New to Haiku, Full of Questions

Help
1

First of all, greetings to the Haiku community.

Every now and then I get the urge to try something new. I’ve been aware of the Haiku project for a couple of years, and have been a dual-booting Windows/Linux user for about a decade. I remember when BeOS was first released, and had always been interested in the original OS but never had the opportunity to play around with it.

Today, I decided to give Haiku a shot and installed it to a USB drive to give it a test drive before I’d be willing to commit a hard drive partition and a space in my GRUB launcher to it.

However, I ran into a problem right out the gate: the display drivers for my Dell Latitude D630 (yes, it’s old, but it does the job) under Haiku rendered something rather schizophrenic. I had the mouse and desktop icons, but they appeared stretched and flickering. After rebooting into Safe Mode with VESA drivers defaulted, it worked fine. However, I can’t seem to find any documentation on forcing Haiku to always use VESA drivers in lieu of a workable display driver.

Further, I can’t for the life of me seem to get it to connect to the internet, whether this is a feature of Safe Mode or not I do not know. I’ve tried ethernet connecting it but can’t seem to find any information there, and locating a wifi option doesn’t seem to be going smoothly for me either.

I’d like to be able to spend some time getting to know the OS, and am using the latest dev build as suggested, but if I can’t get the display to work properly without Safe Mode every time and can’t get an internet connection… it kind of puts a damper on the project.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, I’d appreciate it. I’m mostly looking at the OS from a hobbyist perspective at the moment since I primarily use Ubuntu and am more comfortable in that environment, but can see there might be some productivity advantages to booting to Haiku in regards to cutting down the potential for distraction in getting work done.

2

Hello and Welcome to Haiku! It seems you are having some easy to fix problems. For your graphics issue, first, you’ll have to boot normally, and you’ll need to identify which driver you are using by opening the screen preferences application. In the preference look for something like “intel_extreme” or “radeon_hd”, and from there, I can help disable the faulty graphics driver. As for your network problem, try opening WebPositive or other web browser without safe mode on and see if you’re able to open a webpage.

3

[quote=“cknappiowa, post:1, topic:6221”]
However, I ran into a problem right out the gate: the display drivers for my Dell Latitude D630 (yes, it’s old, but it does the job) under Haiku rendered something rather schizophrenic.[/quote]

Odd I think I have a D630 hidden in a closet somewhere that used to work. I’ll try to find some time tomorrow to reproduce.

You can indeed force safe mode video every boot. There is a configuration file at /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/kernel

We need to improve the video troubleshooting steps there to include a more permanent workaround.
EDIT: Done. Updated the page to mention the fail_safe_video_mode setting.

lpe /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/kernel

At the bottom there is a setting: “fail_safe_video_mode true” uncomment it, save and reboot.

4

IIRC, I think @johnblood has Haiku running a Dell Latitude D630

5

For your networking problems, we need the output of the “lspci” command from Linux on that machine, or “listdev” from Haiku. This will allow us to identify your hardware and see if any particular steps are needed (installing binary firmwares for the wifi card, for example), or if we just don’t have a driver yet for it.

6

I just booted from an old nightly build of Haiku I had on CD and installed it. No problems on my end.

7

Well, I followed the advice of all the helpful people in this thread and have it up and running, defaulting to VESA, and my wifi connected without a hitch. So, thanks to all of you for your speedy and helpful responses!

Now that I’m getting a chance to explore the OS and the apps a little more fully, I’m enjoying it so far. Still a few kinks to work out, chiefly right now being that WebPositive doesn’t seem to like a lot of my usual sites. I tend to get a “URL cannot be shown” error on even the most basic sites about 9/10 times. Even google.com and wikipedia return this message.

Since PulkoMandy suggested using listdev to get a better look at my hardware, which will hopefully aid in my display driver issue, here’s the info dump I get:

device Serial bus controller (SMBus) [c|5|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 283e: 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller

device Mass storage controller (IDE interface) [1|1|8f]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2828: 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA Controller [IDE mode]

device Mass storage controller (IDE interface) [1|1|8a]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2850: 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller

device Bridge (ISA bridge) [6|1|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2815: 82801HM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller

device Serial bus controller (FireWire (IEEE 1394), OHCI) [c|0|10]
vendor 1217: O2 Micro, Inc.
device 00f7: Firewire (IEEE 1394)

device Bridge (CardBus bridge) [6|7|0]
vendor 1217: O2 Micro, Inc.
device 7135: Cardbus bridge

device Bridge (PCI bridge, Subtractive decode) [6|4|1]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2448: 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge

device Serial bus controller (USB controller, EHCI) [c|3|20]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2836: 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1

device Serial bus controller (USB controller, UHCI) [c|3|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2832: 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3

device Serial bus controller (USB controller, UHCI) [c|3|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2831: 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2

device Serial bus controller (USB controller, UHCI) [c|3|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2830: 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1

device Network controller (Ethernet controller) [2|0|0]
vendor 14e4: Broadcom Limited
device 1673: NetXtreme BCM5755M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express

device Bridge (PCI bridge, Normal decode) [6|4|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2849: 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 6

device Network controller [2|80|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 4229: PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection

device Bridge (PCI bridge, Normal decode) [6|4|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2841: 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2

device Bridge (PCI bridge, Normal decode) [6|4|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 283f: 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1

device Multimedia controller (Audio device) [4|3|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 284b: 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller

device Serial bus controller (USB controller, EHCI) [c|3|20]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 283a: 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2

device Serial bus controller (USB controller, UHCI) [c|3|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2835: 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5

device Serial bus controller (USB controller, UHCI) [c|3|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2834: 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4

device Display controller [3|80|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2a03: Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (secondary)

device Display controller (VGA compatible controller, VGA controller) [3|0|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2a02: Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (primary)

device Bridge (Host bridge) [6|0|0]
vendor 8086: Intel Corporation
device 2a00: Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub

The display driver shown in Screen when I first booted without changing the default to VESA was “Intell GMA (i965GM)”. Under that driver, I had a bad stretching effect that gave my cursor a doubled appearance with a cursor on each end of a white line about half an inch wide, and text blocks would be cut into pieces with long gaps. It seemed to apply to the whole screen, as the Haiku logo on the background only showed “HAI” and the launcher was entirely offscreen. Apologies for not having a screenshot of what I was seeing under that driver.

1 Like
8

There’s already ticket #13152 about the i965.
The iprowifi 4065 has issues with “High Throughput”, try this in Terminal:

ifconfig /dev/net/iprowifi4965/0 -ht

If that improves connectivity, put it in a script and place it in ~/config/settings/boot/launch/ to have it autostarted at every bootup.

9

The issues on Web+ are known and I will try to spare some time to work on it and remove the remaining bugs. I finally managed to reproduce the error reliably, which means I can debug it and I started to understand what is going on this morning. However, I had to stop and go to work :frowning: . Will resume the work this afternoon…

2 Likes
10

By what the preferences is giving, it means you’re using the intel_extreme driver, which has been going through lots of changes and fixes recently, I’d recommend creating a bug report at dev.haiku-os.org. From there, to disable that driver without being in safemode, follow this procedure:
https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/daily-tasks/blacklist-packages/
As a note, the name of the package is “haiku” (without the quotes), and the relative entries you’ll need to block are:
add-ons/accelerants/intel_extreme.accelerant
add-ons/kernel/drivers/graphics/intel_extreme

If you need any extra specification just ask here :slight_smile:

11

Blacklisting the kernel driver, add-ons/kernel/drivers/graphics/intel_extreme, should be enough no ?

12

You may be right, but just for safe measure, since the accelerant (from at least what I know) may have an init function in user space, that the app server can use.

13

I remain pleasantly surprised at the willingness to help and the speediness of answers in this community. I haven’t had time today to try some of the suggestions listed here yet, but will attempt them later when I’ve had a chance to rest.

For now I’m using Qupzilla to get around the WebPositive issues, and that’s serving well enough, though it will be nice to see a truly native Haiku browser that can compete for functionality without having to rely on QT ports.

It’s been almost fifteen years since I touched C/C++ in any meaningful way, so I can’t offer much in return on the Dev side of things, but if anyone has suggestions as to what I can do to help further the R&D going here I’m game.

I’ve had a look at Haikuporter, and have been considering trying out various open source apps under that environment to see if there’s anything I can build to add to the catalog. Personally, I’m looking for a MUD client that works under Haiku, but haven’t found any yet. Mudlet is my client of choice, so I’m going to take a stab at porting that.

I think for now my only other question is how to configure Caya properly to access my GoogleTalk/Hangouts account. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of documentation available, and if I could get that and a MUD client up and running I’d be pretty well set for spending more time on Haiku.

It’s only been a couple days, but I’m excited about this OS and the hard work you all seem to be putting into it. Moving one step closer to giving it a permanent partition on my hard drive instead of running from a slow USB stick, and the responsiveness of this community is a big part of that.

14

I’m not sure if Caya still works, there isn’t much activity on its development at the moment. Last time I tried it, I had to reconfigure my Google account to allow “unsafe” logins through xmpp (somewhere in google account web page). Out I don’t even know if Google still allows use of the xmpp protocol. Caya may need a new protocol plugin.

15

Only for the next 2 days. Google’s XMPP servers are being shutdown on Oct. 31st.

Sadly the multi-platform IM clients are less useful now with AIM, Yahoo, MSN and Google all gone or moved to a closed protocol.

16

MSN always used a closed protocol. Only reverse engineering made it possible to connect to it with alternative clients. I don’t know about Yahoo and AIM (these were never too popular around here), but I suspect they are in a similar case.

Also, the “cool stuff” these days is WhatsApp, Telegram, and possibly Facebook Messenger. All also custom protocols.

We should probably base a client (or write a Caya plugin) around libpurple: https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhatIsLibpurple

17

Both Telegram and Signal’s protocols are public, not closed.

18

Given the sheer scope of plugins already designed for use with libpurple (including one that works for Hangouts), that wouldn’t be a bad idea. Pidgin has long been my IM client of choice in both Windows and Linux, so seeing it or an alternative built around the same core would be great as a primarily end-user sort.

An aside, but to my original post; I wound up breaking off a chunk of hard drive for a dedicated Haiku partition. Not particularly large, only 5GB for now, but more than enough for my purposes at present. The USB stick boot was getting annoying, and I wanted to get better response time out of it. So far so good! HaikuDepot had a bit of a hiccup trying to download all of the required packages for the fresh-install’s Qupzilla download, but when GUIs fail us, terminals prevail.

19

It definitely needs blacklisting or something. I haven’t been able to get the intel_xtreme driver working for years.

20

It works for me on all the machines I tried it on (well almost: I was recently donated a laptop which gets no backlight, but working display otherwise. Will investigate.).

I hope you reported your problems to the bugtracker already?