ok... tested!

the cd is a live installer (it lets you run from a cd, or install), which is nice. it takes a hella time to load up.

A new desktop environment. the taskbar is a little box in the top right. its pretty basic, but does have a nice feature to mount partitions straight from the desktop, to the desktop. I used this to mount my Linux partition and listen to some mp3 files, the music player is horrible (reminiscent of the original quick time player, where its just a bar with progres and play/pause/next buttons. also, it lacks any real volume control. i almost blew out my ears...) It uses double-click, which was a pain since im used to KDE...

there are hardly any apps, and i couldnt find wifi networking anywhere. (that may be because its alpha1) It was running slow, but that's to be expected from a live cd, so i decided to install.

that's where problems began. it has virtually no quick install option, since the system uses a unique filesystem: Be
so i booted into my slack, and set aside a separate 4gb partition for the new OS. I re inserted the disk, and i formatted this new partition to Be filesystem. i installed the OS to there.

It took forever to install. the whole system is only three hundred and eighty something mb, but it took longer to install than it took me to install 4.8 gb of slackware. it doesn't write itself to the loader, so once its installed, you can't boot from it unless its the only OS on your machine. i tried to fix this by adding it to my LILO. i put in my slackware installation CD, (i use that to edit the setup of LILO because its easier than changing the configuration manually), and i added Haiku as a new OS. i took out the setup cd and restarted my machine. i chose to boot from Haiku, and i got a kernel panic. this is not related to the OS, though, just my bootloader. but a pain nonetheless

From what i saw of the OS on the live cd, it doesn't really seem to have any groundbreaking new features that most Linux distros don't already have. I couldnt find a terminal anywhere, or any type of cmd interface for that matter. I assume its going to be mainly a GUI os, with hardly any command interfacing.

Nice looking, and pretty nifty. but its just that. Nice looking and Nifty. doesn't really seem like its going to be very functional or powerful for a while. Once i get it fixed in LILO ill update since itll run faster.

Theres my first impression. hope you find it useful, and i encourage it to see for yourself, definitely worth a test run, since it DOES have a live cd.