Haiku natively on these machines?

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I am involved in a new e-commerce endeavour called PressButton computing, dealing in the building of computers for purpose, rather than building fairly general machines and cross-selling.

We will be building our own laptops, and as with our desktops, unless the customer asks for an OS we will be shipping with FreeDOS and nowt much else - my question is, is Haiku likely to work natively on machines of this spec: http://shop.pressbuttoncomputing.co.uk/epages/es106145.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es106145_shop/Categories/Computers/laptops

If so, how long until a live Release so we can ship with Haiku?

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I should also mention, we are intending to make a small donation from every machine we ship with Haiku.

From umccullough: Oops, I accidentally replaced your comment instead of replying to it - first time that’s ever happened to me!!

Anyhow, the above portion is the only part I saved (because I quoted it)… sorry about that! feel free to edit it again back to the content it was - I don’t think Drupal saved it :frowning:

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Haiku is still in pre-alpha stage.

A very rough timeline is:

  1. Get Alpha version out by end of 2007
  2. Get Beta ( or R1 ) out by end of 2008

These are not set in stone and will happen when they happen but they seem to be the goals being aimed for ( as far as I can tell ).

It is too early to be using Haiku. It is more for the hard core BeOS “fan boys” out there or those that really love playing around with different OSes. It isn’t ready for the average computer user out there.

To really know if it’ll support your hardware it is better to try it out. But from looking I can say that:
your motherboard, cpu, sata controller & video card will likely be supported.

Also, you’ll get USB support for keyboard & mouse.

Sound should eventually work with OSS port.

Wifi will not work. Wired network card might not work either. And no ACPI.

I’d say, that for now you’re better off to use Linux until R1 is out. Distrowatch is the best site to find Linux distros: http://distrowatch.com/ ( or go with Ubuntu or Fedora; two of the popular choices but both are Gnome based & some people will prefer KDE ). And better to wait for Haiku late Beta or R1 and then check into it again.

But, don’t let this stop you from donating. Haiku will certainly be the better OS out there but it’ll take time to mature. By the time R2/R3 are out, it’ll start to rival Linux and start attracting real attention.

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That caught my attention! :smiley:

(BTW, I would recommend re-posting your intent/questions on the Haiku mailing list as the forums aren’t read by many of the core Haiku developers)

In my opinion, the specs provided on that page aren’t quite detailed enough for someone to check driver support. Can you provide a detailed list of all the various components? vendor/device ids are handy if you’ve got them.

It would appear that most of the non-video hardware is probably intel-based since that is the chipset used.

So, let’s start at the top:

Intel PM965 + ICH8-M chipset

My guess is that the SATA controller will be supported shortly by the Haiku AHCI driver if it doesn’t already work currently.

The Intel HDA audio can only be supported by the OSS port at the moment… this maybe isn’t an optimal solution, but should at least produce sound :slight_smile:

Not sure about the network chip… and AFAIK, Haiku doesn’t really have modem PPP network support yet.

Intel USB should be UHCI/EHCI which are both currently supported.

Now for video: nVidia NB8P (8600MGS) PCI-E graphics card 256MB

This is probably a tough one… if you’re lucky, Rudolf C. will start adding support for the newer nVidia cards to the Haiku driver - but considering he’s been on a hiatus for some time, and only recently started committing changes to the driver again, I wouldn’t expect this to happen any time soon. If he, or someone else, starts syncing the driver to the code for the FOSS XOrg driver, maybe you’ll see this working :slight_smile: Really, nVidia is not an FOSS-friendly piece of hardware because they don’t release the specs or reference drivers (not even for 2d!). This forces operating systems like Haiku to reverse-engineer the hardware (hard), or wait for commercial support (unlikely). I suspect chips like Intel or ATI will have much better FOSS support before long.

Other details: I don’t think Haiku has a working PCMCIA bus yet, and someone would probably have to add support for the webcam before it will function. I’m certain there are probably a bunch of little features on those laptops that won’t work under Haiku until someone adds support for them.

Another major piece that is missing from Haiku is a proper ACPI implementation. This is probably needed for any kind of serious power saving, fan control, temp monitoring implementation from within the OS.

You could maybe donate one of the machines to a developer who has the time and knowledge to ensure Haiku will run on the hardware properly - I’m not sure if that will help or not for the nvidia chip, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

And finally, to your last question: There’s really no estimate on when Haiku will be “released” in any capacity that everyday users can use it. If we’re lucky, there may be an alpha release before the end of the year, but that is approaching fast, and there are probably still a lot of things to fix/finish before that can happen:

In Trac there are some milestone targets with all the bugs/enhancements that are labeled for those releases:

http://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap