Finally got good laptop for daily driving Haiku

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Hello!

I have been using Haiku a pretty long time, but always in some virtual environment or too old/slow hardware, so daily driving with it wasn’t really possible/pleasure. Basically web browsing was the main reason, because it requires nowadays quite a powerful machine.

Couple weeks back, i started to think that maybe i should buy dedicated laptop for Haiku. I started to research Haiku hw database, this forum and asking AI about some things. I noticed that some Intel based Thinkpads and Latitudes was pretty good in reviews and those have best compatibility. A couple days of Ebaying and found this from AMSO.. :nerd_face:

Lenovo Thinkpad T460s with i5-6300U cpu, 8Gb ram, 240Gb SSD, 1920x1080 display, finnish keyboard layout.. and of course a working battery, but this has only one battery inside, second have been removed. Main battery have 82% of capacity left, luckily it is OEM Lenovo battery.

It came with Win10 Pro FI and i tested hardware and battery life with it, basic browsing and some youtube videos got about 4,5 hours of battery life. Laptop is pretty good shape, no cracks anywhere, screen has couple of marks from trackpoint buttons, but it doesn’t really bother me.

Everything was working good, so i gave Windows a exodus and installed Haiku R1Beta5 to it. I made UEFI install and partitioned SSD in three partitions, EFI, HAIKU and 50gb MyStuFF where to store important files. It worked pretty good out of the box, but trackpoint and touchpad was a bit problematic, sometimes another worked and another didn’t, just randomly. I upgraded OS to latest nightly and it gave some more options to adjust mouse settings and now it is pretty good and usable. Still sometimes trackpoint doesn’t work..

Battery life is, well not good as in windows, but Haiku drains battery about 45% per hour in basic browsing, so i get about two hours of battery life. I will probably buy that another battery later, maybe from iFixit eu-store, it costs 65€ with postage and they seems to have pretty good reputation/quality. With it i should get maybe 4 hours of battery life.

I tried it also with Ubuntu 26.04 live usb stick, i installed tlp and checked battery wear/info with it and then calibrated battery in ubuntu, got couple of percent more capacity with it. I tested also battery life in there with same kind of browsing and i got 2 hours 45 minutes of battery life in balanced mode and display brightness about 50%.

With “sudo tlp-stat -b” command i noticed that there was battery charging treshhold limits, which were 0% to 100%. I read from internet that those limits are stored in chip, so ran “sudo tlp setcharge 75 80 BAT0” and checked again and limits changed. I rebooted ubuntu live and checked values again, and they were still 75% and 80%.

Then i booted to Haiku and voila, same charging limits are used in Haiku too. Why i did this, well i probably keep this laptop sometimes in charger for longer times, and this now keeps battery charge maximum 80% all the time and it only starts charging below 75%. I hope this old battery lasts a bit longer in this way.

A bit long post, sorry about that, but i am VERY happy with this laptop! :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:
Finally i really can daily drive Haiku! It even plays Youtube videos in 1080p with Iceweasel, how awesome is that!!! (Btw. it plays 1440p videos also in youtube, without dropping a single frame, but fan spins pretty fast then!)

Thank you developers!

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I have the same Laptop, but with 2560x1440 Display, that make a huge difference, the fonts and icons look stunningly beautiful.

Highly recommended

Everything but Webcam and fingerprint reader works

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Yes, that is true.

With my eyes this fullhd is enough for me. :face_with_monocle:

I was wondering that sim tray which seems to be installed. But I didnt see LTE modem inside, so maybe that was option back then. Antenna cables were taped in place where i think modem should be.

Huawei ME906s and Sierra Wireless EM7455 may be the modems which are supported.. not sure however.

Probably no LTE support in Haiku yet..

