Given I’m unable to connect my laptop to the internet (unsupported wifi, no ethernet port, XHCI errors when using USB to ethernet adapter), and getting unsatisfactory performance in both VMware Player and VirtualBox under Windows 10, I am exploring a possibility to download software from HaikuDepot for offline install (with dependencies).
Is there a supported way to download/cache packages on a machine with an internet connection a then install them on an offline Haiku machine?
I suppose the easiest way is to use Haiku in a VM and install the things you want with HaikuDepot. Then open /system/packages, sort for last modified and copy all the just installed HPKGs to a USB stick (or if that doesn’t work, upload to your cloud and download to a USB stick from your host OS).
Downloading all manually determined dependencies from the HaikuDepotServer sounds painful…
yes… i use this method too… update via vm… copy all package file… bring to my realbox and do via terminal pgkman install *. hpkg
Here it would be fine to have a info in haikudepot that dependencies are needed for the selected package.
Another option is to run Haiku (installed on a partition) in a VM, install whatever is needed and reboot to Haiku.
Is there a tutorial how to do that?
Sure, for qemu you just boot it like qemu /dev/sdb
For other hypervisors there are tutorials on how to do that.
Ohhh, I never imagined it to be this easy! Instead of messing around with ill performing VirtualBox, this does the trick neatly:
sudo qemu-system-x86_64 /dev/sda -cpu host -smp 6 -m 4096 --enable-kvm --usb -device usb-tablet
Thanks for the hint!
This would be an almost perfect solution for me. However, I was unable to set it up from Windows host (VMware/VirtualBox/QEMU - each failed for different reasons). I would be interested if anyone succeeded from Windows host, particularly with QEMU.
Anyway, I was able to connect my physical Haiku installation as a partition in a Haiku VM to easily transfer the downloaded packages. For now, I am pretty happy with this set up. Thanks for the heads up!
Thanks, it works! I’m doing something similar right now.
Please make screenshots and a description of it, so we can add it into oir knowledge base.
I’ve managed to set it up after all, well almost. On the physical machine, I’m dual-booting Windows 10 and Haiku (UEFI with rEFInd). And now I can boot from the same Haiku physical partition in virtual machine in VMware Player on Windows (MBR, since EFI fails for reasons unknown to me).
I was struggling with booting the VM. Nothing worked until I’ve tried booting the loader from the installation CD, holding Shift, and then choosing Haiku on the physical partition. This works!
How can I install the bootloader from CD (non-UEFI) to a virtual drive? Once I can solve this last problem, I can indeed provide a tutorial with screenshots, as I think this is a useful use case.
I guess that’s because Haiku UEFI loader is not yet compatible with VMware UEFI.
You can try the following: install Haiku from a CD to an image in VMware and set it as default boot volume. Then check if you can select your real partition from the bootloader. If that works you can try to remove everything from your virtual image (but leaving /system/haiku_loader package intact). N.B: I never tried that myself so I’m not sure if that would work or not.