23 replies to this topic

[gentoo42]

...the bad news is that you are greeted with a kernel panic. :)



The text says:
PANIC: vm_page_fault: unhandled page fault in kernel space at 0x31, ip 0x802fdc99
Welcome to Kernel Debugging Land...
Running on CPU 0
kdebug>_

I've never been a BeOS person, but a friend at work asked if it would run, so I tried it.

[subcypher]

...and I am that friend. I don't have my own Eee PC yet, but will within a month from now. I think up things I'd like to do once my Eee PC gets here and make gentoo42 try them.

BeOS was, by far, my favorite operating system when I was in University. I just wish it had either not died or taken off better once it did die.

[mkstevo]

Haiku / BeOS is (or was) very fussy about the system under which it will load I found , not liking many graphics cards , DDR memory or ACPI systems . On some versions you could press a key at startup ( space bar ? ) and then select various options . Usually turning all the options off would enable it to eventually boot , but even this was not reliable , and often once installed to hard disk you were back in kernel debugging land , as there seemed no way to turn off enough of the options to make it boot , so wasting an entire hour or two .

Have you tried BeOS MAX ? This was the last version of Be that I used , it is 'recent' enough to have support for AMD processors* and was fairly stable . The developers seem to have moved on to Haiku , but it looks as though the old images are still available .

I really liked Be , I was going to purchase a real copy of it , but then they folded . The nearest modern equivalent is Apple OS X . I see somebody has managed to load this onto an EEE , if I could believe it was going to be reliable , I'd really like to put that on my EEE .

*[Yes I realise that the EEE has an Intel Inside , but thought this showed how BeOS MAX were catching up with some of the hardware . I can't remember if BeOS MAX supports DDR memory , but it definitely had AMD support]

Edited by mkstevo, 16 February 2008 - 09:00 AM.

[muriani]

I tried to install Zeta/BeOS MAX/Dev Edition (R5.0.4) on the Eee unsuccessfully, as well.
It doesn't like installing from USB CDROM, and you can't install elsewhere and image the install to the drive. It requires a boot sector signature specific to that machine which is written to the drive upon installation.

Else, I'd "Be" a happy man with my Eee.

For now I'm stuck with XP.

[joninatl]

I miss BEOS.
Built a dual celeron box for it back in the day.
Would love to have it running in me Eee.

[gentoo42]

I tried with the latest nightly build again just for kicks. It gets a little bit further, but still ends in a kernel panic.

PANIC: get_ boot_partitions_failed!


I'm guessing it doesn't appreciate being booted off an SD card.

[gentoo42]

Found there is already a bug report on this that is being worked on:

http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/1671

[blind cyclist]

Another oldtime ex-BeOS user here. It would be incredibly cool to have BeOS run on the eee.

[Ed_Ca22]

haiku works now! Havent tried it myself but look here:

http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/1671

Theres no LAN, wireless or sound, and apparently some strange issues with the display resolution, but its getting there! Woohoo!

[kingduct]

BeOS was pretty awesome. That said, I think that if you liked it, you will find the standard Xandros install pretty acceptable (and much better than XP). It is fast, simple, and reliable. It also has a hell of a lot more software available than any of the BeOS descendants.

I understand that that isn't a very satisfying answer...

[blind cyclist]

Xandros is nice, but BeOS still had (has? Some peeps still use it, believe it or not) better music SW. My favourite MIDI sequencer, Sequitur, is a BeOS app. And my favourite analog-modeling softsynth, Objekt Synth, runs on BeOS, too.

[bornagainpenguin]

I just wanted to bump this to see if anyone knows anything new about getting Haiku to run on the EeePC?

--bornagainpenguin

[paulfxh]

Yes, I have a native install (non-VM) of Haiku running on my EeePC 901 as part of a triple-boot system (other OSes are Xandros, Ubuntu).
It runs and looks very well (no resolution problem as reported earlier) and is very fast. It boots to a fully operational desktop in 11 seconds (compare this to 35 seconds for Xandros Advanced and 80 seconds for Ubuntu). The image I installed takes up less than 100 MB on the partition.
The biggest problem is that there is no Internet connection as the current Haiku image does not include drivers for either the Ethernet controller: Attansic Technology Corp card or the Network controller: RaLink wireless card. However, I understand the ethernet card driver is currently being developed for Haiku.
I really would consider Haiku as my primary OS if it only had an internet connection.

[bornagainpenguin]

Quote

I really would consider Haiku as my primary OS if it only had an internet connection.

I'd definitely be dual booting it at least, that's for sure!

I guess I'll be waiting a bit longer then until someone ports over some working drivers...

