Well, I was planning to do a FreeBSD installation this weekend, but I was having so much fun working with Haiku and going through the HaikuWare software that I ran out of time–real life and work don’t leave me as much free time as I’d like to have. And sleep…gotta sleep every now and then, too!
Gah. After I posted this, I had a bit of panic. When I booted back into Haiku, I was sent to Kernel Debug Land when the tracker tried to start up. Fortunately, booting into Haiku from the cd and running checkfs on the usb thumb drive resolved the issue. I’ve been worried about how reliable the Sandisk thumb drive would be for running Haiku. So maybe I should go ahead and install it on the hard drive?
Well, duh! Of course you should… 
Maybe partition the drive to leave room for dual-booting another OS.
Regards,
Humdinger
Actually, I was planning on installing a second hard drive for more OS installations. The first hard drive has Windows XP and now FreeBSD on it, and I would install Haiku on the second drive.
But I do have a question. How do you update Haiku when a new version comes out? Will the installer include an upgrade option?
Well, duh! Of course you should…
Maybe partition the drive to leave room for dual-booting another OS.
Regards,
Humdinger[/quote]
No, no, no. Bootmanger works well and most free OSes don’t need too much space to boot from. Plan and set up for at-least four OSes. In my case I have Windows, Haiku Alpha 4.1, the latest test haiku image and a partition to try out diffirent other OSes. So far I don’t like the Linuxes or DragonFly but I still want to take a look at AROS.
Leave room for the future.
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ATM, It’s normally suggested to have 3 partitions for Haiku. One for data. Two more for installations of Haiku. E.g., in Haiku-A, download a nightly image, mount it, and use Installer to wipe Haiku-B and install the new nightly.
Some people even use bash scripts as a basic backup scheme to copy settings and other files, directories between installations.
[quote=Earl Colby Pottinger]
No, no, no. Bootmanger works well and most free OSes don’t need too much space to boot from. Plan and set up for at-least four OSes. In my case I have Windows, Haiku Alpha 4.1, the latest test haiku image and a partition to try out diffirent other OSes. So far I don’t like the Linuxes or DragonFly but I still want to take a look at AROS.
Leave room for the future.[/quote]
I had as many as seven OS’s at one time on an older computer, although I got rid of a couple and stabilized it at five. But that computer had certain hardware problems that kept me from fully utilizing it and got worse over time.
I’d certainly like to try some other OS’s, but I’m not quite sure which ones yet. I’ve tried out a few different live cd’s. Minix interests me because it’s supposed to be a true microkernel. While it looks like they’re throwing all that GNU/Linux stuff on top of it to turn it into Yet Another Linux, I don’t see why an entirely different OS couldn’t be built on top of the kernel, much like Haiku built off the NewOS kernel.
In any case, playing with Haiku and FreeBSD should keep me busy for a while
Speaking of FreeBSD and Haiku, they’re like the difference between night and day. Haiku was up and running in a short amount of time into a nice GUI with usable programs ready to run right away. While FreeBSD does have a graphical installer, it really only gets you through to a base install, providing the command line interface, no gui. It’s taken me a lot more time to install various packages, including X-Windows, so I’d have a decent GUI to work in instead of the CLI. And the process has not been without its headaches and concerns.
There are distros of FreeBSD, like PC-BSD, which are intended to make things easier for the user. However, I preferred to go the harder route, building up my system over time, and learning more in the process. I just tonight got around to installing Opera, running in IceWM as I type, to submit this comment.
But of course, the primary target of an OS like FreeBSD is not necessarily your average desktop user. FreeBSD excels in other areas that Haiku isn’t so good at, such as acting as a server.
And that is why I have not moved away from Haiku. Of the other free-os out there I have no idea which I would like or not, but too many of them (the developers) seem to think you are willing to devote days(weeks?) of your life to set the basics of getting they useable. One BSD I download stated it was GUI ready, I pulled down a 4+GB image, booted only to find it reporting that there was no fonts installed. 4+GB and no font set! Where to get them, where to install them also was not mentioned, I was expected to look it up, why?
