How I use Haiku 64bit every day on a 2007 iMac (Core 2 duo, 20'')

Feedback Hardware
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Hi everyone,

I am trying to use Haiku on this machine as my main OS (at home) and until now I have not encountered a serious obstacle. Since I have no essential free time to help more with the project the least I can do is to give some feedback. Also added comments on HaikuDepot about the apps I use and problems I have seen (I will also report them here as see fit). Please forgive my maybe random order of reporting things…

Machine/OS details:
iMac Core 2 duo 2Ghz (2007), 20’’ with 640Gb hard disk and 4Gb memory.
Haiku 64 bit hrev52874.

Boot:
Dual booting with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Kept it as the last OS that performed well on that machine but I am not actually using it unless needed. Actually dual booting is misleading. After countless different tries and reading of anything related I gave up on booting through the hard disk (having tried Refind, Haiku EFI boot e.t.c). Verified that my Haiku partition has indeed the correct UID but neither refind nore Haiku EFI boot manager can boot it. The way I boot which is always working (100%) is pressing “C” to boot from Haiku beta1 DVD, pressing “space” to get boot options and selecting the hard disk partition to boot (no USB boot seems to work on that machine…). And I correctly also see and am able to boot all boot states (which is amazing BTW). I love Haiku so I can live with that way of booting it :slight_smile: Most of the times I don’t turn off the machine.

Initially I was using the beta but a month ago I changed the repositories (how useful!) and I now follow nightlies, without any problems. On the opposite I got fixes and improvements. keymap switcher on deskbar draws OK now and my sound works very well through line out (only). I always had that machine connected to external amplifier so no problem I can’t use internal speakers. Graphics is only VESA with 1400x1050, not the native 1680x1050, but I can live with that as well.

I am still discovering aspects of the OS I was not aware off (like background hidden windows coming in front when pressing right click on title bar of overlapping window, amazing !). I really appreciate things like queries. They seem lightning fast especially if you take into account that I have 500Gb data on the machine. Also, to me HaikuDepot and SoftwareUpdater are crucial and well implemented pieces of the OS. I understand from the forums that it was a debatable subject but I am very happy that you did it that way. For me this is the correct choice. Also I was very impressed the other day when I traversed through the whole list of HaikuDepot “All packages” and saw how huge is the list of available programs and opensource libraries and frameworks. Through that list I was able to remove user guides of languages other than english. Now software updater downloads less data:)

About applications:
I use QuickLaunch through a shortcut to load apps. I would like it to be able to much pieces of the word I am writing (for example writing “depot” should be able to find HaikuDepot).
I use Deskbar with “expand applications” because it helps with app switching (read somewhere in the forums).
All my media files work OK either through the builtin player or through QMPlay2 which is very good.
LibreOffice loads most documents. But I cannot find a way to make it actually load a file through double-click or “open with”. It’s just displays the main page and doesn’t load the document. Need to do an explicit open. I think Caligra doesn’t have that problem.
After some experiments I ended up using Otter browser (which I use right now). It’s able to load most of the sites I need correctly and plays youtube videos well enough. It’s mostly stable. A serious bug though: it leaks memory when rendering arstechnica.com . It’s very easy to see memory increasing live although document rendering has finished. So I need to close it from time to time to release the memory.
Mail: I haven’t succeded in using mail with gmail. I see empty mail body when opening mails. I would like very much to try Haiku’s way of handling mail. I use it through the browser instead. It uses a basic HTML version due to unsupported browser but does the work. Trying to evaluate Trojita, last time I checked I had problem to send mail.
I was thrilled to find and install Celestia and playing Prince of Persia in Dos box !!!
I am experimenting with other apps as well but I think the above are the main I use.

So for my home usage senario that machine with Haiku works really well:
Playing music and videos, browsing, reading articles e.t.c. Right now it seems like being my main computer at home. I plan to investigate more things as time allows.

To say thank you to all Haiku devs and people in community that help everyday is really not enough. I tried 2-3 times in the past to donate through the site but I had paypal problems. I don’t know if it was known problem and/or if it’s fixed. I will retry.
I wish I was younger without family responsibilities to be able to really help with development. For the time being I will just try to give feedback, comment apps on HaikuDepot and report (reproducible) problems.

Thanks all in the community for making Haiku a reality day by day and please continue to do so. I believe there are other people like me out there that may use it but don’t speak a lot…

13 Likes
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I added this option a while ago, but I don’t think HaikuDepot was updated. If you build from the source you can get it.

run the following commands in the Terminal:

git clone GitHub - humdingerb/quicklaunch: A tool to quickly start any installed application
cd quicklaunch
make

Then there should be an “Objects.[architecture]” sub-folder under QuickLaunch. Open that up and run that version of QuickLaunch. There is an option called “Search from start of application name”, uncheck that option.

Yes,I love that feature!

2 Likes
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Thank you for sharing your experience! :slightly_smiling_face:

You can use ‘*’ for it (for example writing “*dep” will find HaikuDepot)

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Welcome fkap!

