Exact instructions for installing Haiku R1 beta6 on a 2012 Mac Mini (Mac Mini 6,1) with a high resolution monitor

[Carl]

This is an exact step-by-step guide for installing and running Haiku R6 on a Mac Mini Late 2012, also known as Mac Mini 6,1 with an Intel i5 processor. We will use the likewise old boot manager rEFIt to do it. My monitor is a 2160p Philips 4K display connected through HDMI.

You might have to delete all data on the machine to follow this guide.

This is how it looks from the front:

This is how it looks from the back:

Before you start

Messing with Haiku on an old Mac should just be done for entertainment. If you want to do something productive, there are many better options.

SSD Drive

You should make sure your Mac Mini has an SSD drive and not a HDD drive. This is a cheap and easy hardware upgrade and will give your machine a massive performance boost, no matter what system you use. If you just bought it second hand, it’s very likely to already have an SSD.

These things do not work with Haiku on the 2012 Mac Mini and can’t be fixed:

• WiFi. You need to use an ethernet cable, or try a USB WiFi Dongle.
• Sound will not work at all.
• ᛒ Bluetooth does work with the Logitech K380 keyboard. Not with Microsoft mouse and not with bluetooth speakers. Launching the Bluetooth service in Haiku will not work.
• Native graphic card driver. The fallback framebuffer is what we will use instead.

The development pace of Haiku is slow. The things above will likely never be fixed.

What you need

• A 16GB USB thumb drive. Take care that the drive is of good quality. Fishing up an old pen drive from your drawer can lead to a lot of frustration if it is corrupted.

• Preferably another computer to use for flashing the OS installer to the pen drive, and for referencing this guide.

• A wired USB keyboard (or a Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard)

• A wired USB mouse

Let’s get started!

1 Stage: Prepare within MacOS

We will use the rEFIt boot manager to dual-boot Haiku and MacOS X.

rEFIt doesn’t work if the computer has a MacOS X version later than Mavericks. If your machine has a more modern OS, you have to downgrade.

(If needed) Downgrade your MacOS from Internet Recovery

Warning: This will nuke all your data on the machine.

1. Reboot the computer and hold Command + Shift + Alt + R to enter Internet recovery mode. It will first show you a spinning grey globe. It takes a long time, so be patient. If it fails, try again. Note: Only holding Command + R is wrong and will not enter Internet recovery mode. You might have to reboot the machine several times to finally enter Internet recovery mode.

   

2. If you only have WiFi and no ethernet, it will ask you to connect to a network.

3. Once inside Internet recovery mode, start the Disk Utility tool to wipe MacOS from your local drive. Select the drive and “Erase”.

4. After this, you will be able to install OS X Mountain Lion on your drive. If it refuses, that means you skipped step 3.

Before moving on with installing Haiku, feel free to upgrade Mountain Lion to Mavericks, following the easy instructions given from Mavericks Forever:

Mavericks Forever

Making a Haiku partition

1. Open Disk Utility in MacOS X

2. Select your local drive and then the tab “Partition”. Make a new partition with the + button, and give it a nice name that you will remember. You can select FAT as the filesystem.

This process should be fast.

Installing the rEFIt boot manager

1. Download Refit from Softpedia and install it: https://mac.softpedia.com/get/System-Utilities/rEFIt.shtml
2. You have to reboot your machine 2 or 3 times before the rEFIt menu starts working. It will show up after that every time you boot your Mac.

Preparing the Haiku installer thumb drive

We will use balenaEtcher to flash the Haiku iso file to a thumb drive. That thumb drive will be used to install Haiku.

1. Version 1.5.63 of balenaEtcher works with Mavericks and can be downloaded from here on GitHub: https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/releases/download/v1.5.63/balenaEtcher-1.5.63.dmg You can also use another computer to make the thumb drive, if you prefer.
2. Download the Haiku R6 installer iso image file from here: Get Haiku! | Haiku Project or from the big yellow button on the Haiku home page. The correct file for your Mac Mini is the x86_64 version.
3. Open balenaEtcher from MacOS and click the blue button “Flash from file”. Select the haiku…anyboot.iso that you downloaded.
4. Click the button “Select target” and select your USB Thumb drive.
5. Click the “Flash” button. It should only take a couple of minutes to flash and validate.
6. Once it is done, click “Ignore” on the alert pop-up saying the disk was not readable.

