BeOS on recent Mac hardware?

Be, Inc.
#1

This is off topic but have you found a way to run BeOS on a Mac? I have a 27" iMac from May 2020 and would love to either dual boot or run Haiku on top of Mac and just haven’t done enough to figure out how if either are possible.

I’ve got 5 different boxed versions of BeOS from back when Be was a company. It was the first OS that I actually LOVED how it worked and how fast it was and what you could do with it.

It had so much promise and if it weren’t for Microsoft (may Bill Gates develop a horribly painful disease and live to be very old and suffer horribly every day) Be would have transformed the world.

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SPI driver for MacBook
#2

Some people have had success with rEFInd on the Macs, but I haven’t tried. I was able to run Haiku on my 2011 MacBook Air. But the Macs use Broadcom Wi-Fi, which isn’t supported by Haiku (not as much of an issue for a desktop).

#3

Why is it not as much of an issue for desktop Macs? Does Haiku have drivers for desktop wifi? I only use wifi.

#4

If you actually mean BeOS I don’t trust this is possible, I’m afraid. I have not tried myself, though.
BeOS kernel has severe limitations and is missing modern drivers.
Frankly speaking, your machine is well capable of running BeOS in a VM.
Re. Haiku: It may be possible but beware of the disk controller, if the disk is NVME chances are that it is not supported. I need to open a bug for that…
rEFInd may help and indeed it did on my MacBook but it’s not magic and will not fix the missing drivers problem.

#5

I figured most desktops would use Ethernet.

#6

In the sense that Desktops can be connected to routers via Ethernet or an Ethernet to Wi-Fi bridge. The lack of Wi-Fi is not a problem as it would be on a laptop

#7

Correct, I’m pretty sure BeOS won’t run on anything newer than an old Pentium or PPC 604e.

#8

I used to have 5 PCs and ran different OSs. Then when BeOS and IBM said the were discontinuing support of OS/2, well I HATE windows (lower case on purpose) and I’ve two dozen Linux boxes on my shelf along with my Five BeOS boxes and four OS/2 boxes (that’s how you got OSs back then), well I got sick of the PC world and went Mac and that’s all I’ve had since then so unless something ran on top of Mac in a VM I haven’t run it.

I have run maybe eight different OSs on top of Mac in VMs but never found anything for running Haiku on top of Mac or even dual booting on Mac. But I have been following the progress after stumbling on it after seeing a thread on someone’s BeOS website.

Anyway, I have used only wifi for as long as wifi was an option on my iMacs (I’ve been buying them since 1998 when iMacs first came out).

Mac is better than windows. OS/2 is still around but made for businesses and not really for people like me. Linux … I’ve been play around with Linux since 1996 and even wrote some programs for it but I just didn’t like it all that much. If BeProductive worked on Haiku and was updated with some newer features than maybe I could use it as my main OS on my Mac on evenings and weekends when I’m not working …

Anyway, I move my 27" iMac between my house, work and my mother-in-law’s house because it just works best “for me” with my bad eyes. Yes, I totally realize there are other options. This is what works best “for me”. I even have a special case for it to protect it and it looks brand new as far as the hardware goes. Wifi works best for me just like my 27" iMac works best for me. What I’m going to do for my next Mac after Apple F’d me by discontinuing the only iMac I like … well that remains to be seen. Maybe I’ll just keep this computer forever.

#9

I had the first gen iMac (Bondi Blue, Mac OS 8.5) and I don’t recall Wi-Fi being an option.

No Apple Silicon for you? The reviews and benchmarks have been quite impressive.

With the progress of Haiku on ARM and Linux on the M1, it would be amazing to have Haiku on the M1 someday :slight_smile:

#10

Wifi wasn’t an option in iMacs until the AirCard came out and it was an option in desktops and even laptops for a while until they started building it into them. I don’t remember which iMac first had AirCard built in. I believe that I bought and installed an AirCard in a home iMac before they came built in. But I’ve supposed Windows, Mac, and little (too little) Linux and UNIX at work.

Here’s the thing. Apple laptop screens are too small and I really don’t want multiple pieces of hardware to drag around with me and my wife and I have medical bills and so I really don’t have the money to be buying the only real quality 5K monitor with is the new monitor that Apple that came out with that is $1599 before sales tax (which is slightly over 10% where I live).

Why not a 4K monitor? There are lots of those…right? Well try going from highdef display back to standard definition because I would lose about 40% real estate on the screen going from 5k to 4k monitors. And my iMac screen is much better than anything that costs under $1,500 so if I’m going to spend that much that I might as well buy the Apple monitor. Now what kind of computer can I buy for $900 which is basically all that would be left in my budget. I’ve had a Mac Mini with a monitor and compared to just having an iMac with no cables at all except for power and my redundant backup hard drives? Do I want to go back to more cables? NO!

So then my options are what, a 24" 4K screen where I lose almost half the screen real estate. It’s like living with large car and now you are living in a clown car.

Quote: “With the progress of Haiku on ARM and Linux on the M1, it would be amazing to have Haiku on the M1 someday.” I totally agree. I just hope that they reverse their decision and come back with a 27" or even a 30" iMac. And yes, I’ve emailed Tim Cook (cookt@apple.com) and let him know what I thought as politely as I could.

#11

Although the conversation is interesting it is OT and I encourage @Sabon to move this to a separate thread in a relevant category where we can keep talking.

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#12

You can coax it in to working on Pentium D class machines from ~2004.

#13

See: UTM :boom:
" UTM is a full featured system emulator and virtual machine host for iOS and macOS. It is based off of QEMU. In short, it allows you to run Windows, Linux, (also: *Haiku | BeOS(?))", and more on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad."