With the Pentium 3 machine working successfully and out the way, my next victim for the boot CD was my laptop (HP Compaq Presario V5000, V2000/V3000 were tested to work and are very similar machines), which currently runs Windows XP. I don’t have any intention of migrating my laptop to Haiku yet, maybe when it enters Beta stages, so I used VirtualBox as a testing ground. It’s very sluggish (1.8GHz Turion64 and 896MB RAM) but it made it to the desktop, my Alpha 2 disc shoved into the side beforehand.
However, when I went into Network Preferences, the Ethernet and Wireless LAN (Broadcom chipset) were not detected. WLAN was particularly important to me as I use it to access the internet. Haiku does have Broadcom chipset drivers included in the package (unfortunately there isn’t much information on what exact Broadcom driver in the technical specifications). All there was in the drop-down menu was ‘none’. This was in stark contrast to the Pentium 3 machine where the ethernet pci card was actually detected. Not that this is an internal laptop wifi, incase there is a difference in external ones which have a different method of communicating with the PC.
Also, the wifi was turned on, the LED indicator on the ‘Wifi button’ was glowing blue as it should be. Anything I can do to resolve this? (This is one of the things A2 was so supposed to achieve in the first place).
When you use something like Virtual Box, Haiku is not running on the real machine (the Presario laptop in this case) but on a virtual machine, which has imaginary hardware. So even though your Presario laptop has this particular brand of Wireless network chipset, and so on, this is irrelevant to Haiku which is not running on the Presario laptop but on the imaginary hardware of Virtual Box instead.
You may be able to configure Virtual Box so that it presents Haiku with some imaginary hardware for which Haiku has working drivers. The arrangement you most likely want is called “bridging”.
So the best option is to go real instead of virtual, then.
Nevermind, I’ll just continue developing my PIII machine, then. I could obtain a wireless pci adapter using the Atheros chipset instead. Concerning the laptop, I’ll wait until Haiku is at least in the beta stage.
Or you could change the settings in Virtualbox to use Virtual hardware that Haiku has drivers for.
(The problem here is that the “valance” driver in Haiku has been removed, as it has created some major stability problems for some of the core developers in the past.)
Testing in VirtualBox, or any other virtual machine, means you are testing on a virtual machine. The virtual machine has not much in common with the real machine. So if you want to test your hardware, run it on the machine itself.
Concerning my last post, I actually managed to create a new partition (799MB) for Haiku, by resizing the others to provide more space. However, as Haiku was installing from the disc, it stopped at 746 with an error similar to ‘Boot System Failure’ or something like that. This occured both my attempts.
Maybe it will only work if I nuke the hard drive and install Haiku on that, but unfortunately I don’t want that.
