Haiku on e-waste install shenanigans

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Good day. I have had a great interest in Haiku ever since I first heard of the project years ago. So now I want to install it on a somewhat permanent setup.

I have dozens of these AM2 and socket 775 boards, so might as well use one. First I tried a low end board with a Sempron LE-1150. The install USB was loading and then it shut off the PC. I don’t know how to avoid this. Oh well, next board. This one was really high end in its day, full size ATX, crazy onboard sound (burnt out, LOL), loads of USB, Athlon 64 X2, an… amount of RAM. Put in a Radeon X1600 and got Haiku going. Installed without much issue.

Now I want to get it working well, but I am simply at a loss with some of these issues. There seems to be no GPU driver (but I found references to the card in a driver within the source code?) so it uses the generic VESA thing. Problem with that is, it knows my screen’s resolution, but it does not let me set an aspect ratio. Only 4:3. This would be just fine if this card had VGA and I could use one of my CRTs, but this PC is far too new for that. There are posts on this forum about the issue, ranging from a decade ago to a few months ago, no definitive answers.

Anyways, then I installed IceWeasel. It does nothing. Not even start up. As far as I can tell, all dependencies are installed. Is there a way I can see what is going on behind the scenes and report the bug in the appropriate place? “my browser doesn’t start” is not particularly helpful I would think.

Then I went to update. Worked fine. Except now I cannot boot from HDD. It starts up just fine, the Haiku boot screen appears, the “progress bar” icons light up all the way. And then the system hangs. The same software works off a USB stick, but not off SATA. I may try booting the same drive on USB, but this is not how I want to use the system.

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If the rocket icon lights up but the desktop never appears, then something in the userland failed to start. You should try the various “Safe mode” options in the bootloader menu and see if one of them does the trick.

Not sure why it wouldn’t let you set an aspect ratio. If it’s actually using the generic VESA driver you’re just stuck with whatever resolutions the VESA BIOS has embedded (unless we can live-patch more resolutions into the BIOS, but we can’t in most cases.)

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After a few hours of messing around I kind of gave up. The system will boot when the hard disk is connected through USB. The browser now works with the updated system. I found a PCI GPU to use instead of the PCI Express Radeon x1600. Haiku even picked up the driver for it. Looks nice on my CRT. The half burnt out Realtek sound chipset has drivers. The system runs more or less fine due to the relatively high specs (well, at least it was a monster gaming PC in 2008).

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