Intel Celeron N2840
4Gb DDR3 (soldered to motherboard, no free slots)
500Gb SATA HDD
Integrated Intel HD Graphics
Realtek WiFi
Realtek Ethernet
SonicMaster soundcard.
Touchpad recognized as standard PS/2 mouse
Video not recognized (works with Standard VESA. With native resolution.)
WiFi not recognized
Ethernet works perfectly
Under Haiku B5 + Falkon, YouTube videos barely work in 480. Touchpad has area for buttons, but that’s not recognized and just works as part of the touchpad area. Touchpad click works, so does right-click.
Under Linux Debian 12, everything is recognized and working perfectly. YouTube works flawlessly in 720p. 1080p is too much for this processor, so that’s unusable. 720p works, but just barely. Can’t multitask while watching, and changing windowed-fullscreen is laggy. But it works.
Any possibility of making this work under Haiku? Especially the WiFi + Video.
I’m not skilled enough to program drivers myself (I’m just a hobbyist Python/Xojo/C# programmer.) BUT. I’m more than willing to run code and troubleshoot. Might also be able to offer remote connection to this laptop if that’d help.
For saying something about the Wifi support status,it would be good to know which Realtek chip is used exactly.
You can see that in the Devices application.
I know that a good number of Realtek chips is supported,but probably not all of them.
Haiku uses Wifi drivers from both FreeBSD and OpenBSD,so if your chip is supported by one of them,there’s a good chance it can be made work on Haiku as well.
Alternatively,you can try a USB Wifi dongle,there’s also a good number of them supported.
For Youtube videos,I recommend installing the QMPlay2 application that you can find in HaikuDepot.
The website is just awfully bloated and slows your system down unneccessarily,especially on low-end hardware.
I’m sure your computer can do a lot better when playing the videos in a video player instead of the browser.
Ah, my bad! Sorry, I intended to post that info too, but forgot. so, here:
WiFi: RTL8723BE PCIe (Ethernet is RTL810xE)
Video: Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series.
running install-wifi-firmwares.sh does not solve the WiFi problem, although a couple of the drivers fail to download (I think the files are not available anymore).
I’m fairly sure it works on my TP-LINK WiFi dongle, but I can’t test that at this moment (it’s in use in another computer.)
I can probably download OpenBSD and FreeBSD and see what devices work with those.
Thanks for the QMPlay2 suggestion! It’s not only about YT videos, it was just a commonly known performance metric that I could compare between the two OSes.
Someone should really place a big fat warning above the manual instructing to run install-wifi-firmwares.sh that this script is only for a small number of very old wifi chips and doesn’t help with any modern ones.
Firmware for most chips already ships with Haiku and should work out of the box,if it doesn’t,that script won’t change it.
I did some research on the support status for the RTL8723BE and found that FreeBSD does not support it,but on OpenBSD you may have luck,I’m not really sure.
The rtwn driver manual doesn’t list RTL8723BE as supported,it’s not mentioned at all: rtwn(4) - OpenBSD manual pages
I found a thread about support for that specific device here: Realtek RTL8723BE wireless chipset support? - r/openbsd
While some say that it didn’t work back in 2019,the PCI IDs have been added to the OpenBSD source and they’re still there,so there’s a chance that it works today in 2025 and that the driver can be imported to Haiku.
I’m also sure that I’ve seen people saying that a TP-Link dongle works,but not sure if it’s exactly the same as you have.
Ooh, thanks for the research! I’ll see if I can get OpenBSD running and confirm if the WiFi is working or not. I’ll get back to this when I can.
I’m not 100% either about the TP-LINK dongle, but I had an older one that worked back in Beta… 3? I think. So I’d hazard a guess that the newer one works in Beta5. I’ll test that too, probably even today, if I can get the chance to snab it from the other computer for a few minutes.
BUT, there’s another change, albeit a bit more hands-on one: the WiFi card on the laptop is not soldered on, and can be removed — and thus probably replaced by something that is supported. I’ll dig into this more when I have time. But at this moment, this seems like the most probable angle to work. I may have a few old WiFi cards lying around, I’ll see if anything fits there.
With the exact list of affected chipsets. Doesn’t prevent people from running the script… I doubt making the warning bigger or more colorful will help.
On the other hand we should make the network prefrences show something about it. Just a “firmware loaded succesfully” message or something similar may help people see that the firmware for heir device is already there
I had the idea that if your chipset if supported with this firmware, the driver should attach but give a message in network preferences, and have a gui way there to install just that firmware. That should make it un-ambigious for when it is needed and isn’t.
Haiku uses only network drivers from FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Haikus graphics drivers are self-made and support only a rather small set of hardware,but if the VESA driver works with the native resolution for you,that should be good enough.
Hardware acceleration isn’t supported with any of the currently available drivers anyway.
For modern Nvidia cards,a experimental driver with hardware acceleration is currently being developed,but not yet ready.
For other cards,that would need to be written from scratch,which is a massive amount of work and unlikely to happen anytime soon.
