Guest post by Haiku R1/Alpha 4 had a couple critical bugs that were immediately identified and resolved shortly after release. These issues affected a significant number of users, and Haiku developers felt it made sense to do an Alpha 4.1 point release to provide a better experience for subsequent user downloads. The new download links and torrents have been provided, and they encourage people to update.
I was about to post a disgruntled post over at the last news update. I’m a fan of Haiku, but was upset that a laptop previously capable of running the system, now failed to install the OS properly. Alright, time to give it another go.
I’m sure the devs are happy for the users that reported the bugs resulting in them getting fixed rather than making disgruntled posts on the press release.
Two critical bugs, only when booting from on read-only media.
What to say? A “normal” installation would be on a hard disk (partition) or an USB memory key or a virtual machine. Installing Haiku on a read-only medium is of very limited use, and in practice it’s also more work and more expensive to write a CD-ROM, resulting in a slower boot-up… I don’t understand why they still support read-only media and why some users insist on using them.
On the other hand, an OS that can boot from read-only media is more flexible and probably boots faster and with less chance of problems. The Haiku team strives for perfection, it seems.
Well, probably because some devices are from the same days as when BeOS emerged. And yet I haven’t seen one of those devices booting from a usb stick.
Even my IBM Thinkpad T42 from 2005 cannot do that. And that is my main machine running Haiku.
Edited 2012-11-16 08:22 UTC
Nice to hear that. Do you mind to recommend me good tutorials or documents for installing haiku on a T42?
Thanks in advance
Or, indeed, on any Thinkpad. Hopefully I’ll have a spare x200s to play with it on. So long as the video and networking work, of course.
Haiku has full hardware support except for cpuidle on the x120e. I’ve seen pics.
It’s been a while since I’ve played with Haiku (sadly), but it’s a fairly simple process unless things have changed drastically. In broad strokes:
1) Setup a partition on the drive.
2) Write a Haiku image to a thumb drive & boot from it.
3) In Haiku, open the Installer application.
4) Choose the thumbdrive as the source & the new partition as the destination.
5) Run the install.
The installer application was one of my favourite things about BeOS, you could use it to copy the contents of one drive to another (I often used it as a backup tool/poor man’s Ghost). The install CD literally just booted into BeOS, with a customized bootscript that ran the installer instead of the desktop.
But I digress…
I would write something about it, if there was any hints necessary to give. Just dd the iso to a cdrom and install haiku on the T42. Everything worked from boot up!
This heavily depends on the available drivers of course.
How about the machines which can’t boot from USB and still have a floppy drive? Could a boot floppy be created with the updated code and allow booting Haiku to perform an install from the CD-ROM?
The T4x series did not have a floppy drive but could boot from an USB floppy. There are probably many other laptops from the same era which could do the same. And a boot-floppy is a lot smaller to download then a CD-ROM image even if it is compressed.
It is excellent that the Haiku team figured the issue out and fixed it quickly. I had downloaded R1A4 had had problems with systems which had no issues with R1A3.
It’s mainly a concern because quite a few people try to install the OS onto their normal read-write media by booting from a CD ; obviously if the latter won’t boot then they’re not going to get very far at trying the OS out. In any case, the bug doesn’t actually pertain to read-only vs read-write per se, it’s an issue where the list of loaded images wouldn’t be properly normalized because a bug in some of the hashtable iteration code would result in entries getting skipped (if you’re morbidly curious about the details, see http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/?id=ad53cd29cb74a329731b9e759… ).
And you run into KDL for the first time ever for just installing ..
I’m crossing my fingers this was just a glitch!
Before I download the ISO:
Can Haiku handle Solid State Drives that need some things taken care by the OS?
(like TRIM and such…)
Don’t count on it. Haiku filesystem drivers are dicey things, and I wouldn’t recommend subjecting an SSD to it just yet. Windows and Linux both have TRIM support on the default filesystems, so they’re what I would recommend for an SSD.
We detect TRIM support… and can act on the OS TRIM SCSI request… but the other two sides of that process aren’t complete
http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/?id=b937bd211c37af1cbd71f58ab…
I have been using a Intel SSD 80GB for over two years now. Haiku has always run great for me on my machines: Toshiba NB305, Aspire One, Toshiba Satellite C670, Compaq Desktop.
My old Dells used Compact-Flash cards with an adapter and also had no problems.
Haiku unlike Windows rarely writes to the drive if you are not saving your data/files.
Absolutely amazing progress!
Booted the VMWare image in Fusion. Everything I tried worked. Absolutely superb work, well done!
I just made a short howto:
http://techmonks.net/installing-haiku-directly-to-a-disk-partition/