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by experimental 5449 days ago
You could help out coding Haiku OS (www.haiku-os.org) which is an x86 clean-room open source continuation of the once commercial BeOS being developed by a committed team. The emphasis is on native code, fast, lightweight and being super-responsive. You can have 10 videos playing at once (I don't know how much, but it's designed to never block a user's actions) and it doesn't bat an eye. It has binary compatibility with BeOS and new apps are being created for it all the time (avoiding the chicken-and-egg problem). There is a variety of them (some open sourced professional apps). It is not UNIX-like, but it has POSIX compatibility. Haiku has a journaling-file system which is fast and supports user-definable attributes (Be engineers brought a subset of it to Apple with them developing Spotlight and Microsoft had been working on a similar feature). Stack and Tile (haikuos.info/video/stack-and-tile.html) is a cool windows management feature unique because of tabs for window titles. The OS API is said to be the simplest and a joy to use.

Some of the languages available: C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, Lua, Haskell, Scheme, Squirrel, Yabasic, bash (comes with a bash shell), zsh

Some of the developer tools available: Paladin (its own IDE), Git, Hg (Mercurial), GNU Compiler Collection, Vim, QEMU, Bochs

Some of the technologies used: Multi-process WebKit browser, OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL and Qt libraries, Gutenprint and CUPS for printing, FreeBSD network drivers, Haiku Vector Icon Format

On the way: An ARM port, Clang with the already working LLVM, OpenJDK, Gallium3D, package management, more language bindings for the API

Included below is ways to contact, lessons and software sources:

freelists.org/list/haiku

freelists.org/list/haiku-development

haiku-inc.org

haiku-screencasts.blogspot.com

www.haiku-os.org/blog/darkwyrm

www.osnews.com/story/24945/A_Programmer_s_Introduction_to_the_Haiku_OS

haikuware.com (back online shortly)

bebits.com

There's also a wallpaper contest going on. I am not affiliated but I'd love to see more people get involved in this great OS! :)