I’ve just installed haiku on a small partition on my iMac. The installation ran flawlessly, but when I entered the Haiku boot loader via my install cd I could not navigate the menus because I got no response from my keyboard. It obviously worked before this step as I used a key command to access the boot loader. It’s just in there that it does not work. Furthermore I notice that the caps lock key does not light up, as if my keyboard has no power.
I have tried three different keyboards, 2 wired and one wireless all with the same results. Two were standard french AZERTY and one was an american QWERTY. Two were apple and one was a logitech. I believe that the problem does not lie with the keyboard itself.
I then booted up the desktop in ‘live cd’ mode to verify that it would run on my machine, and it did. The OS was very fast and responsive, being held back obviously from being accessed from a cd instead of the drive.
Any reason why my keyboard would not work during while using the boot loader? Any way to circumvent this? I planned to use the boot loader from the CD because it seems the easiest way to boot on a mac. I am mostly installing haiku to see if I can/play around with so I do not mind booting from the cd each time.
HI. I’ve got Haiku installed on my MacBookPro. The keyboard issue is strictly an Apple firmware issue (BIOS), since it doesn’t offer an option to treat USB keyboards as legacy keyboards (PS2 or serial). Most PC BIOS’s offer this function and is on by default, which is how USB keyboards are usable on PC’s with Haiku. The Haiku boot loader is a very small piece of code, and it doesn’t have room for USB drivers, and it only uses standard BIOS calls to access a keyboard.
If Haiku boots successfully on your iMac, then you can ignore the issue, since you dont need to access any of the Safe mode options. If there is a setting you do wish to PERMANENTLY alter, you can always alter the home/config/settings/kernel/kernel file which has most of the safe mode options.
The other option is for Haiku to do what Linux does, and that is to either use a boot partition (eg. up to 32Mb, and load an entire kernel there), or to have a simple read-only file system and write a boot loader which will load a 2Mb kernel from the same disk partition. This is quite complex to do, and for the potential user base it boils down to a nice to have feature, but way down on the feature list.
Haiku developers have more important things to worry about than trying to work around deficencies in Apple’s BIOS. Send a bug report to Apple, and ask them to offer legacy keyboard support in their BIOS. I’ve done the same, and have also complained about their incorrect VESA settings.
When Haiku is installed to a partition, it also installs its bootloader in the MBR of the partition (like Windows does). rEFIt should allow you to start it without issues.
Just to confirm I am getting the same problem with a MacMini: keyboard doesn’t work in boot menu. This is is a problem since I’d need to try vesa mode to verify something: how can I change the boot options again ?
I don’t think you can force VESA with a settings file. If you can’t enter the boot options, you’ll have to rename the used gfx driver to have Haiku fall back to VESA.