I’m coming from Ubuntu/Debian/MSDOS/Fedora (but mainly Ubuntu) , I saw Haiku featured in LinuxFormat magazine, and was intrigued. I wasn’t around to see BeOS, but from what the article said, and what I see in your slideshow, I like the idea and the ‘look’. Questions, though:
What command-line does it use, and where do I learn about it?
Which bootloader does it use, or does it use its own?
I have been developing packages for Ubuntu for a while (with mixed success), but I understand Haiku has a different approach. Where can I find a brief explanation of how Haiku manages packages/updates, and how to become a Haiku developer?
Does it even have a package manager?
In case you hadn’t guessed, I haven’t booted Haiku yet (slow Internet). Sorry for newbiness, I genuinely haven’t touched anything that’s not Linux/Microsoft based.
Haiku comes with several standard command-line tools and his own specific ones, which should all supports the --help option to display the builtin help.
It has it's own bootloader indeed (dubbed bootman after the name of the tool [un]installing it on a partition), but its works fine with GRUB, LILO or any boot manager supporting boot loader chaining.
Find more information here: http://haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/bootloader.html
The package support in Haiku is currently a work-in-progress. Meanwhile there is basically three way to install an application:
Zip files, extracted wherever you want. That the self-contained way from BeOS era, but which
don't works with a moving target like a in-development software platform.
The "installoptional" command-line tool, which is a temporary little package solution for installing optional packages
The "haikuporter" command-line tool, which install ported software like does xBSD ports: by fetching, patching and building from sources.
See http://ports.haiku-files.org for details.
Last but not least, don’t forget to visit the Community site page where you’ll find the mailing-lists and IRC channels where you can get help.
Haiku don't have yet a Package Manager, but as said above it's the subjet currently under heavy design & development by our first full time developer contract.
I’d quite like to install over the entire hard disk on my laptop, can I do this from the cd, or do I need to use dd? (I’m not familiar with dd, but I’m very familiar with live cds, as I develop software for GRUB in Ubuntu, I re-install about every other day when something goes wrong.) My laptop currently runs Ubuntu 10.10.
Haiku bootable CD or USB key behaves like a live CD, and allow you to
install Haiku on another volume.
When booting from the CD, an alert ask you if you want to install Haiku or run it live from the CD. Choose Install then. If you miss that option, just launch the “Installer” application and follow the install instructions there: Installation Guide | Haiku Project
Really no needs to use dd command-line tool
Beware, installing Haiku over the entire hard disk will erase your Ubuntu. And Haiku partition tool don’t offer any resize feature yet.
[quote=MGandTL]OK, thanks, have it running in VirtualBox now. I was going to install it over entire hard disk, but my internet don’t work.
Can you write drivers for these things?[/quote]
Already done: you should select the “Intel PRO/100 MT” network card kind in VirtualBox. It’s not the default one, hence why you don’t have Internet access yet.
OKay, so I’m trying the Haiku ISO via Unetbootin this time, but it’s taking ages. As in, at the rate it’s going about two days. Any ideas/alternatives?
The cheapest way to use & learn Haiku is to buy a little USB “thumb-drive”. 4GB is sufficient. Its nice to have a portable OS you can take with you that allows you to store your files as well. My experience with linux on USB flash drives was the default was to not have permananent user data storage. Haiku has the advantage! So long as you can boot from USB, you’re golden.
You can’t user unetbootin to create the USB thumbdrive version.
You need either a raw image or the hybrid image that you need to dd onto your thumbdrive.
