Following on from Chris's Screenshots of Haiku on Real Hardware, I thought I'd post my own experiences and some other stuff from around the net.

My own approaching antique self-build box - Intel Celeron 1.7, 512MB RAM, Radeon 7000, SB Live!, 3Com 3c905 - has been booting Haiku to a 1280x1024, accelerated colour desktop for some time now. While once hugely unstable, it now runs for quite some time before dying, although I've not managed to get sound or any networking working. Haiku has, in the time I've used it on that box, gone from launching a graphical terminal to starting with Deskbar, running Tracker, and having working icons, Tracker navigation, and indeed most of the functionality of the BeOS GUI.

However, I've not tried running many applications bar those in the image. BePDF starts and crashes only after almost entirely loading if double clicked, but if opened with Open With, actually manages to render a PDF, and thats about the extent of my experimentation.

But, not all is lost for nice screenshots for this article, oh no. Haiku developer, Axel Dörfler has a screenshot on his site of VLC 0.7.2 running and playing a video (My Name Is Earl, apparently). VLC is rather a large, ported application, and running it is quite an achievement, which required the fixing of a number of bugs, and the implementation of other such things as SSE2 and SSE3, changes to locale handling, and some work on Overlay support. Most notably, that is an unmodified R5 binary, not a recompile for Haiku.

Also available for your viewing pleasure is 3dEyes gallery (warning, text is in Russian), which shows a number of themed collections - games, media tools, image viewers, etc - of unmodified R5 applications.