I have an old Pentium III 800 mhz with 256 ram . I think none of the hardware is rare . I want to this PC as my Haiku Box . I know it is still in alpha stage but it is stable enough for my experimental/entertainment box .
One thing I want this box to play movies (non-HD) and some web surfing .(How I can I do that)
You might have to go back to an older version of Haiku, the newer ones don’t have working PATA (parallel IDE disk drive controller) support (the older Haiku alphas also didn’t support IDE DMA - turn it off in the safe mode boot menu). As well, 800Mhz isn’t fast enough to decode MP4 video in real time, even in low resolution. MPEG-1 video is fine though.
[quote=agmsmith]You might have to go back to an older version of Haiku, the newer ones don’t have working PATA (parallel IDE disk drive controller) support (the older Haiku alphas also didn’t support IDE DMA - turn it off in the safe mode boot menu). As well, 800Mhz isn’t fast enough to decode MP4 video in real time, even in low resolution. MPEG-1 video is fine though.
Can I solve this problem by booting and installing from Haiku USB flash drive…? if no please suggest
me some other solution as I don’t want to use older version of Haiku .
By your answer I am assuming Haiku does not support IDE hard disk or CD ROM…correct me if I am wrong
I’m afraid I don’t know the answer, but a simple way to find out, if your computer supports booting from cd (likely) or from usb (not so likely for older computers) is to burn a cd or usb stick with Haiku and just try it.
And if it does, you could go to the Haikuware page and add your computer to the list of working hardware.
Can you boot from USB on a machine that old? Probably not, but it would solve some of the problems if it did work.
Haiku works best with a SATA hard drive controller in AHCI mode (there’s usually a BIOS setting for that mode).
I tested Haiku R1 Alpha 4.1 on a 440BX motherboard with Pentium III processors, and it doesn’t boot past the safe mode menu. Even turning off IDE DMA in the menu doesn’t work. You’d have to go back to Alpha 2, or maybe Alpha 3 to get it to boot off CD-ROM.
There’s also the old IDE driver stack that’s currently disabled by default (they’re using a newer ATA one instead). If you care to rebuild Haiku with it enabled, it may work on old PATA IDE hardware. Look for HAIKU_ATA_STACK in the build system, and a Google search may help too.
Or maybe install Linux on that PC, and use a virtual machine with simulated SATA to run Haiku?
I am typing this on a 2x 500MHz pentium 3 with 512MB RAM on one of the latest Haiku PM nightlies, with a PATA HDD and no changes to the OS, although only one of two processors is identified.
Cool! Maybe things have been fixed up since Alpha 4.1, I’ll have to try a recent nightly. Does install off CD-ROM work or did you have to copy the nightly to a partition on the hard drive?
CD-ROM install seems to work. I also had some success with chainloading a usb stick with the PLoP boot manager.
The latest nightly works better than R1A4, in that it gets to the middle icon while booting, while R1A4 didn’t get any icons lit up. The nightly then has a kernel panic, complaining that it can’t find the boot partition (was using the anyboot image burnt to a DVD). I also tried putting it on a partition, but that wasn’t bootable either (need to run makebootable somehow - boot Haiku R1A1 and run it from there?).
So, it’s better than before, but would take work to get it going.
How to chainload a usb stick with the PLoP boot manager? Many thanks.
It’s a lottery. I have a ten year old Dell Pentium 4 happily chugging along on the letest nightly, while my Samsung Celeron II that is half its age won’t boot anything newer than alpha 3.
Try an plain CD-R with an ISO or carefully done CD-R with an anyboot image. (anyboot images can get munted when burning by some CD/DVD burning software that automatic “optimises” the image so that it won’t boot anymore)
I think the Alpha-R3 release would probably run pretty decently on your PIII/256MB computer. I have an old PIII 868-Mhz computer with 128MB of memory, and it does pretty well with the Alpha-R3 release. I’d guess the extra 128MB that your computer has could make it run better than mine. The PIII does pretty well, but can be sluggish when using WebPositive. Being the Alpha-R3 release, it does panic once in a while. I live with that because it lets the old gear continue to be useful. The only other OSs that will run (reasonably quickly in graphics mode) on that old machine are Windows-95, FreeBSD 7.1 or less, and Debian Etch (very long in the tooth).
The nightlies continued to work for awhile after the release of Alpha-R3, prior to the release of Alpha-R4. At some point in there, my old Pentium couldn’t install the OS anymore, displaying an “insufficient memory to install Haiku” message thereafter. So, I use Alpha-R3 on that machine. It works fine (for my purposes) which are mainly casual internet browsing. I emphasize “casual” browsing - as Web+ is still under heavy development. I’m not using it to do my banking yet. 
Wait! I don’t even do internet banking!
I successfully installed Alpha 4.1 on a HP ePC PIII 933 with 256MB of RAM. It installed and so far with what little I have done with the machine it runs fine. I did teh install off of a CD. More RAM would help though as after loading a couple of Web Sites in WebPositive or FireFox all the RAM is used up.
Re: booting old machines via USB.
For old laptops with an old processor and board that doesn’t support USB booting, you can get USB booting to work in most cases by using PLOP Linux’s boot loader:
There seem to be a great misunderstanding about the removal of the “IDE” driver. Of course we didn’t drop IDE hard disk support! We had two drivers, the old “IDE” one and the new “ATA” one. The ATA driver is improved, and supports both IDE (parallel ATA) and SATA (serial ATA). For some time, we kept the old IDE driver in our sources because the ATA one was not compatible with all hardware. But over the years, we have fixed these problems, and now it runs well everywhere.
As for running Haiku on a Pentium III, beware that WebPositive has some problems with that in the nightlies: it currently needs SSE2 instructions. I tried to fix that, but not having old enough Pentium hardware around, it’s not an easy task.