Hi There:
Been playing around with Haiku since beta 4 and I’ve gotten deeper into it with beta 5…thought you might be interested in what I’ve found.
I’ve got beta5 installed on a Qemu/KVM VM (under Ubuntu). Could not get the installer image to boot on VirtualBox, it always hangs part way through the boot. Works great using virt-manager. I find that when running it on Qemu/KVM that the console interface is sometimes a bit janky…I feel like I have to click multiple times on a menu item for it to take. The audio is crackly. However, if you set up a spice display in virt-manager and use something like “spicy” to connect to it, those issues go away. I’m chalking that up to the virt-manager console and not Haiku in particular. Running spicy on the same host as the VM seems as fast as the virt-manager console too (with sound).
Haiku #2: Installed it on an old HP HDX laptop I bought back in 2006 or 2007. Installed quick, easy and clean. Comes up in 1280x768 VESA resolution which is not the max of 1366x768, but I can live with it. Sound and ethernet works great. In many ways this old thing seems snappier running things like Falkon than the Qemu VM. Have not had a chance to do too much with wireless yet, although the built-in and the external dongles aren’t recognized “out of the box.”
Observations: Cannot get mount_nfs to work in any way, shape or form on either VM (which uses NAT) or on hardware (which does not). I always get “Permission denied.” The devices are in the /etc/exports on the host. I’d really like to get this working as I use a lot of NFS. For example “mount_nfs 192.168.1.145:/usr/local/files /boot/home/mnt 0 0” will always report “mount failed (Permission denied)”
Wine (on both hosts) just brings up a blank window. If you move it off screen and back on, you can see the contents, but it does not re-draw. I know someone on this forum was trying to get Squeak Smalltalk compiled…you CAN run the Windows version using Wine (I did this for years on FreeBSD as I couldn’t get it to build native on that platform either). It works on Haiku, but the window won’t refresh. This appears to be a general issue with Wine on Haiku right now (it happens with winecfg).
Build tools: I’m impressed, I’ve been able to get a lot of things to “just compile” under Haiku. Built the entire VICE emulator with sdl2 UI without too many headaches. Got the pForth interpeter to compile. Could not get gForth to compile but that build process is pretty complex. Still working on that.
General usage: Well I’ve been using Haiku a lot on a day to day basis. I can limp by on most web sites with falkon/Web/WebPositive. Not being able to mount an NFS drive is a bit of a show-stopper. But overall I like what I see and it works very well with my “work flow.”