Issues -- Haiku R1A3 on Dell Latitude E6500

1

First off, let me say thanks to everyone who’ve gotten Haiku to where it is today: computing is fun again! As an old-time BeOS user, I’m happy to see that legacy not only carried forward, but improved. Congratulations! I’ve got R1A3 up and running in a virtual machine on OS X 10.7.4 using VMware Fusion 4.13, and everything’s working after I installed the OSS package for sound and set the network driver to “e1000” in the .vmx file.

Now I’m trying to get R1A3 to run from a USB stick on my Dell Latitude E6500, and I’m having issues. First of all, it seems that the NVIDIA NVS Quadro 160M is not supported, so I have to use Safe Mode VESA. Haiku lists the Quadro 160M card as “G98M,” and I can’t see if it’s part of any of the older driver packages.

Is there a better graphics option, and, if not, how can I set Haiku up to use the VESA driver (preferably set to 1440 X 900 32-bit resolution) without entering the Safe Mode menu at each boot?

Speaking of Safe Mode, even with the VESA drivers I’m left with just the mouse pointer frozen in the middle of an empty desktop, though all the icons fire up okay on the boot screen. Enabling the Safe Mode option (and Safe Mode graphics) seems to get me fully loaded to the Desktop (with the Tracker, Deskbar, and a fully functioning system), but is there some way to find out what’s causing the failure?

For what it’s worth, I’ve enabled a debug log, but nothing’s being written – not even a syslog.

Then there’s networking: I’ve got both an Intel Wireless 5300 and on-board Intel 82567 LM Gigabit Network Controller – both of which are recognized by Devices, but neither of which loads. I’ve installed the 5xxx drivers, but Network Preferences still can’t find a device – wired or wireless. And while “listdev” sees both the devices, “ls /dev/net” just finds ‘ipro1000’ and ‘iprowifi4965.’ Anyone have any ideas?

As an aside, whenever I do run “ls /dev/net,” it will run the command and then freeze the system hard (at this point I need to power the whole computer off and restart.)

Last of all there’s sound. Devices shows an Intel 82801 (ICH9) HD Audio Controller. Since I can’t use the “installoptionalpackage” script to install OSS without a network connection, I’ve done it manually. The Media Preferences shows Intel HD as the audio driver, but I get no sound from either the HD Audio or Intel HD Audio settings. Any ideas?

Finally, the Media server needs to be started after every boot – it’s not being started “automagically.” Is this because I’ve had to use Safe Mode to get to the Desktop? Can I have it start somehow with a script?

Thanks in advance.

2

Well, I’ve got the latest nightly (44182) to test, but so far it changes nothing. I still can’t get my network adapters recognized – wired or wireless (even after installing the Haiku Intel Pro WiFi 5xxx drivers). So, no network and no internet connection.

This means there’s no way to install the wpa_supplicant package, unless I can get it directly somewhere? (For what it’s worth, the package seems to already be built into the nightly, but perhaps I’m wrong here, since the 5xxx drivers don’t show up after ‘ls /dev/net/’.)

And, for whatever reason, running the ‘ls /dev/net/’ command always freezes the system, requiring a hard reboot. Is the network server crashing, or is it something else? Does anyone know how to stop and restart the network server by the command line?

So I’m left booting with Safe Mode, which means my graphics is VESA and there’s no sound. I can live with that; more importantly, there’s no wired or wireless connection. Sigh.

Anyone have any ideas? The whole point of the exercise was to see if I could Haiku functioning outside of a virtual machine, but I suppose if it won’t recognize any of my hardware, there’s not much to do. The lack of drivers is an obvious deal-breaker.

3

For me, everything works (even the WPA2-encrypted WIFI), except it produces no sound.

Did you report the right model ? The Dell Latitude E6500 doesn’t have a NVIDIA NVS Quadro 160M graphic adapter but an Intel one.
http://haikuware.com/details/dell-latitude-e6500

May be you should try a more recent build. see http://www.haiku-files.org/unsupported-builds/x86-gcc2/

4

Well, the Intel was standard, but you could get the NVIDIA card as an upgrade – which I did. Same with the Intel 5300 WiFi: you could configure the machine with the standard Dell wireless, an Intel 5100, or an Intel 5300.

I can deal with the graphics card issue for the moment, but not having an internet connection is a bit limiting. How did you get your WiFi to work?

Also, I’d love to try the nightly stuff, but I can’t figure out how to install it over my current one. Do the nightly builds overwrite everything, or can you just copy over the /system folder?

5

First of all, you should definately try the nightly builds. A lot has changed since R1A3.

I don’t think any NVidia cards are currently supported, which means you will probably have to use VESA and a standard BIOS specified 4:3 ratio screen resolution. Haiku currently has good support for many Radeon cards and some Intel cards (I think).

