There is minority of users that still use a floppy drive…I do in my retro PCs…both 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" drives.
I have it in Linux and Win 7 & 8.1 boxes where I prep for retro installs and so forth. Also for archival and preservation of old software where I create images or ISOs…it comes in handy to have great floppy drives.
Some of his points are useful as tickets, and he should create the relevant ones, with enough information for them to be verified.
If boot hangs with some usb thing connected ( in this case, a floppy drive ) , that should be investigated. Not recognizing some hardware is ok, but then Haiku could just jump over it and continue the boot. If it hangs, there is some corner case that could be fixed. Here it is happening with a floppy, but could happen with another not-so-common peripheral.
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These days a friend is archiving a pile of old floppy disks with irreplaceable content of sentimental and historic value. Without a machine with a working drive, all of it would be lost to time, like mine are now. And one of these days, other operating systems are going to start removing relevant drivers, if they haven’t already.
Sure, but how would you test that? You can look at the code and say “That looks OK”, but you don’t really know until you’ve tried it with that peripheral physically plugged in. And then it may still happen with a different brand of peripheral. We can’t expect devs to collect warehouses of obsolete hardware to test against.
This is why we need a reference platform, one machine on which everyone works like hell to make sure that everything works. For argument’s sake, a mid-range Lenovo Thinkpad. “Get this exact machine and everything will work. We guarantee it. The further you get away from these specs, the fuzzier our guarantee becomes”. Then (this is the hard part), you announce a new reference platform every three years or so.
And that is not going to happen. It would take a lot more centralized direction and control than this community is comfortable with.
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Manufacturers often market several iterations of the same model with different components.
Even within the same generation. Take the Thinkpad example to follow your reasoning. A given model variation may ship with a touch lcd screen or a glass trackpad. They are apparently the same model but the glass trackpad is manufactured by another company and is known not to be recognised by Haiku. How would you address this?
IMHO the only solution would be to sign a deal with a manufacturer that ships a product which is “Haiku certified”. But we are not at that point yet. Maybe when R1 is released even so I have some reservations
Single board computers stay the same, and @X512 already works on Haiku support for VisionFive 2. Also, SBCs are inexpensive compared to laptops.
So official support is viable for some hardware.
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Is it a standard floppy drive? I mean, not a zip drive or something of this kind?
OK, we’re not pushing Lenovo here, just using it as an example while exploring ideas.
You’d have to be very precise. We’re not saying “Haiku runs on all Thinkpads” but “Haiku is developed on the Thinkpad 21H1005JZA”. Every large manufacturer will change that model code when they change parts. Except maybe some obscure ones in China.
That would have to be a smaller manufacturer, like System76 is for Linux. And who signs for Haiku? We are such a bunch of rugged individualists that you’d immediately have people saying “I didn’t vote for you” and forking the code.
Anyway, it won’t happen, unless some tech billionaire decides he needs a new hobby, like <cough> Ubuntu <cough>.
Exactly, some hardware which is not fully supported for the time being and generally speaking not very fast.
Nevertheless, I agree SBCs have more chances to have a longer lifecycle.
The cost induced by low performance outweighs the saving. Is it worth it?
The cost induced by low performance outweighs the saving. Is it worth it?
It is worth it, because a developer can buy a cheap SBC without a second thought. You would not buy an $1200 workstation that eagerly.
Also, a good SBC is more performant than hardware BeOS was running on. Careful programming can make a good value of not so beefy hardware.
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I don’t know much about laptops besides thinkpads , but thinkpads don’t vary that much in one model number. A range of CPUs and RAM, wireless cards, different screens, and different options for things like fingerprint scanners, and colorimeters on high end models. A few offer a range of graphics cards but mostly the workstation models. Not much else really?
As any bugs : needs information about it, the hardware involved, logs, syslogs, etc. And the willingness of the affected person(s) to test bug corrections. Just generic descriptions of the hardware do not help.
As many people have already said : there are nice Dell, HP, Acer or Lenovo ( and others ) models that could be very good to use Haiku on. Then that specific model doesn´t sell in some country, another is sold with different ( and then unsupported ) wifi hardware, video options and the like.
Like explained , if you tie yourself to some specific hardware platform, people won´t even try it in different machines because it probably wont´work correctly.
I agree that the OP should kick the tyres of a few niche OS before deciding to stick with Haiku over another OS. Never-mind the absence of drivers, 9Front often requires the user to buy a new 3 button mouse!
Also, as @BlueSky says, the virtual machine is your friend. If the idea is to have a poke around and see if it suits, let the existing OS handle the compatibility and run in a VM. If it piques your interest sufficiently, then it is the time to find a surplus old PC with totally generic hardware that is unlikely to frighten Haiku (that said, I seemingly always manage to pick a dud!).
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I guess it´s safe to say that porting Firefox to a new platform is not “simple” by any account. If you want to know details please do a bit of searching here on the forum, you´ll find several threads on this topic. Of course not everyone agrees that Web+ is the best way to move forward browser-wise (I do) and there are several ported browsers available on Haiku, but as of now (at least to my knowledge) nobody seriously attempted porting over Firefox. But I don´t think anybody is waiting for Mozilla to port Firefox to Haiku, as you suggested.
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Firefox was already ported long ago, but because they kept changing stuff the port became non-viable. Webkit atleast gives us a native port that we can tangibly maintain : D
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Yes I know that, but thanks for mentioning it. I left it out for the sake of simplicity.
This is enough to move you quickly from a fully supported machine to one where you get only 800x600 video in VESA, and no Wifi.
So, yes, the commercial model number is not enough.
Yes but it’s a much smaller set of variables than on some machines where for the same model they will have a different chipset and all peripherals are changed too. Or for example on routers where the same model number has a totally different SoC from a different manufacturer.
It is far easier to target this small set of variables than on other systems. And even if you can’t support all the variants, saying “laptop model X works well but if you have wifi card Y you’ll need to change it, and of the three LCDs available LCD Z does not support native resolution” is much better than “total lottery because they are all entirely different machines”.
Floppy support was removed a couple years ago, if I am reading this correctly.
Link
Can Haiku 32 bit use BeOS drivers?