For now, you can use “*” for a wildcard character, e.g. “*depot” will find HaikuDepot.

Yeah, maybe I should do another release…
I was in the process of making a change to deal with localized app names, but hit a bit of a snag which needs some deeper changes. Haven’t found the motivation to finish that yet… :slight_smile:

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Thank you all for replying !
I will begin using ‘*’ for the time being in QuickLaunch.
But I will also try building it based on Nighthawk’s suggestion. It’s a good chance to begin becoming familiar with the process in Haiku :slight_smile:

In another front, should I report through another official way the problems I have encountered with Otter Browser and Libre Office? Should I create tickets for them?

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I encourage you to build it yourself. You’ll see, it’s very easy!
Nevertheless, I’ll release an updated version soon that’ll also fix a crash if a “Favourite” can’t be found because the app was re/moved.

At the moment there’s just one string missing for Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Russian and Ukrainian. If anyone can add those until the end of the week it’ll ship with those languages, otherwise I’ll remove them for this release.
Translations are done at Polyglot.

If those bugs are related the Haiku ports and not the apps itself, you can file tickets at the HaikuPorts issue tracker.

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Thanks humdimger!
I will certainly build it myself.

For LibreOffice I think the issue is at least Haiku specific so I will use the HaikuPorts issue tracker.
For Otter browser I will try to verify its behavior also on Linux before reporting anything.

2 Likes
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Are you trying with Haiku EFI loader through rEFInd? That’s the setup I use on my ThinkPad and it works just fine. Might be an iMac-specific issue. (Also, using the EFI loader from the nightlies may change this, there were some fixes to it since the beta.)

These issues were fixed in the nightlies.

This should be fixed with the new WebPositive from last week.

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Was this recent? I still had this issue about a week ago.

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Hmm, then maybe some still remain. Things are greatly improved in Mail since the beta, though.

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Indeed. Things are shaping up nicely in many areas. I could definitely see a Beta2 or RC in the not-too-distant future.

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Yes, exactly. I used EFI boot loader from the link in “UEFI Booting the anyboot image” page. Where I can find the latest nightly boot loader?

I also re-tried it recently. I follow nightlies pretty closely.

Thanks ! I will try again :slight_smile:

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After I’ll be refusing a PR from someone that would add another option, I thought about it some more and decided to not include the “Search from start of application name” after all. Prefixing a search with a “*” is simple enough, and IMO you’ll end up with too many results if you have that new option activated.
There are already too many options for my taste…

So, anyone that absolutely NEEDS the option: fork now. :slight_smile:

FWIW, Gmail does work for me using IMAP. Connection type SSL, Login type ESMTP.

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Retried yesterday after updating to latest nightly (setup mail account from scratch). The settings are the exact you describe. I still see empty bodies in most messages. From Google side I have set it up to allow less secure connections. Otherwise it couldn’t work. Are there any other (Google side) IMAP settings I need to pay attention to ? Is there a possibility that it takes lot of time to display a message since it needed to pull some thousands messages the first time (although I suspect only titles)?

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No other settings besides the “less secure connections” are needed, or AFAIK possible on the GMail site side of things.

Yes, definitely. It took ages to get all the files… mail_daemon kept hanging and had to be quit/restarted quite often. Thanks to fixes by Peter Kosyh, that should n’t be needed anymore, though.
I suggest having the ActivityMonitor show the up/download to see what’s going on.

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Sorry I’m late to the post! Welcome to Haiku on Macintosh! :smile:

I understand your Snow Leopard sentiments — I love that OS as well and think it was one of the best Apple ever made, but I also know that as time goes by, less applications and browsing options are left for it.

As a side note, I just started a Facebook page for running Haiku on the Mac. Feel free to follow or post if you’re interested :slightly_smiling_face:

In any case, I wish you luck with your iMac and Haiku! Sure, Haiku’s small, and takes a bit of work and patience to work with at times, but I think it’s really an excellent OS for the growing number that discover and delve into it. :slight_smile:

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Thanks! It seems that we are more than a few :slight_smile:

We are on the same page…

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Are these HTML-only emails? for these it is expected that there will be no body, because we can only show text in the mail client (until BWebView becomes ready for use outside the web browser). In that case the mail content shows as an attachment that you can open in the browser for now…

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Some of them I expect that they should be HTML mails, yes. In that case I will check if there is an attachment there. Thanks for the hint.

More info:
It seems that for others it just takes time to download them. Today I saw bodies in mails that yesterday were empty. Also in “atrributes” menu I see menu entry for “partially downloaded mails” or something like that. So the system seems to know that it’s in the middle of the process? That menu entry is dynamic and different based on the IMAP folder I am checking.
Another strange behavior is that when I double click some mails the window opens and closes very fast, not able to see anything.

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One thing that should be added is some kind of mail delivery applet or status window. As Haiku doesn’t have any form of logging API or standard, it’s practically impossible to troubleshoot what doesn’t work.