2 Stage: Install Haiku from thumb drive

Now we are ready to install!

1. Insert the USB thumb drive if it isn’t already inserted.

2. Reboot your computer from MacOS

3. The rEFIt boot menu will show up. Highlight the Haiku ESP boot option.

4. IMPORTANT As soon as you press enter, start hammering SHIFT and SPACEBAR and keep hammering them until you are shown a MS-DOS looking screen saying “Welcome to the Haiku Boot Loader”

   

5. Select safe mode options → Fail safe graphics driver. Select it.

6. Return to the main boot menu and select “Continue booting”.

7. The Haiku logo will show, and the gray icons will become colorized as Haiku proceeds to boot.

   

8. An alert saying “No partitions have been found etc” will show up. Click “OK”.

9. Click the button “Set up partitions”

   

10. Select the partition you made before with the nice name that you could remember.

11. Select Partition → Format → Be File System from the menu or from right clicking the partition. It will be fast. Do not begin the installation yet!

12. Select Tools → Install EFI Loader from the menu. This step is important. If you don’t do it, the Haiku boot loader will ask you to select a boot partition every time.

    

13. Now you can click the “Begin” button to begin your Haiku installation.

After the installation is finished, you will reboot your computer, remove the thumb drive, and boot into Haiku from rEFIt.

Remember that you have to hammer SHIFT and SPACE BAR every time you boot into Haiku and select “Fail safe graphics” until you’ve fixed the graphics in the next step.

3 Stage: After installation graphics fix

You now have two ways of booting Haiku from your Mac Mini with rEFIt. Either through EFI or through Legacy Mode. The difference is which graphics driver will be used, and EFI is much better for a high resolution display.

What we expect

• After booting into your fresh Haiku installation from EFI, your screen resolution should be 1920 x 1080 with 24bit color through HDMI output.
• Click Deskbar → Preferences → Screen to see if it says “framebuffer”. It will not be possible to change the screen resolution or any other screen settings. If it doesn’t say “framebuffer” it means you have booted into Legacy Mode, and your resolution will probably be 1280 x 720. You can proceed to the next step anyway.

Make Fail Safe Graphics permanent (easier than it sounds)

“boot” is what the partition you have installed Haiku onto is called, even if you have given it a name of your own.

1. Go to the folder boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/

2. Open the file called “kernel” by double clicking it.

3. Remove the # symbol in front of the line that says fail_safe_video_mode true

4. Save the file. Do not remove any other # symbols.

   

That’s it! No more hammering SHIFT and SPACEBAR every time you reboot.

4 Stage: Some post-installation improvements

Improving Legacy Mode graphics

This is not necessary if you prefer to always boot in EFI mode.

1. Boot Haiku into Legacy Mode from rEFIt
2. Click the Deskbar menu and select Preferences → Screen
3. Make any change, it doesn’t matter. For example change the color bits per pixel.
4. Click “Apply”
5. The next time you boot Haiku in Legacy Mode you will have more resolution options in the Screen preferences. Not all of them will work.

The max resolution I could get in Legacy Mode was 1600 x 900 with 24bit color.

Fixing font antialias

This is not necessary if you use Haiku at your monitors native resolution.

1. Click the Deskbar menu and select Preferences → Appearance
2. Select the tab Antialiasing → Antialiasing type → Grayscale

Software Update

Just for good measure run the software update from Applications → Software Update

[Drake3d]

Just something I did for my MacBook Air was once I installed beta 6 I did not reboot I mounted the partition, well I think it may have already been mounted. I opened drive and went to /home/config/settings/kernel and adjusted for fallback driver, you can also edit the vesa file for resolution too if needed, I did not need to.

YMMV but it worked better than hitting the spacebar and getting lucky.

[nephele]

Where did you get this information from?
This post just seems like LLM spam…

For reference, the officical installation guide works just fine on this machine. (or the fast version of 1. downloag image; 2. copy it to a drive with cp 3. Boot Haiku (holding command as the mac boots and select it) and install)

I don’t know where you got all this misinformation from about needing an SSD, sound beeing broken etc.