A Linux I download also claiming to be GUI ready, ask me which windows manager I wanted installed. But no matter which in the menu I choose it said the ??? files were missing!
Maybe it is the netbook I am using, it is a cheap model, but so far only Windows (slow setup) and Haiku (fast setup) have been easy to just install and run. Still I have Mint-OS and AROS to try some time soon, so wish me luck.
PS. I have no need for a CLI only OS, I did CPM, MSDOS, and BASH on Amiga/BeOS/Haiku. I just want an easy to setup GUI OS that does not demand multiple GBs to install.
Well, it was a hassle, let me tell you, but finally I’ve got my computer set up with Windows, FreeBSD, and Haiku co-existing on one hard drive. With GAG as the boot manager. I won’t go into details unless someone is really interested. After all, I’m not really sure what was the source of the problem. I just fiddled with it until I got it to work the way I wanted it to.
The FreeBSD boot manager, Boot0, was working fine for all three OS’s, although Haiku was simply labelled as “??” instead of by name, but I liked GAG’s graphical interface, plus it’s easy to modify on fly, and lets you assign an icon for each OS. There’s no Haiku icon, but GAG does have a BeOS icon. I had tried the Haiku boot manager, but that’s when I was having problems. I noticed that the “uninstall” feature didn’t work (the uninstall button remained inactive when I restarted Boot Manager to remove it from the MBR), and so I had to just overwrite the MBR with another boot manager. I’m not sure the Haiku Boot manager contributed to my problems, but I decided not to take the chance.
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Regarding Minix … they are acutally making it more like NetBSD not Linux. They use NetBSD ports now which is why they have alot more packages than they would otherwise. Also this is of interest https://github.com/diger/hpkgsrc it is NetBSD ports for Haiku it has been around for awhile.
Keep in mind Minix is about stability and fault tolerance not speed… so being like NetBSD which itself is quite stable if not tolerant is a wise thing for them to do.
Wow I could not do that I would have just used PC-BSD, GhostBSD, DarwinBSD, or MidnightBSD.
Well, the main thing is to do some careful planning and to have lots of patience. And of course, make backups of anything important in case you mess things up and have to reinstall/restore your system.
But as I said, I like using FreeBSD as a learning experience, and to remind me of the nuts and bolts of computing. FreeBSD gives you all of that *Nix stuff like the command line interface, programs like Midnight Commander that remind me of my DOS days, and X-Windows and Window Managers.
Of course, a lot of that stuff can also be done in Haiku, especially inside the Terminal, but it’s not necessary to mess with the nuts and bolts to get a usable Haiku system up and running.
Getting Haiku up and running is no big challenge. Get FreeBSD up and running, and you’ll feel like you’ve accomplished something! 
I just love FreeBSD. Perhaps we should try to code something like HaikuBSD these days.
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HaikuBSD? Is that just the Haiku userland on a BSD kernel? If so, not only would that require a shedload of work, but the result wouldn’t be anywhere near as well integrated or compatible as Haiku OS now.
Now if you focussed that effort on creating a fully POSIX compatible subsystem, you would end up with something with all the advantages of Haiku (easy to use, Just works®) with all the advantages of Unix (source code compatibility with virtually every piece of open-source software ever written). Haiku, as it is, already has a reasonable POSIX API, but like all software, it could do with improvements.
Also remember that Haiku already has a port of Pkgsrc and its own native ports system… so it has become quite nice from a software perspective (At least for stable releases… anyway this stuff is a bit broken at times recently due to lots of changes going in)
Would using the NetBSD kernel help with anything beyond support for newer motherboard chipsets?
Would it have any impact on drivers?
Is it? Ive installed FreeBSD only once about 10 years ago and I dont think that it was any harder than, lets say, Debian.
One problem to look out for, with multiple copies of Haiku, is that the OS sometimes uses fs queries to find things, like software to execute, and the results of the query aren’t limited to what you might consider valid execution paths - or even the boot volume. I don’t know how much of that goes on, or even how to find out, I have just run into it once or twice.