Hi all,
I wasn’t sure where to put this post…it is related to Haiku, yet is also off-topic.
I had a BeOS Pro 5.03 disc I bought from Purplus years ago, but unfortunately it is damaged to the point of being unusable. They don’t offer it anymore. I would like to get a full-native BeOS machine together, especially a multi-processor P2 machine. The BeOS Personal edition does not support multiprocessors, but since the BeOS Max Edition has all kinds of additional drivers, etc. I was wondering if that does support multiprocessor?
I’m having a lot of fun using the Haiku Alpha release and also trying out the latest builds (last build didn’t allow my keyboard to function, but it did let me use my Intel 5000 series Wifi card using a driver).
Thanks
Jeff
The cause of BeOS Personal Edition “not supporting” multiprocessor is the rather unpleasant strategy of trying to start the OS from within a running Windows 9x system. When booted in a more usual manner the OS will work with multiple CPUs / cores. This is the same for all Intel BeOS versions and was in the past fairly well documented (but a lot of BeOS community sites are gone).
However it may not work with modern multi-core systems because BeOS was intended for an old standard called MPS and modern systems don’t necessarily bother to implement it because they’re not expecting you to run obscure 1990s operating systems. It’s like expecting a 5¼ inch floppy drive in a brand new laptop.
If you really wanna run BeOS buy a PII or PIII smp system I have it running fine on a Dual PII graphics work fine its only works in black and white on my slightly newer sempron PC with a geforce2
I have a rage pro in the older box those seem to work fine and are cheap on ebay.
Hi,
It’s not really for performance over newer systems; I have a Dell Studio 17 Core 2 Duo with Vista, a couple flavors of Linux, and Haiku on it, and also a 2.67 Ghz Intel desktop. I’m more or less a collector/enthusiast and appreciate simplicity and efficiency. I was really impressed with BeOS when we set up a radio station in NY, on a Dell P3 500 Mhz desktop. I remember it did things that at the time Windows certainly couldn’t do and perhaps still can’t. I never ran it on a P2 or a Pentium 586 so would like to set up at least a dual-processor P2, preferably a quad-processor. I’d also like to see how it performs on bare-minimum resources with the lowest supported processer. Maybe even set up dual-boot with DOS on another partition; I sorta miss DOS and still use some DOS programs with DOSBox under Linux/Windows.
I think technically a PIII is faster than a P4 for many use cases as Intel basically gimped the processor and jacked up the clock rate…though a PII would definitely be slower as the system bus is usually 66mhz vs 75 or 100mhz IIRC
I have a video of a dual 300mhz PII (tyan motherboard/ Intel LX chipset which is similar to Intel BX just a bit less flexible and aimed for servers) running BeOS on youtube just search for cusbrar1 it should give you some idea of the proformace its pretty good actually. It can just barely play dvds and even then not all dvds…
I’ve tested BeOS on Dual PII 350 Mhz. It worked with both CPUs. I tried to get it to run on Dual Core Atom but would only work by disabling SMP (supports single core). Multi-core is too new for BeOS to handle.
Quad processor system should work but not quad core. There were 586 quad core systems that would go for very cheap but better performer would be Dual P3 CPU (700+ Mhz per CPU) if you wanted to play with and test SMP performance or if you could get a quad P2/P3 processor system would be very cool.
BeOS/Haiku take around 96 MB RAM with buffers & cache. Most applications will run alright with 256 MB but better to have 512 MB.