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My eyes aren’t that great either, but i really makes a difference, just as a hint for anyone looking to buy one (those dispolays are hard to find, though)

Have fun

PS Haiku also works on my “Work” Laptop T14gen4, but only the trackoint, not the touchpad

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Okay, nice to hear. :grinning_face:

I had couple of t460s options, and one was with 1440p display, but i was thinking, maybe that drains battery more and i dont really need it. Another option was 1080p with touchscreen, but it was glossy display and i like matte more.. and i dont need touchscreen.

I also had t480 as option, but just those possible touchpad/trackpoint problems and also those were more expensive.

I really like Haiku’s simplicity and lightness. No bloat etc.. i found “almost” all software i needed to it. Trying to use native apps as much i can..

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Have been using this Haiku laptop almost every day and it is good for almost any daily task. Updated it to latest nightly which broke Bluetooth. And Iceweazel seems to hang more often now, but web+ works a bit better now..

A still need to get that second battery, now with only one battery sometimes I got to hurry to find charger.

Couple of friends tried Haiku first time and they loved it. They are searching compatible laptops now for it. Sadly there is no up to date, easy to search hw-database, so they started to make one..

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If you do not move your laptop the whole day constantly, then you do not have to take care battery drainig, it can be plugged in permanently, then you can have any HW option.
Do you need it as you need the laptop on field or meanwhile trafficing ?
In my 2013 Dell laptop I could set in UEFI BIOS to leave battery without charging/discharging and works directly from the power adapter. I would enable back as if I would go out traveling and I maybe cannot use power from power outlet on the train or other places where I would open the lid to boot up.

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For an old cheap old laptop, the Dell Latitude E7240 works fine. Graphics/wifi/sound/trackpad/keyboard all work out of the box. The screen resolution is pretty low (not a Haiku issue, it’s just a old small screen).

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Actually i had some of those Latitudes in mind too, but finally choosed Thinkpad.

Couple days ago I tried to make some librecad tutorial video with Haiku. In Linux i usually use OBS Studio, but because it haven’t been ported to haiku yet, I recorded audio with Audacity and screen with BeScreenCapture and i mean both at the same time. Edited video in OpenShot and exported it to mp4. It worked pretty good.. i was a bit suprised.

I had to use USB sound card for headphones microphone. There was some background noise, but after recording I added some filters in Audacity and result was pretty good.

I will probably make more videos with Haiku..

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Would be a great thing to have a tutorial about your workflow, as Text or as Video…
I could imagine many people will love to know this tricky thing to do on HAIKU.

Why Audacity? Is there no other option to use the microphone?

Would be great to have some BeScreenCapture with Sound option.

But your solution will work right now, thank you for some insight on that matter.
Great to know:

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Ahoy Bruno ( @brunobastardi ) !

Yeah, in case recording Haiku desktop and sound altogether using Haiku the possibilities are actually scarce.

If you search recording at package manager, you get understandable response regarding audio

Audacity, ffmpeg, ffmpeg5, ffmpeg6, ffmpeg8 packages.

If you search recorder at package manager, you get following regarding audio

Tenacity, which is a fork of Audacity

And finally appears the one and only video recorder application program :
BeScreenCapture.

Somehow the built-in Soundrecorder had not come up for the package manager search - as it is possibly within a bundled package.

I asked in a Web search :

- → recording desktop and mic with ffmpeg

and finally specifically on Haiku, as ffmpeg works differently for Windows, Linux and macOS as well, so I was curious, wether the AI find those devices/applications I can call in an ffmpeg in Haiku terminal command prompt as in this case I can avoid syncing audio/video – I get a whole AV file. As there is no x11grab (video) and pulse (audio) as in case Linux.

