Newbie feedback, sound problem and postscript printing

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#1

I have been following Haiku for a few years. Coming from a Mac OS (the real one) background I’ve always found Be OS familiar & cool and I was among those feeling sad that Apple went with NextStep instead of Be OS for their Next-Gen OS.

That said, I didn’t do much more with Haiku other than dropping it into a VirtualBox and looking a bit around.

That changed, however, the past weekend when my neighbor gifted me his “old” Acer Travelmate P-253 M 53234G50Mnks. Out of interest I tried to install Haiku beta 3 on it and - lo and behold - the thing booted into it right away. Things worked “out-of-the-box” and Haiku runs natively on the machine. Very nice! I love the aestethics of Haiku and the sheer speed. (the machine had Windows 8.1 crawling on it, Haiku is so much more responsive)

With the help of the User Guide (yes, some folks DO READ that stuff) I’ve already been able to answer most of my questions and even learned a few functions (i love the stack & tile functionality!) and the fact that a window is minimized by double-clicking its topbar. (the old Mac-heads among you may remember WindowShade on Mac OS, kind of remininiscent)

Been exploring the HaikuDepot for the past two days and found a lot of interesting stuff. At one point even my wife became interested when she saw there’s Office Suites. :slight_smile: I just wish there would be more original Haiku software other than the usual *nix / SDL culprits.

The only two things I couldn’t get to work yet on the Acer Travelmate P253 M are the included webcam (not that bad) and Sound (that’s bad, as I’d love to listen to webradio using StreamRadio).

Is there anything that can be done against that if it’s not working out of the box? (additional drivers etc.?)

Second question - can Haiku print via generic postscript? I’d really like to use it for handling typical “office” stuff.

Also, I’d like to point out how much I appreciate all the work that people pour into Haiku. It is already now an amazing experience and I’m looking forward to see it evolve while sticking to its core principles.

Won’t take much more before I can finally drop out of the world of T2 security chips and annoying push-notifications and return to the world of true Personal Computing and high productivity!

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#2

Welcome!

There are improvements to the sound driver for the upcoming beta. If you’d like to try right away, you can upgrade to the nightlies. In the meantime, Opensound driver in HaikuDepot is another alternative.

#3

On our hardware database only one Travelmate. Here are no problems with sound. But every hardware have his own cards and many times they are diffent in one product version.

OpenSound is the only way to proof.

If OpenSound does not make the change, test di blacklist the board soundcard.

Please help us list hardware tested on Haiku: Hardware List: Complete Systems - Compatibility / Hardware - Haiku Community (haiku-os.org)

#4

For the webcam, not much at the moment. Webcam support is virtually nonexistent in Haiku except for one or two specific models IIRC. As far as sound is concerned, there’s a few things you can do. First thing is to find out which audio hardware you have. You can use the Devices app or use the listdev command in the terminal. In the audio preferences panel you can see which driver Haiku is using for you card (if any). With that information you can head over to the bug tracker at https://dev.haiku-os.org/ and search if there already is a ticket for your hardware.(pci id is always good for searching). If not you can create a new one. Often there are only small changes required to a driver to make it support additional models. There is no guarantee of course but this really is the best way to get your hardware supported eventually.

Another thing you can try and might get your sound card to work immediately is OpenSound (as @lelldorin already mentioned). This is an old sound driver architecture that supports some cards that native Haiku drivers don’t. You have to install the opensound package (“pkgman install opensound” or via HaikuDepot) and blacklist the native sound driver (if Haiku has loaded one). This process is explained in detail here: Disabling components of packages | Haiku Project
I admit it looks a bit complicated at first but it is really not that hard. If anything is unclear to you, just feel free to ask. :wink:

#5

No, and also printing in ported applications is not directly supported yet. It’s one of the (many) reasons we will stay in beta releases for a while, until we have added all the needed things.

2 Likes
#6

There’s a fix for some hda audio chipsets with 48bit alignment for registers, beta 3 did not get this fix.

I put a ticket up about it post B3 and ran the bug down.

Newer nightly should have that fix if it is indeed your issue

#7

Thanks everyone for the helpful answers!

Actually, changing repos from beta3 to nightly and updating did the trick - sound works fine now!

So only the webcam isn’t supported by Haiku as of yet, everything else works out of the box on this model. That’s pretty neat!

I’ll gladly help out with the hardware info, how do I get Haiku to display my hardware specs (like “dxdiag” on Windows or “About this Mac” on OSX) ? I don’t have any docs that came with the Acer …

As for printing, that’s unfortunate. A generic postscript printer would be high-up on my wishlist.

I also downloaded a strategy game (0.A.D.) out of interest yesterday but it seems to crawl on my 2.5 Ghz machine. I suppose everything is still software rendering, hence the performance ? Any plans to improve / add 3D routines?

