I’m not sure if this is already being implemented, but it would be a rather nice feature, to be able to boot Haiku on a FAT(16) partition, as BeOS 5 PE also incorporated this. This would add a larger user database, encouraging more people to download Haiku, as it wouldn’t take much effort to just download and use install.exe or something to that effect. It’s less “painful” to just install it on your existing partition. Thanks for reading. 
A lot of people could boot Haiku from USB Keys. But then you’d lose plenty of the nifty features of BeOS because FAT16/32 is less powerful.
Ronald wrote:
A lot of people could boot Haiku from USB Keys. But then you'd lose plenty of the nifty features of BeOS because FAT16/32 is less powerful.
USB keys can be reformatted… I have a large number of BFS USB keys, floppy disks, Zip disks, etc.
Also, 99.5% of the computers out there can’t boot off USB, so its a bit of a null point.
Ronald wrote:
A lot of people could boot Haiku from USB Keys. But then you'd lose plenty of the nifty features of BeOS because FAT16/32 is less powerful.
I suspect he was talking about the 500mb image.be file on a FAT partition that got created when you installed R5 PE from Windows - it was really BFS inside an image file, so you still got the powerful featues of BFS.
umccullough wrote:
Oh yeah. That would make more sense. :lol: :wink:
I suspect he was talking about the 500mb image.be file on a FAT partition that got created when you installed R5 PE from Windows - it was really BFS inside an image file, so you still got the powerful featues of BFS.
I have flonix which can be booted on all usb + floppy drive computers, using a boot disk and usb drive.
The better tactics would be to make the installer be able to resize FAT (there are enough OSS sollutions to use the code) and NTFS (is the Mandrake Installer OSS?) without losing the code.
The problem is: Windows creates a single partition with the size of the HDD by default [with the size of free space]. People don’t want to lose their data while installing a different OS.
I’d also like to see booting from an image file supported - I think it would be useful to get people to try out BeOS. It was a great feature of PE.
I’m pretty sure it is supported too, but I could be wrong.