New to Haiku, problem!

1

I’m running Haiku through VMware. It looks nice but it doesn’t come with a browser (well from what I can see), so ahh, how do I head off to BeBits and download some stuff?

Thanks, Ki.

[Edit: I just found a previous post about this, but the answer wasn’t what I was looking for. Is there a precompiled version with a browser? I don’t have BeOS :(]

2
Ki wrote:
I'm running Haiku through VMware. It looks nice but it doesn't come with a browser (well from what I can see), so ahh, how do I head off to BeBits and download some stuff?

Thanks, Ki.

[Edit: I just found a previous post about this, but the answer wasn’t what I was looking for. Is there a precompiled version with a browser? I don’t have BeOS :(]

There are a couple issues that will prevent you from "heading off to bebits".

  1. Netstack is currently unusable. Several months ago, the core developers basically ditched the old netstack and started working on a new one from the ground up. It is coming along - but is not usable currently. There was a recent post from Axel D. on the haiku-os.org site stating that he hopes to have it useful by the end of the year.

Any old screenshots you’ve seen of Haiku running network apps were using the old netstack.

  1. Firefox is currently unstable on Haiku (it actually doesn’t load at all right now for me - possibly due to missing netstack pieces). Even when it did work, mouse support was nearly useless - and all navigation had to be done via keyboard. It also is not compiled specifically for Haiku, and therefore relies on the binary-compatibility of Haiku - which should be good, but not perfect yet.

  2. No useful network tools are included on the images, because they’re not in the Haiku repo. When I set up my haiku images, I have to add files during the image build process if I want them to be usable on VMWare. There are some instructions I wrote on how to do this here:

http://haiku-os.org/wiki/index.php?title=Adding_files_to_the_Haiku_Image

The easiest way to mess with Haiku is to have a functional BeOS/Zeta machine with an empty second partition that can build Haiku and install it to the empty partition. This would allow you to mount the BeOS/Zeta partition, or copy additional files to the Haiku partition for testing.