Let’s try to gather some facts and assumptions.
AFAIK this Mac has EFI 64bit and should be able to boot Haiku. I think it’s possible to boot in legacy mode but I don’t recommend you venturing in this space.
I assume that your Mac works well under MacOS, doesn’t it?
I haven’t used such a machine so I don’t have any clue why the DVD does not work but I can tell for sure that the keyboard will not work by default. The oldest model I have is a late 2008 MacBook Unibody which should be pretty close in terms of specs.
In order to have a fully functional keyboard in the boot menu you must install rEFInd which does some magic as long as you add spoof_osx_version=10.9 the config file (usually 10.9 is a safe version which forces the Mac to initialize the firmware correctly for non-MacOS operating systems).
iMacs and MacBooks default the resolution exposed by EFI which matches the LCD panel resolution (1680x1050 on the 20" model) unless the Haiku video driver supports the Radeon (2400 XT or 2600 PRO according to EveryMac) otherwise it will default to framebuffer so forcing the resolution via the VESA config file may not work.
I suspect that the settings suggested by @cocobean are not applied so I would try using rEFInd and entering the boot menu.
Another thing re: the keyboard, if you are using a Magic Keyboard (Bluetooth) you must boot MacOS at least once and let EFI configure it by using a special internal driver which enables the keyboard (and the Magic Mouse) like it was a wired USB model (up to the boot menu, past that point Haiku kernel takes control and there is no way on earth to get it work due the incomplete BT stack)
keyboard not working on a computer seems like a bug to me
I’ll report issues I encounter specfic to my hardware.
Seeing as apple dropped support for this computer and the last available version is el capitan which was only supported till 2018 Haiku could fill the gap as an OS on this system.
I think some parts of Haiku certainly could be improved for this usecase (for example I was quite pleased with the device automatically trying to connect bluetooth mice when none were present.)
This is a specific well known Mac-specific behaviour.
Apple’s Universal EFI is not so universal and manages Mac internal components in a non-standard way (surprise!).
The EFI bootloader by Apple enables certain components depending on the MacOS version which is known at boot time via what is known as “blessing”.
A non-Apple bootloader doesn’t know how to do it and this is where rEFInd kicks in, especially with the flag aforementioned.
#### Apple iMac (Early 2008; iMac8,1) - A1224 / MB323
Rating 4/4: Haiku works with all (or nearly all) components
Version/branch: Haiku R1 Beta 2 (in testing; upcoming stable release)
Architecture: 64-bit x86 (Intel x64/AMD64, etc.)
Share on GitHub: Yes
Startup media: Standard SSD, hybrid SSHD, or hard drive (imaged or installed)
Memory: 2 GB
CPU: Intel “Core 2 Duo” E8135 @ 2.4 GHz (64-bit/x64, 2 cores, 6 MB L2 cache)
GPU: ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT (128 MB VRAM)
Networking cards: AirPort Extreme (Broadcom BCM43xx); Gigabit Ethernet
Sound cards: Intel High Definition Audio
Graphics status: Graphics work by default or “out of the box”
Sound status: Sound works by default or “out of the box”
Networking status: Ethernet card(s) work
SD status: My computer does not have a SD drive
Restart status: Haiku restarts smoothly
Contributor: apgreimann
Contribution date: 5/15/2020 17:08:17
Additional notes: Use Ethernet with Haiku on this Mac
I definetely have a radeon card. I can show the specs macos sees if anyone wants.
Still severall bugs as above, i assume the efi just doesn’t know about the keyboard. Pressing the space bar to bring up the boot mane seems to hang the machine.
If i let it boot through i get those graphical glitches
But it changes when I move the mouse, so that seems to be supported.
It’s kind of awkward that I cannot acced the efi loader settings to atleast try the failsafe graphics driver.
Nope.
I did post above that my issue is after loading the efi loader, mainly at the end of the boot at app_server start. It has nothing to do with the efi beeing 32bit (it’s 64bit)
oops you right, your mac is full 64 bits.
Btw i could boot haiku on MacPro5,1 which is closed as yours, using refind and disabling GFX acceleration (rx580).
I tried this again, with opencore legacy macos installed haiku could boot fine with vesa, and it worked!
The I tried to install it, wiped the esp and macos… and now I can no longer boot it.
I’ve tried booting opencore so it tries to boot haiku, no dice. Tried refind chainloading and letting the firmware directly boot haiku.
In all cases the screen stays blank. Hope to get this working again but kind of out of ideas. MacOS patched is too slow to use on the machine.
I don’t know if helps, but using anything on Mac hardware, even with MacOS partition wiped and used for something else, I always keep 2 initial partitions: ESP and MacOS Recovery. If you put opencore to ESP, it still may need something (drivers?) from Recovery. Needless to say, the recovery partition contain some useful maintenance software for Mac.
In case I use a blank storage for Mac, I usually restore necessary partitions from Time Machine.