Hi,
Can I use Haiku on Pentium I, 300 MHz if I put 300 MB of RAM? I see that the minimum requirements are like Pentium III. What is the main reason for the rather high hardware requirements?
It’s wonderful that people are trying to run Haiku on antediluvian computers. But calling Pentium III “high hardware” is a bit of a stretch in 2021, surely?
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You might try it, but if Haiku requires SSE instructions then it is a no go on anything below Athlon/Pentium III.
Btw, AFAIK WebPositive requires SSE2, which first appeared with the Pentium IV and Athlon 64, so you’d need another browser anyway (not that the modern internet is anything near usable in an ancient Pentium II).
i can’t believe someone would worry about running on a nearly 25 yr old cpu, bro, pickup a extra shift
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That’s incorrect? The minimal requirement is a Pentium I processor with MMX instructions. But yes, you do need quite a lot of RAM by 1995 standards, and it will be unbearably slow on these old machines. Haiku is a modern OS and these old machines are clearly not the main target for us.
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best recycled, they are very power hungry, and the raw materials would make a better PC anyway, recycle these dinosaurs
While I’d not run Haiku on such system or try to use it for daily use, the retro-PC enthusiast in me feels sad reading this… [looks at the Pentium MMX system at the other side of the room and comforts it: “don’t worry, nobody’s gonna hurt you”]
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Instead of writing reddit-level comments like this, you should consider to provide patches to reduce Haiku’s memory footprint and/or its hardware requiments. It IS possible to make HAIKU behave better on cpu/memory constrained systems, and only you are the one, who can decide if it makes sense to adjust it. Contributing would results in more upvotes than playing on the harp of nostalgy, what you are doing right now.
That is kind of a sad attitude. So - by that measure, no computer history should be saved? I mean, that machine would probably run Open Step, BeOS or
Zeta quite well.
“power hungry” apllies to much old hardware (anything atlleast 2 years old, computers keep getting more efficient), but this is an easy fallacy because it ignores the cost of recycling and the cost of producing new hardware, in the hierarcy of waste reuse always goes before recycling, anyhow, and not everything can be recycled effectively either.
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you forget power use per instruction, so basically while older CPU used less power in watts per hour, they did far far far less work per watt consumed.
If I still had a Vampire accelerator in my Amiga 500, I’d tell your Pentium MMX to bring it on! Haiku works best on a multicore system, or at least multi-processor. Single threads are still in Aros’ territory.
Dude, I was just answering to the guy that told the OP to recycle his retro machine. I myself am not interested in running Haiku in the sub 1GHz machines in my collection. I assume there was a misunderstanding here because I don’t think I’ve said anything to warrant such a response.
No, I haven’t.
For an example a solar panel only becomes climate neutral after 10 years of continued usage, before that it is a net negative on the environment. It’s easy to say to just recycle everything old but we just aren’t that good at recycling. especially with products containing those horrible lithium-ion batteries.
Yes modern computers can execute more instructions per watt, but then they are also generally asked to run astronomically more ammounts of crap for tasks than before, so I am not convinced this is that much better.
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If a Pentium 4 is a little much, you could consider a Pentium M system; in fact I had it running on a small HP slimline computer, it’s actually not bad - only issue I have is audio (I haven’t tested it since early Beta 2).
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Also “Release build” could help with performance. But currently it is only “debug”.
Runs really nicely on a Pentium M Thinkpad I have - 2GB RAM - Audio and Wifi work too. Of course, watching youtube isn’t going to happen, but it will play smaller format videos and heaps of DOSBox and older ported games work nicely too…
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As was said, we welcome patches to improve Haiku and make it work better on low-end machines, even if it’s not the current focus, and this also means improvement for faster ones.
But many features that didn’t existed at the BeOS also usually require resources, and it’s always a tradeoff. Still, we usually try not to waste memory or speed without a reason. Else we’d have the same requirements as Windows 11 
I still intend to support some old platforms someday and this will probably mean workaround or fallback for some stuff (like, not using gradients in the UI, but we already can do this with decorators and control looks).
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The releases are built in release mode. The nightly builds are built in debug mode. It’s running faster in release mode, but the memory recuirements are about the same