On my modern-ish desktop it works fine as far as I can tell, no support for my (USB) wireless chip and no way to get that box to a place I can reach with a network cable, so not exactly useful, but it works. This is really cool because versions of Linux newer than 2008 won’t work unless I disable APIC (and SMP with it…) and PC-BSD won’t do SMP. Windows? No idea, not going to try.
Next was my (pretty old) laptop. I didn’t bother trying it in live cd mode (I should have!), just installed. Installation went fine, but Haiku freezes while loading the desktop, and then only responds to the power/reset button - ctrl-alt-del does nothing. Haiku does work when I enable safe mode. The other options in the boot menu don’t seem to matter.
So how do I make Haiku always boot in safe mode? Or even better, how do I figure out what is causing the freeze and how do I disable just that component?
Your pretty old laptop may have a driver or a resource allocation problem.
If CTRL-ALT-DEL does nothing, ALT-SYST-D (in this order) should let you enter the Kernel Debugging Land (KDL). Now you should be able to track down the problem.
I did manage to enter KDL while in safe mode, so I am pressing the right keys, but Alt-SysRq-D does nothing when frozen.
I also tried “open /var/log/syslog” while in safe mode (although if I understood correctly that log isn’t kept after a cold reboot?), which just got me a “No such file or directory”.
I guess “system freezes completely” is a bit vague for a bugreport. Any ideas how I could at least figure out which component is to blame?
I’ll search the bug tracker for my hardware now…
EDIT: No luck. So it’s bug report time
syslog is now located at /boot/common/var/log. syslog is written and stays if you can boot into Haiku. ie: if you boot with safe mode then syslog will not show what is causing the freeze
syslog while freezing is helpful to see what is going on. on-screen debug (by safe mode) may give some hints too.
Supposedly there is a way to save syslog - what you really should do to file your bug report.
There’s no way to save the syslog, I don’t have a real reset button, just a power button that may do something different (like reset or hibernate) depending on the OS and configuration if pressed for two seconds. Power off = contents of RAM gone = syslog gone.
On-screen debug disappeared to be replaced by the desktop after a few pages, then the system froze after a second. I didn’t see anything that would seem like a reason for the freeze, but I don’t know too much about the Haiku kernel so what do I know .
If only I had a serial port, I might be able to get the relevant bit of the syslog.
Looks like the location of syslog needs to be updated both in that wiki page and the bug reporting instructions linked to earlier, by the way…
I’ll go through that list of servers and update my bug report (6095) tomorrow when I have the laptop and desktop on one desk again.
If Haiku boots past all or most of the icons in the splash screen and dumps you at a black screen, do “ctrl+alt+esc” and it will fall back to VESA mode if thats whats halting the boot process.
Diver gave some good information. safe-mode disables bunch of other stuff. So, if you can boot with safe-mode, you should try starting up the disabled servers from terminal.
net_server or media_server is likely to cause the freeze or crash. Try running those first from terminal and see what happens.
Noticing which servers affect you will at least narrow down what is causing your freezing issue.
Does the laptop have onboard WiFi? If net_server issue, then you may want to remove the WiFi drivers because those can cause a problem sometimes - if you have onboard WiFi otherwise should not have any affect.
media_server was the problem. The bug seems to be the same as http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/4491 , and I “fixed” it by removing the audio driver for my hardware.