[colmiga]

Thanks for taking the time to make a guide detailing your experiences with this hardware.

Only question is did you file bug reports at https://dev.haiku-os.org before concluding those hardware items you listed ‘can’t be fixed’? It might be that it’s a slightly different variant of the 2012 Mac Mini and all it requires is a minor patch to the relevant driver to make some of those items work. Only recently someone did just that to get sound on their MacBook Pro 6,2 working. All it needed was a quirk added to the hda driver.

[Carl]

I will let your hostile and dehumanizing comment stand as it is, and extend an open invitation for you to apologize for your behaviour when you are ready to do so.

As for the technical part: Without rEFIt the 2012 Mac Mini cannot boot Haiku in EFI mode, which is required to use a high display resolution. If you boot from Legacy mode / CSM, Haiku will use the fallback VESA driver instead of the framebuffer. You want to use the framebuffer because performance is leaps and bounds better than VESA on this machine. As explained in the original post. You can also try with the teapot app, and compare the difference in FPS.

[Carl]

@colmiga This machine is 14 years old now, and obsolete by every standard. I didn’t expect that anybody would have any interest in fixing hardware compatibility for it. “Can’t be fixed” is not directed towards any developer, but towards the reader of this guide, so that they don’t wonder why the listed things don’t function and if they have done anything wrong.

And while doing my research, I found bug reports and long discussions about all of these issues, so I saw no point in making duplicates. But if you’re interested in giving it a go, I’m happy to give you any information and logs and such as you’d like and we can use this machine for testing and tinkering.

[colmiga]

Ideally if you could create bug reports for the hardware that does not function at https://dev.haiku-os.org and attach the things like the syslog, and the output of listdev and listusb that would be the most useful for the devs. Having a quick look at the reports there I don’t see anything outstanding for no audio on a 2012 Mac Mini, for example.

Attaching the files here might also help if you don’t want to create new reports. Even if the reports are duplicates the information can be helpful. It could also help people with similar hardware and there are people who use Haiku on old Intel Mac hardware such as you have.

In fact, there are many people who run Haiku on hardware regularly from that era or older. I run it on a 2014 era Intel Core i7 system as a daily driver. The devs are certainly interested in bug reports for such hardware, they have been quick to fix several of the issues I’ve reported to them.

[Carl]

I will send a private message to you and we can take it from there. I don’t want to clog up this thread with long log files, and I was not permitted to register for the Haiku bug tracker.

[colmiga]

If you’re having trouble registering at the bug tracker, sending a PM to the mods here is the best idea as a number of them are also devs. They may also be able to help with the hardware bug reports.

[Carl]

Just something I did for my MacBook Air was once I installed beta 6 I did not reboot I mounted the partition, well I think it may have already been mounted

That’s also a good method. I just thought it will be easier to follow the guide if the user physically removes the USB thumb drive before editing the kernel file, so that it is certain that they’re doing it on the correct drive. Also because I would expect most people to call their new partition “Haiku”, which is the same name that the USB thumb drive has…

Ideally, there would be a dialog as a last step in the installer to select some safe mode options.

[brunobastardi]

I do not have a mac, but great tutorial.

[us3r1d]

@Carl

I will let your hostile and dehumanizing comment stand as it is, and extend an open invitation for you to apologize for your behaviour when you are ready to do so.

I’ll agree that @nephele was a bit hostile there.

But I don’t think they were dehumanizing.

If I understand the substance of @nephele 's post correctly, though, they thought that several aspects of your guide are incorrect and was concerned that it may be sourced from or generated by an LLM (which can be a touchy subject around here).

I don’t have that model to test on, so I can’t speak to whether the information is correct or not, but I would appreciate it if you could address the issue of whether the writeup was all from your personal experience and whether the text was generated. ( @nephele is not the only person who’s raised that question to the moderators.)

[Carl]

If you are actually serious about these kind of accusations, you should either delete my thread or send me a private message.

The purpose of this thread is installing and running Haiku on a 2012 Mac Mini, and the people who are looking for information about that aren’t helped by a bunch of off-topic comments.