edition or Max Edition are official releases. They're just hacked together updates of the old BeOS R5 Personal Edition released before Be went tits up in 2001.

Also, if you care about competition, go to the HaikuOS team website and send them a small donation to help them keep the Haiku Foundation going. I just contributed my $10 tonight.