HP Envy 13" compability & what can I do to help

Hi guys

A few years ago I was keenly following the development of this projects. The last five or so year I’ve been using a MacBook though and felt like I couldn’t do much to help out, especially as I didn’t even have my own hardware (used company hardware for everything.)

The time has now come for me to get my own laptop though, and I’m looking through options. I won’t be using Haiku as my primary operating system as I don’t think that’s completely practical at this point, but I would love to have the option to run it and contribute with what I can.

Though I’m fairly used to reading & writing code it has been only on the web for the last 8 years so I don’t expect to be able to contribute too much, but perhaps the odd fix / improvement for UI related things and one or two easy tickets.

Sorry to be rambling on. I’m looking at the HP Envy 13" as having the most bang for the buck, decent battery performance and overall pretty good reviews. If I’m not mistaken this laptop has pretty good prospects for running Haiku, right? If it doesn’t what can I do to help out? Happy to hear recommendations for a similar machine as well. :slight_smile:

Sorry for writing such a long post on such a small topic. Thanks a lot for your time!

Depends on what doesn’t work. We accept patches for everything, if you can figure out what to do :slight_smile: Otherwise, submitting tickets / commenting on existing ones with listdev/syslog is a great help to us, but we only have so much manpower.[quote=“eml, post:1, topic:5364”]
Happy to hear recommendations for a similar machine as well.
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Lenovo machines usually work pretty well. I have a ThinkPad E550 which I’m happy with, and it runs Haiku pretty well (audio works, etc. – didn’t get around to attempting WiFi setup, though, so I don’t know if that works or not…)

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We can offer some support if you need to write or update some drivers if something doesn’t go right. There is always the option of buying 2 laptops and giving one to one of the Haiku devs so he writes drivers for you, but that is not a cheap option.

If you can find a cooperative reseller, maybe put Haiku on an USB stick, and ask them if you can try to boot it to see how well it runs on the machine. This way you know what to expect before buying and you can check that display, sound, wifi, etc works as expected.

If you don’t use Haiku as your main operating system, and everything else fails, there is always the option of running it inside a virtual machine.

I don’t have much advice on similar machines, as I tend to use hardware that is a few years old. It is much cheaper and usually, when I get it there are already drivers for it.

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Thanks a lot for your answer! The E550 looks quite good and even cheaper than the Envy. I don’t need to squeeze a lot of performance out of this machine but that one looks like it packs a punch. I watched your interview about Haiku yesterday (great work btw, got me very excited :D) and it sounds like you haven’t had big problems setting up dual booting. What do you think about getting wifi to work on it, impossible without coding?

Cheers! I have dabbled with C and C++ before but I’m not sure how much I trust myself to do things correctly. Thankfully that’s what patches & reviews are for. Are there guides to get started on driver development (say, Wi-Fi for example though I think you’re getting those from FreeBSD) or do I need to jump into code and learn by example? Not sure I’m technically up for the task but I’m up for trying.

Ignore my question. Clearly there are a bunch of guides on the website. :slight_smile:

For Wi-Fi drivers, we get them from FreeBSD and I think that makes them relatively easy to do.
The process would be something like this:

  1. Find the driver that support your network device in FreeBSD
  2. See if an older version of that driver is already in Haiku, if so, you “just” need to update it
  3. If not, create a new directory for the driver (here: http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/tree/src/add-ons/kernel/drivers/network). You will need Jamfiles and a glue.c, possibly taking inspiration from other drivers
  4. Try to compile it. You may find that our compatibility layer (http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/tree/src/libs/compat) needs some functions added. Check the FreeBSD man pages (or git logs) for such functions and implement them
  5. This should be enough to get things going.

Thanks! I really appreciate it.