The road to BeOS: Part 2, the install
| September 16th, 2009So, as promised earlier I said I’d post the chronicling of my second attempt to run BeOS on my laptop.
First up was to locate both BeOS PE Max and some installation documentation. As I write this the BeOS Max website is actually down so it was off to archive.org to go and find a cached copy. Here is a link to the latest copy available of the wiki pages.
So, I downloaded the torrent and set about getting myself a copy of the install files. This is where it gets tricky.
Following both the instructions on the wiki page on burning the CD in Linux and the readme included in the zip file, and worked out what I had to do.
First of all I had to get the right CD burner. Recommended in both sources was the program cdrecord. I downloaded the latest alpha release (again, recommended in the instructions), and I found it simple enough to install (extract the files, cd into the directory and enter make, then cd into cdrecord/OBJ/i686-linux-cc/ where the binary was created.
First I had to have it identify my CD drive (it has its own naming system for this), this was done with “cdrecord -scanbus”.
cdrecord -scanbus:
scsibus1:
1,0,0 100) ‘TSSTcorp’ ‘DVD+-RW TS-T633A’ ‘D300′ Removable CD-ROM
1,1,0 101) *
1,2,0 102) *
1,3,0 103) *
1,4,0 104) *
1,5,0 105) *
1,6,0 106) *
1,7,0 107) *
After that it was a simple case of getting the burning command right. This is the command I used (NOTE: all one line):
cdrecord dev=1,0,0 speed=4 -eject -v -data /home/jim/BeOS/BeOS5PEMaxEditionV4b1/files/intel_r5.0.3_boot_cd.img /home/jim/BeOS/BeOS5PEMaxEditionV4b1/files/BeOS5PEMaxEditionV4b1.iso
Your command will of course differ depending on the floppy image you’ve selected (.img files, it comes with quite a few! select the file file that you feel best fits your computer. I chose an Intel one.) and device number and filepaths.
So after the CD burned it was straight off to the laptop to boot up the computer.
BeOS attempt one. Fail!
This didn’t work at all! I rebooted and, following instructions, opened up the boot options by pressing space during the boot process. I selected Normal VGA as my graphics to no avail:
Attempt 2. Still no luck :(
Next, I booted into Failsafe VGA mode (I should have done this the first time, but I completely missed the option :P). This time it worked, although the screen resolution was a bit [READ: very!] iffy. I didn’t take any pictures at this point. Continuing on, I accepted the EULA and continued to the partitioning stage. Before I continue in my chronicle, I just want to say this: The partitioner SUCKS. I mean, really. It can’t delete partitions as far as I can tell, and I got an error trying to format the whole disk. At this point I switched off and attemped to boot it back into Linux.For the record, here is a picture of the partitioner:
The partitioner. It sucks.
It seems I did manage to do something with the partitioner after all:
Grub Error. Oops!
To make like easier I booted into Crunchbang Linux and deleted all the partitions on disk. I also took this point in time to investigate proper graphics drivers for my graphics chip. If you are interested, the chip is an 86C270-294 Savage MX-MV.
I found a driver for my chip (http://www.bebits.com/app/2787) and then went on to try the system install again. This time I took pictures of all the screens. I’ll post them in a separate blog post to keep this page from becoming an imagefest.
I probably should add that BeOS cannot create partitions (from what I could work out, anyway) and needs to be installed over an already existing partition, so I just created an unformatted partiton taking up the whole disk to install to.
The install is currently running. Watch out for part three on the installation of drivers, installation of software and a general system review!
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