Safe Mode disables unnecessary servers, including the media server. After you boot, you can start them one by one (I think they’re in /boot/system/servers or someplace similar).

6

Seems that the Haiku nVidia TNT/GF driver works okay (at least I don’t need to choose Safe mode video anymore), but something’s still blowing up at boot. Is there a way to find out what the boot process is choking on? I mean, even though I’ve installed the Haiku nVidia drivers, how can I be sure that they’re being used? Is there a way to see what the kernel is using?

I still can’t use my network adapters – wired or wireless. I see that the Intel 5xxx drivers aren’t specifically written for the 5300 (just 5000, 5100, 5150, etc.), but I’d assume my Intel ethernet should be recognized?

Here’s relevant output from ‘listdev:’
[…]
device Network controller [2|80|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 4235: Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300
[…]
device Multimedia controller (Audio device) [4|3|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 293e: 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller
[…]
device Network controller (Ethernet controller) [2|0|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 10f5: 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection
device Display controller (VGA compatible controller, VGA controller) [3|0|0]
vendor 10de: nVidia Corporation
device 06eb: G98M [Quadro NVS 160M]

I’m more than willing to try new builds, but how do I do it? Do I need to destroy my current installation, or is there a way to keep it and also update to a newer build?

Thanks in advance.

7

First, you need a nightly build and second, install the optional package wpa_supplicant.

Just put the anyboot image on a USB-key, Boot on this device, open the boot menu and make sure you boot from the right volume.
Then, run the installer again.

The installation process erase only the system folder.

8

[quote=NewForumuser]
This means there’s no way to install the wpa_supplicant package[/quote]
this optional package has just been added to the standard build (see hrev44190 )
so you will have nothing more to do.

The iprowifi4965 should support your Intel 5300 WiFi adapter ( listimage kernel|grep driver ) but may be you miss a firmware.
The firmware should be in /system/data/firmware/iprowifi4965

you may open a new ticket. Don’t forget to include our device list (listdev) and the system logs (/common/var/log/*)

regards

9

Thanks – I’ll give it a try.

You know, I think something’s not working with the network server: I ran a debug to screen and entered KDL as it tried to load. I’ve been having issues with ‘ls /dev/net’ freezing the system (see above), and I tried to start /boot/system/servers/net_server (by double-clicking on it) and it froze everything, too.

Is there some way to start, stop, and restart the network server from the command line? I’ve looked and couldn’t find any command for the network other than netstat and netcat. There’s ifconfig, of course, but it doesn’t do me much good at this point.

Also, is there a way to output the boot process from the Safe Mode screen? It’d be nice to actually see what’s being loaded, what’s not, and where something blows up. The output to screen is way too difficult to decipher – the font is tiny!

10

Thanks. I’ll keep exploring; it’s become a bit of a challenge. If I can’t get any further, well, I guess I’ll replace the fan assembly on my old ThinkPad T40 and run Haiku from there.

It is troublesome that Haiku is like BeOS in that the lack of driver support for new hardware may ultimately force it to remain a niche product. Sigh.

Perhaps I should learn how to write drivers?

11

This could be explained by a driver that communicates with a device without firmware…

run /boot/system/servers/net_server

in the boot menu, enter Select debug option and enable on screen debug output

12

That was a bad idea as this driver is already included with Haiku. Installing this old version will only make things worse. What happens if you don’t use Safe mode video option? Also see Screen Clicking Apply button saves selected resolution under ~/config/settings/kernel/drivers/vesa.

According to Quadro - Wikipedia Quadro 160M is based on 9300M-GS. Unfortunately nvidia driver in Haiku only supports cards up to Geforce 7600. So Haiku automatically fallbacks to vesa driver.

[quote]Last of all there’s sound. Devices shows an Intel 82801 (ICH9) HD Audio Controller. Since I can’t use the “installoptionalpackage” script to install OSS without a network connection, I’ve done it manually. The Media Preferences shows Intel HD as the audio driver, but I get no sound from either the HD Audio or Intel HD Audio settings. Any ideas?
[/quote]

If default hda driver doesn’t work for you even in nightly image, then you need to disable it before installing OSS.

mv /system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/bin/hda /system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/bin/hda.disabled
installoptionalpackage opensound

[quote]I’m left with just the mouse pointer frozen in the middle of an empty desktop, though all the icons fire up okay on the boot screen. Enabling the Safe Mode option (and Safe Mode graphics) seems to get me fully loaded to the Desktop (with the Tracker, Deskbar, and a fully functioning system), but is there some way to find out what’s causing the failure?

As an aside, whenever I do run “ls /dev/net,” it will run the command and then freeze the system hard (at this point I need to power the whole computer off and restart.)
[/quote]

Enabling the Safe Mode option disables net_server among others (see Search results for 'how_figure_out_what_crashes_haiku' - Haiku Community) which in turn disables associated drivers which are cause this freeze. ls /dev/net most likely triggers the same bug. Do you still have this problem in the current nightly builds?