Also, is there sort of a magazine for Haiku with news, reviews, interviews and stuff? I couldn’t find one on a quick search.

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#8

You can use my tool BeSly SystemAnalysisTool from our Repo Server: https://software.besly.de or you can add you data to the forum part for complete systems Hardware List: Complete Systems.

1 Like
#9

This game runs poor on Haiku, and yes there is no hardware acceleration for now. There are several other strategy games that works fine on Haiku…

#10

You can see some basic hardware information at About Haiku in the leave menu and some more detailed information in the preinstalled Devices application.
If you prefer the Terminal,you can use the listdev command.
I don’t think there is a magazine about Haiku yet but I’d also like to have one.
There is the official blog at Blogs | Haiku Project where you can read about the most important technical changes.
Additionally I used to write news and reviews about Haiku for a German Linux news page,but I recently quit,so I have some capacity for new stuff.
Maybe a news/magazine section could be integrated on “BeOS City” https://beos.retro-os.live ?
@MarisaG what do you think about it?
Alternatively,I could probably set up a dedicated news page for Haiku,but only if there’s really a lot of interest and many potential writers (not only myself),otherwise I don’t want to buy yet another domain and server.

#11

@lelldorin - thank you for your help! I tried to download your SystemAnalysis Tool, unfortunately I get his error when trying to install from the expanded .hpkg file:

package beslysystemanalysistool-0.9.2-1 is not installable

I’m probably doing something wrong here. Can you help me out?

brunobastardi - ah, i thought so. Thanks for confirming. 0. A.D. was highlighted in the gaming section on HaikuDepot and thus I picked that one to try it out. I haven’t looked further into the category, will do.

nipos - Thanks, saved the official Haiku Project blog as a bookmark. But I was more looking for a classic third-party magazine. Something you open in the morning while drinking your coffee to catch up news, read a review for an app / game and such. I may be able to contribute an occassional review or news. Maybe your endeavor would be worth its own thread? :slight_smile:

Another thing I wonder - any shops that sell pre-configured & optimized hardware for running Haiku? While I’m using it on this hand-me-down laptop, I’m more of a “Desktop guy”. And I think it’d be really neat to have a desktop computer with supported components that runs Haiku. It sounds like a nice little side-project for someone with the required hardware skills. Has nobody come up with this idea yet (hard to believe) or is there no demand? Or are there other reasons?

#12

There is @haikunauts (https://haikunauts.home.blog/) - so maybe those who are interested in writing about Haiku could see if they can contribute to Haikunauts?

#13

There you on 32bit or 64bit?

I change anything in the package, i do not know that. But i need to clean my administrative folder under packages in system, but then you lost you recovery versions. You can copy them to you desktop and remove folder from system packages, install, and copy them back for testing?

Update
I test it on 64bit here i get fatal error. I delete the last two entries form packages/Administrative and it runs.

#14

We do not have any haiku magazine around at the moment. I often plan one but never go on to start it up (have enough ideas for the issus ;-)). But i do my work for our knowledge base and then i need to make things twice for the magazine.

For informations and help about the system and games you can found on our knowledge base: https://www.besly.de

#15

The market is to smal, the only company sell there hardware beside there poducts are: Radio Automation Software | The TuneTracker System (tunetrackersystems.com)

#16

In the community area there are “groups” and just like the Facebook feature the groups can be private or public, have events, files, pictures etc. If that is what you are wanting I can help you with it.

#17

As mentioned, use the Haiku hardware compatibility listings (complete systems) from previous users.

  • Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q Tiny

Several of the core devs use AMD Ryzen-based computers or specific laptops (Thinkpad, etc). Stick with their hardware selections as a guide.

Postscript? Use/configure Ghostscript. Using IPP or printer proxy can help for wireless/email printing (.i.e. connectionless or proxy printing) . Convert files to whatever works or is needed.

#18

No,I was talking about something like a blog feature,where multiple people can write longer articles and they end up in one list,maybe with a preview of it on the home page.
Content should be moderated (only approved posts appear) and look somewhat official,not just a random group.
Then we could use it to publish news about Haiku,apps for Haiku,reviews about Haiku and so on.
It’s only a idea,you don’t have to do it,but I think it would be a nice fit for the page (and maybe some way to gain more views,because currently it’s quite silent there).

#19

That seems not so active to me,also they only link to reviews on external pages and don’t publish their own.
It’s always nice to have websites about Haiku,but it’s not what I would call a magazine.

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#20

That already is exactly how the blog page on haiku-os.org works

edit: this recent post is a perfect example OK Lenovo, we need to talk! | Haiku Project