--bornagainpenguin

PS: What kind of battery life do you get?

[ZilverZurfarn]

Hmmm - Encoraged by paulfxh's post I tried one of the more recent images on my 900, but I am always dumped to the kernel debugger at random points at the end of the boot process. Once I did even see a window on the desktop, but then it crashed again.
I'm dd'ing the image (the bigger 400 MB version) to a 512 MB SD card that I boot from.
paulfxh, did you do anything special to get your install working?

/Zilver

[paulfxh]

Quote

paulfxh, did you do anything special to get your install working?
/Zilver

I believe that just dd'ing the image over does not format the partition (or card in your case) to the required BeFS. Also the partition won't be bootable.
However, building the image directly to where you want it, will include both of these necessary procedures.
At least, that is my understanding.
What I did was:

1. Use Gparted on a USB key to create a 800 MB parttion on my 16 GB HD. Formatted to FAT32 (although I don't believe what it's formatted to is important AND my partition size was way too big).
2. Used this guide to prepare all the tools and Haiku source needed for the build (Make sure you have enough space on on whatever Linux partition you are working on -- I can't remember exactly but you might need at least 2 GB free space).
Follow this guide only to step 5 (don't do step 6).
3. Use this second guide for the building of the Haiku image on your partition (i.e. prepare the UserBuildConfiq file and run the jam commands).
4. I use the Xandros Grub bootloader to boot all three OSes on my system. So, I had to open the Xandros /boot/grub/menu.lst and add this section

Quote

# Haiku on /dev/sdb4
title Haiku
rootnoverify (hd1,3)
chainloader +1

5. Reboot and enjoy Haiku

The whole build procedure took about 4 hours on my machine.
Note that if you're not currently multibooting, you probably need to comment out the 'hidden menu' line in /boot/grub/menu.lst. Remember that you can't access the Xandros / partition from Xandros itself. You have to do it either from a Live USB or from another OS on the same machine.
After the image has been built, you can delete all the build tools and Haiku source on your Linux partition to regain the considerable space tied up by this stuff.

I had considered importing one of the larger nightly Haiku raw images, now that I have a partition formatted to BeFS, and using the Haiku/BeOS build tools to make the partition boot (Haiku has a makebootable command). But I haven't done this yet.

If you have any questions, just post.

[ZilverZurfarn]

Quote

I believe that just dd'ing the image over does not format the partition (or card in your case) to the required BeFS. Also the partition won't be bootable.

Well, as I get Hiku to boot, but crash late on (mostly after seeing a desktop, and oce even a window!) I think it's both bootable and formated. I followed this guide; http://www.haiku-os....et_haiku_booted, section 2.2
But you compiled it yourself from source? OK, that's too much for me at this point, if there's no hope for even a network connection...

/Zilver

[bornagainpenguin]

Quote

If you have any questions, just post.

What is the battery life like under Haiku?

--bornagainpenguin

[paulfxh]

Quote

What is the battery life like under Haiku?

--bornagainpenguin

Unfortunately I don't know as I have never stayed in Haiku long enough (6-7 hours on my machine) for the battery to drain completely.
I spend most of my time in Ubuntu ATM. If Haiku had internet (on the EeePC), however, I believe this could easily change.

[paulfxh]

For anybody that's interested, I've been able to get a Senryu raw image installed and booting perfectly on my EeePC 901.
Senryu is Haiku but with some additional apps that is issued as a weekly build and is therefore a larger image size (650MB).
As I described in post #16 in this thread, I had already built a Haiku image in /dev/sdb4 on my 16 GB drive.
Now I downloaded the Senryu raw image to my Ubuntu /home from here and moved it to the 850 MB partition where I had previously installed Haiku with
.

sudo dd if=/home/paul/SenryuPE.image of=/dev/sdb4

Next I had to make this partition bootable with

Quote

sudo jam run ':<build>makebootable' /dev/sdb4

Unfortunately, I am unable to get the Less Than and Greater Than brackets to print here because of some HTML complication. Where I have put "<" should be placed one Less Than bracket while ">" stands for a Greater Than bracket. However, if I actually use the brackets themselves, what's between them (in this case the word "build"), is not printed at all by the HTML
Finally, I adjusted the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in /dev/sda1 (Grub from this partition is in the MBR) to make the entry for the /dev/sdb4 partition

# Senryu on /dev/sdb4
title Senryu
root (hd1,3)
chainloader +1

Senryu works great and is very fast on the EeePC 901. Unfortunately, as with Haiku there are no drivers for network connections right now, Hopefully that'll change soon as this is really a great OS with an awful lot of potential.

Edited by paulfxh, 26 November 2008 - 12:15 AM.