So, I have been trying to boot Haiku from a LiveCD on a Dell Inspiron 3800, with an Intel Pentium III @ 600 MHz, 256 MB PC100 SDRAM, and a 10 GB IDE HDD. The problem I’m running into is this: using either R1/beta1 or the hrev53001 nightly, it gets past the boot splash screen, but then hangs when it gets to the blue screen with the cursor; in other words, just before it reaches the desktop. The cursor still moves with the touchpad input, but nothing else happens, and there’s no disc drive activity. One possible cause I thought of: when it was running its original Windows 98 installation, the machine thought it had a 3.5-inch floppy drive installed in its modular bay, even though it actually didn’t; thus, perhaps the Haiku system is hanging because it’s trying to access a nonexistent drive? Thank you all for any input you may have.
256MB is a bit low to boot Haiku these days, and the installer can use a bit extra ram that it does after install…
I was able to boot with 240MB of ram on an already installed VM (since most laptops take a chunk of system memory for vram) configured in a VM after install (memory use was 170 or so MB at the desktop).
Booting from the anyboot nightly… 240MB isn’t really enough to run the installer it boots up and you can see the cursor but it is extremely slow with such little ram… not sure if the installer will load at all.
Perhaps, if there aren’t any system requirements already posted, they could be posted on the Haiku documentation homepage? I didn’t see anything about it in the documentation, last I checked… Could be I wasn’t looking hard enough, but I’m not sure…
It has been in flux a bit recently… previously Haiku could be booted with less probably 64-128MB ram… but package management increased that considerably, and some work has been done to get it back down a bit.
OK, thanks for pointing me in the right direction in terms of the system requirements. I’ll also look into maxing out the RAM… which I didn’t want to do if I didn’t have to, but I suppose I will have to. Thanks for the help on this.