- → recording desktop and mic with ffmpeg on Haiku

Recording the desktop and microphone simultaneously using FFmpeg on Haiku is not directly supported via native screen-grabbing APIs because FFmpeg’s device grabbers on Haiku are historically designed for file conversion rather than real-time display capture. To achieve desktop recording, consider these optimal, functional methods: [1, 2]

Recommended Approaches

  1. Use BeScreenCapture (Native GUI): Install BeScreenCapture via the HaikuDepot. It is a native GUI tool that uses Haiku’s Media Kit to capture the screen. [1, 2, 3]

  2. Haiku-in-VM Recording: Run your Haiku environment inside a Virtual Machine (e.g., QEMU, VirtualBox) on a host OS. You can then use desktop recording utilities (like OBS Studio or the host’s native screen recorder) to capture the VM window, which reliably records both desktop and mic. [1, 2, 3, 4]

  3. Capture Card: Route your Haiku machine’s output through an external HDMI capture card to a second computer, using OBS Studio on that second machine to capture both the screen and microphone. [1]

FFmpeg Command Format

If you compile FFmpeg from source or use third-party libraries that enable x11grab (if you are running the X11 server for Haiku) or frame-grabbing plugins, the typical ffmpeg command structure to sync and record both your display and microphone looks like this:

ffmpeg -f x11grab -video_size 1920x1080 -i :0.0 -f oss -i /dev/audio/oss/your_mic_node -c:v libx264 -c:a aac output.mp4

For more streamlined use, you can utilize graphical front-ends like HaikuArchives/ffmpegGUI to construct your FFmpeg command-line for encoding. [1]

Unfortunately as you could read above ffmpeg can not be used directly, that commandline above is for Linux, so this is a typical wrong part in the AI answer.

The VM solution also viable, if you would rather not deal with Haiku solutions, as for me BeScreenCapture recording logic was disappointment when I tried out recently.

As basically writes the recording into the RAM memory, and starts to flush to disk as you stopped the recording. It risks the recording get lost meanwhile saving into the file, as bytes are on the disk … are on the disk ! Also annoyimg to wait long minutes while the frames written to disk. It last long, as if you have 30 frame / sec video, and FHD frames saved about 2 frame / sec to disk .. I could see 520 frames written to disk by about 250-260 secs.

4 mins 10-20 secs waiting AFTER the recording ended … just to flush all out lesser than 9 secs FHD video image to disk. I felt myself in the Pentium1 era, on an 8 core 4th Gen core i7 CPU.

I admit, I use Haiku from an USB 3.0 thumbdrive, so saving maybe it caused to save from memory to disk took so long … but despite that : why not directly to disk ?

If you have enough money I would suggest the HW solution :

  1. Capture Card + Microphone with recording capabilities

cheaper solution

  1. Record the VM + Microphone in the host machine or Microphone with recording capabilities

and just finally

  1. BeScreenCapture + Audacity

If your sound card does not work in Haiku - you won’t be capable to record any sound within Haiku.
Then outside of Haiku , with help of other OS, even other machine (phone ?), or an independent mic with recording capabilities … just works !

EDIT#1 :

I almost forgot to mention - if you have VLC installed, then you can theoretically use it to record the Desktop or if the USB cam works for you in Haiku, then you can even record the webcam output. You just use the Media (first menu tab) → Open recording device (or similar, I have HU translated VLC :)) )
There you can select the device .. select Desktop, under that you can setup the frame/sec, and also there is - as always - down there the panel you select the file format and decoding details.

Questionable - if it wether tailored to Haiku, as devices names/pathes typically different in all OSes than default Windows or even Linux devices, so you may cannot select them. In this case drag & drop does not help as in case DVD desktop icon to workaround the device name.

EDIT2 :

Also forgot to mention that
as supporting audio transfer via HDMI actually does not work in Haiku the described external HDMI capture device solution by AI missed this actual status, so HDMI cable would transmit only the video image feed to the capture device : this way to the other PC as well.
So you must record the sound independently in that case - this way I wrote my suggestion about using capture card + Microphone with recording capabilities (mic recording capability required only in case you want to secure sound recording in any circumstances, as OBS can record the sound directly if the mic configured to OBS as a resource as you want to use OBS for streaming as well, not only recording purpose).

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So it would be great to have UVC Webcam 1.0 working!
Webcam 1.0
Audio via Webcam!

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