The road to BeOS
| September 15th, 2009
So, with all the recent hype about the alpha release of Haiku, the open source BeOS clone. I thought it would be a good idea to test it out. I had heard of BeOS/Haiku before and how good it was and thought it would be the perfect candidate to run on an old laptop we have in the house which doesn’t run Linux at all well.
So I downloaded the Haiku alpha .image and converted it to a .vdi for use in Virtualbox, got networking set up correctly and gave it a go! I was so impressed with it that I decided I would go ahead and install it on this old laptop.
That’s when I realised that Haiku doesn’t yet have a wireless stack, and that the wired stack isn’t that good yet. This was a real bummer, because wireless compatibility is a must in this house. So I did some research and found that BeOS R5, the original, closed source version of the OS, did have wireless support with a couple of cards. So I decided to download/buy a copy of BeOS and install it on this laptop.
no wireless stack
it wouldn’t connect
damn it
That’s when the problems started. First up, I tried to download a copy of BeOS R5.1 Dano, the leaked version that was built on the day Be Inc. went bust. It came in a handy .iso, I burned that and tried to boot. No luck. It wasn’t till later that I realised that this was because it doesn’t use the ISO 9660 filesystem, but its own BFS (Be File System) which it requires due to containing special metadata not found in standard filesystems.
After doing some more research, I found out that Be Inc. actually released a free version of BeOS R5 called BeOS Personal Edition. I downloaded a floppy image and dd’ed it to an old floppy disk I had hunted down. Booting from the floppy worked file, until I got an error message complaining about not finding any BFS file systems. So I rebooted, popped in the R5.1 CD I had burned earlier and booted from the floppy again. This time it got further in the boot process, but at the end of the loading bar it just stopped. Plan 2 went down the drain.
That was last night. Continuing my research, I found there is a distribution of BeOS PE called BeOS5PEMax, which I am currently downloading now. I will write up my experiences installing this version in Part 2, coming later.
Before I go, my research indicates that I have 2 other options remaining. The first is to buy a copy of the BeOS R5.03 Professional CD ($10, bargain!) or find a .iso or buy a copy of MAgnussoft’s ZETA OS, which is based off the BeOS R5.1 code and should work. I’ll try the professional version first, because even if it doesn’t work I can have some geek cred for owning a BeOS install CD!
PS. Expect a review of the Haiku alpha at some point!
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