I had a bit of a silly idea for a project I’d like to maybe try one day: while I have Haiku running bare metal on a somewhat newer ThinkPad (namely my X220), I also have a ThinkPad T42 that I first tried bare metal Haiku on, and now it’s just gathering dust.
So I was curious to know if maybe BeOS 5 would work on it as well?
Thing is, though, is perhaps the T42 might be a bit too new for BeOS 5 to work on it. Or could I be wrong?
But it did get me curious enough to ask: has anyone ever tried running BeOS 5 on a laptop? How were the results of it? Anything to be made aware of? Any changes, fixes, drivers, or tweaks available?
Check this video!
I trust you need to build or use a preexisting franken-distro like Beos 5.0.5 BONE, DevEd2.2 or MAX V4. An alternative option and more funny is to start from a vanilla R5 PE and apply all the patches needed by your laptop, namely 5.0.3 update, BONE, Haiku USB Stack and usb scsi, mail daemon replacement, and tons of other drivers/patches (I needed to predate Zeta and Dano to get something work on a Travelmate 4100).
I have BeOS 5 running on a Gateway 450-ROG. All the most important things work: Ethernet, video, audio, USB, and DVD drive. Processor is a 1.6 ghz Pentium M Banias which is pre-Core2, but post-Pentium 4 Mobile, so it’s pretty fast. The onboard serial port also works. No idea if the card-reader works, I never tried it. It has wi-fi onboard, but not sure if BeOS ever had drivers for it. Maybe the BONE version did?
If it’s an Intel 2100 or 2200BG, yes dano/bone/zeta have a driver but I never managed to connect to my network. Maybe an old router or wifinhotspot is required which supports old style networks (WEP probably).
My travelmate is a PeniumM 1.6Ghz, too. Almost everything works except:
Built in Wi-Fi Intel 2200BG
Ethernet Broadcom 410x (there is a driver, the card is recognised but I never manage to connect either with manual settings nor DHCP)
APM/ACPI (I tried both the APM driver and the ACPI one from Haiku)
Radeon MOBILITY X600 works great including the external VGA port but with odd resolutions. I can’t get 1920x1080
You’ve got fairly limited choice for stuff that is likely all supported:
Pentium III Intel i810/i815 chipset machines with all Intel components (sound, graphics, network). These will mostly predate wifi but some very high end ones may have Prism chips which have an addon driver. These will sometimes work out of box, more often you need to do a device ID hack to the network and possibly graphics and sound drivers too.
Some early Centrino laptops with ATI or nVidia graphics cards, 2100/2200 wifi, AC97 audio and an Intel gigabit, or 3COM 920/940, or Broadcom NIC - all addon drivers, but all work fairly well. These will need things like the IDE replacement driver, various kernel hacks and things like the RAM limiting bootloader, cpu_fix and so on.
Equivalent era high-spec P4 machines will often be the same, without wifi.
BeOS has PCMCIA support and can use an ORiNOCO Gold or equivalent. I use one of these (and have an Intel 2200 onboard on one machine) but with a seperate router, fully network isolated, hidden SSID, MAC address filtering and limited to 3mbps - because I am not even able to turn on WEP on my main WLAN anymore, let alone do I want to!
Panasonic cf-29 and cf-30, i own one of each, both have typically worked excellent with haiku, check chipset for compatibility, it’s all intel hardware iirc