Devices and listdev just lists your hardware using data from PCI database. They don’t know anything about drivers. As starsseed noted you can use

listimage kernel | grep driver
to see which drivers are currently loaded. If ls /dev/net shows ipro1000 and iprowifi4965 it means that Haiku recognized both of them and loaded their drivers. You can try to disable one of them, sometimes they conflict with each other: 
mv /system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/bin/ipro1000 /system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/bin/ipro1000.disabled

Yes, media_server doesn’t start in safe mode.

/system/servers/media_server

Currently all existing WIFI drivers are already included in Haiku.
wpa_supplicant package is included by default since hrev44190 see [haiku-commits] haiku: hrev44190 - build/jam - haiku-commits - FreeLists

13

Thanks for the detailed – and enlightening – response. I think I’ll do a clean install of 44190 and see what happens; that way I’ll have a clean system and can fiddle with stuff as you suggest.

14

Yay! No more Safe Mode required!

It went like this: first I downloaded build 44193 and created a new USB stick so I could start from scratch with an unaltered image.

I tried booting without any Safe Mode options and got as far as an empty Desktop with the mouse cursor frozen in the middle of the screen. This has been “normal” so far, so I restarted and chose just Safe Mode video – with the same result. Still not unexpected, given my prior experience.

So, after a restart, I chose Safe Mode and booted successfully to the Desktop (with the Tracker, Deskbar, and a fully functioning system). I ran listimage and found the VESA driver loaded, so I changed the Screen preference to 1440 X 900 and rebooted with Safe Mode as the only option selected.

Okay, I can live with VESA graphics at 1440 X 900, so I figured I’d try to get a network connection. I ran ls /dev/net to see if it would still freeze Haiku with the latest build, and the answer is “Yes, it does.” After a hard shutdown and reboot, I renamed the ipro1000 and rebooted (again in Safe Mode).

On booting to the Desktop, Network Server tried to configure the remaining driver (iprowifi4965), but ended up freezing the system. So, another hard shutdown and Safe Mode reboot, and I disabled the iprowifi4965 and restored the ipro1000.

On the next boot, Haiku configured the ipro1000 successfully and I had a network connection. I changed the connection to static and changed the address to one on my network (the original DHCP configuration was to a 192.139.x.x address, rather than to 192.168.x.x) and rebooted.

I missed being able to enter Safe Mode and thought, “Okay, let’s see what happens.” What happened was: success!

Everything loaded: network server loaded the ethernet driver and connected, media server started, VESA was set to 1440 X 900. Yay!

With an active internet connection, I installed OSS – after first disabling the hda driver as suggested. This is the only outstanding issue, really, since I still don’t have any sound – whether using the OSS or the hda drivers. Sigh. It would seem this is common with the E6500, so I’ll live with it.

So, thanks to starsseed, drcouzelis, and Diver, I’m able to at least use the Latitude without going through hoops. It seems that the wireless driver was crashing everything, and removing it fixed whatever issue Haiku was having. In short, the iprowireless4965 doesn’t seem to work with an IntelPro 5300 card.

I’ve got a fan assembly coming for my old ThinkPad T40 this week, so I’ll give that a shot, too. It’d be nice to have a dedicated, working, and fully supported Haiku installation to explore.

Thanks again.

15

Looks like iprowifi4965 is causing an interrupt storm on your setup. It would be nice if you could create a ticket at https://dev.haiku-os.org and attach your syslog along with a picture of ints output from KDL after a freeze.

192.139.x.x looks like a bug in the dhcp client which is part of the net_server. It deserves it’s own ticket (again with a syslog).

Did you reboot after installing opensound? OSS might not work because it’s too old and doesn’t support your card or because of some other interrupt related issues. There are already several tickets with requests to update native HDA driver to support newer hardware so no need for additional ticket I think. I heard that sometimes previous versions of OSS work better. You can find them here: http://haiku-files.org/files/optional-packages

16

Thanks for the reply.

I’m not sure how to do either: there’s no syslog being created and I’m clueless as to how to get a screenshot.

See above. How do I “force” a syslog to be made?

Yes, I did. It may be unsupported like the graphics and wireless cards? I can live without sound, and VESA graphics are okay, too. Funny how everything’s better with an internet connection, eh?

I’ll keep futzing with the E6500, but I just installed a replacement fan assembly for my old ThinkPad T40. We’ll see how that goes: I’ll have to see if I can join my home WPA2 network, and how to maybe dual-boot with XP Pro.

17

Take a look at ReportingBugs – Haiku
You can’t take a screenshot in KDL. You can only take a photo of it.

Since it doesn’t enter KDL you can simply grab /boot/common/var/log/syslog

18

Okay – digital camera time. Thanks for the reply.