Yes, BeOS supported floppies, but I believe it was only the more modern 3.5" 1.44MB High-Density (HD) floppies. Double-Density floppies looked the same as 3.5" floppies, but carried half as much data.
Yes. Because in stanard PC use HD not DD like Amiga 500/600/1200 - propably Amiga 4000 was HD.
It seems to me that the majority of users (~70%) simply want a password-protected login screen that cannot be bypassed by triggering the “Three Kings” key combination and killing/restarting Deskbar/Tracker.
Of course, a few people would probably like more, but let’s cut our coat according to our cloth. In my opinion, it would be more beneficial for Haiku to implement transparency and 32-bit color.
I tried to check if the Teac floppy controller in my USB floppy drive can support DD, but it seems even them drops support for this density years ago.
I guess the market is already small enough with HD these days.
You are correct. I just tested with BeOS R5.0.3 in 86Box with a High Density (HD) floppy drive which also supports Double Density (DD) disks. While it could read both in MS-DOS 6.22, BeOS only supported HD disks.
A lot of those USB floppy drives only support HD disks. The one I have which is a rebranded Mitsumi drive only supports that. There are some that support DD disks but they are not as common.
1 Like
I’m not as familiar with the internals, obviously, but I’d think a good place to start multi-user development would be a “Users” preference app that can:
- edit non-system users in /etc/passwd
- set the default GUI user to someone other than 0
- require user-login at boot
Once that’s in place, adding barriers between users should be a lot easier to do (and test)?
Or maybe instead of a multi user system maybe just the single user with a password for the time being or something that locks the screen and you have to put in a password to unlock it. After after a certain period amount of time that the user can set i’d also maybe approach it in a different way. I know we don 't want to reinvent the wheel here, but we kind of want to be a little bit different than linux but that’s just my thoughts and opinions about it
2 Likes
Yeah, you’re right. 
I’m one of the ones who wants full-on multiuser, but more people’s wants would be addressed by starting with just a preference app that could:
- set the default user password
- require login on boot
- force screensaver to require password
You can kinda already do this just with the screensaver though, by setting a password for it and setting it to run at boot.
1 Like
A simple app that ask for a password on boot should do the trick unless you really want to add a full multi user system and have a full on privilege system and have something similar to sudo but call it something like slap or hpup or whatever other name you have in mind I’m not good with picking names here however it would be better for security
1 Like
I have a USB floppy drive that can read and write 720k disks. However, it does even worse under Haiku than phoudoin‘s. It locks up the mount server and Deskbar. I suspect that we need to implement USB floppy support for this. USB floppies are their own device class that is separate from mass storage device. If you were to implement this I would appreciate it.
USB floppy support is of course an R1 blocker since BeOS R5 has vastly superior floppy disk support to Haiku. 
2 Likes
Why? Wait, but you don’t need ISA slot to connect FDD. There are simply standard 34-pin FDD connectors.
If this brings back support for standard 3.5" 34-pin FDDs too, I definitely owe you a beer.
1 Like
So, we agree.
1 Like
Kinda?
This already exists, though:
- go to Preferences>ScreenSaver
- enable it and set a password
- follow the instructions at:
ctrl-alt-del can’t bypass that; the team monitor launches behind the locked screen saver.
On multi-user support: Based on conversations in the forums for a future fork, they are of the same opinion for the most part. Multi-user would be cool, but what we really want is encryption and system security. I would definitely say that should be the focus, and a lot of that work should make future multi-user support even easier.
Not on any machines built in the last 20 years. I have two laptops with non-standard, but also not USB, floppy drives. I am hoping that at least one of them is compatible with the old desktop standards. I have a few desktop floppy drives and cables laying around, but no towers with actual floppy ports.
If someone curious regarding multiuser additions to Haiku, you can get patches regarding to, if you put the next URL
https://git.haiku-os.org/haiku/log/?qt=grep&q=multiuser
(DISCLAIMER
To access this filtered view of enlisted patches …
requires a so called SSO login account – register at : sso.haiku-os.org – ,
that is a recent defense against any kinds of bots and AI agents ( those bother/overload/even lock otherwise defensless services and sites on the internet ) to put this Haiku CGIT service behind the SSO {single sign-on} login. )
So for multiuser, even recently added new additions, however a basic thing still had not done.
You can do it - manually on your system, I just want to pinpoint that is so basic in a multiuser environment.
This is $HOMEDIR, which is now simply ‘/boot/home’, by default, not ‘/boot/home/user’
meanwhile there’s a default user ‘user’ which is an administrator privileged account, so no root access required (fortunately !)
My first Haiku install, that I could do on Dell Inspiron 9100 and a Beta3 32 bit, I pimped the user stuff and changed user name from the default user name ‘user’ to that I used anywhere else – in the system files regarding user and users in groups, however I had not touched home directory as well …
So, me personally, pleased with this DOS/Windows (just GUI shell still) – state of Haiku as my Haiku instances really personal computing in every aspects for me :
→ There’s no sensitive data to be protect
→ Haiku is generally hobby purpose,
and
when I used as daily driver, I thought that well,
and used to reach my bank account online in a browser that had private mode, and javascript protection,
or did it in Windows, until a working Windows was available for me during that 2 and half years of daily driver period,
and not saved any password in any browser in Haiku.
So I think, if R1/beta7 would bring us more in multiuser it is not only permissions and ACLs and privilige separations, but would come with home directory setup, and include installation steps asking about your preferred user account and how would like to have administrative privileges.
Sorry,
once I had been a system administrator on several UNIX/Linux systems at Big Blue, so this way I went through this aspects of multiuser topic of Haiku – in a verbose manner of me.
For this would be soluton, if someone who has such hardware would setup that hardware with a clean Haiku and you together setup ssh access to it via his/her LAN to access for development purposes.
A better option if this is a server grade machine, with enough RAM for development.
A simple desktop
for one hand may have the required hardware,
but the other hand may be insufficient in terms of system resources, which would be necessary for source code compilations that take a reasonable amount of time.
Ability to conveniently switch to or use other mouse cursors without having to recompile.
No; what I mean when I say I want multi-user support is that I want multi-user support. If I’d meant something else, I’d have said something else.
I want to be able to run my GUI without the permissions necessary to mess up my OS, most of all; running Tracker and Deskbar as non-0 users is an obvious route to getting that without having to implement crazy file ACL and complicated permission systems.
(I do also want to have the ability to run the GUI as other non-0 users too, so I can let my kids onto the console without the permissions necessary to mess up the OS or my files.
Not sure if I have the skills to face this.
We are currently using some TRACE and TRACE_ALWAYS macros wrapping dprintf. Those macros are per driver, which is good for enabling extra verbosity in just the module you are working on. I would like to factorize it, so not every driver writes the same macros. Perhaps, modules would only have to define MODULE_NAME, so TRACE macro uses it.
Maybe biased by my Linux background, I miss some INFO/DEBUG/ERROR log levels. But as I said, I use to find inspiration on Linux, what I know most.