Newbie question - will running Haiku in QEMU solve audio and network issues?

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1

Hallo Haiku friends,

I’m currently running Haiku on a Lenovo Thinkpad X230 and most things work apart from the internal microphone not working on Sound Recorder and the bluetooth, ethernet, SD Card reader, USB optical disc drive, and of course the webcam not working.

Would installing Haiku not natively on the Thinkpad, but on QEMU running perhaps on a Windows 8.1 or a FreeBSD running on the Thinkpad give me a better chance to have Haiku access all the hardware on the laptop?

I have not used QEMU in the past so I’d probably not have an easy time of installing Haiku via a virtual layer like that, but if it will solve many of the hardware compatibility issues that Haiku R1/Beta5 has, I am thinking it might be something worth trying. Looking forward to your advice!

2

Of the things you listed, it may help with ethernet and the cd drive, but I’d expect both of these to work natively already on the x230.

For everything else, there is basically no support at all, and qemu can’t help with that. Someone will have to write/finish the needed drivers and servers

3

Don’t we have microphone support for some of the sound devices emulated by QEMU/VMware/VirtualBox?

And I think SD Card reader can be made usable by adding a new drive to VMware/VirtualBox (not sure about QEMU) that maps to a physical disk on the host. UPD like this in Vmware: How to Use SD Card Reader in VMPlayer and VMWorkstation • it’s a bit more complicated for VirtualBox: How to access an SD card from a virtual machine? - Super User

4

What model is it? I would expect this to work at least.

5

Actually I think it may have something to do with my set up. I have Haiku installed to an SSD in the Thinkpad Ultrabase 3 to which the Thinkpad x230 is docked. And for some reason the Ethernet port on the Ultrabase works under Haiku but not the Ethernet port on the laptop. Maybe when Haiku is booting up it sees two Ethernet ports but doesn’t know how to handle them both.

I am thinking of moving the SSD from the ultrabase to the X230 and booting up from that to see whether haiku sees things differently.

6

Does this setup work in other OS? I think the ultrabase is a port replicator, that means you have one ethernet controller in the laptop, and it gets connected to the ultrabase port when docked, and to the internal port when undocked. So that would be normal behavior.

7

You were quite right. Both my linux and freebsd installations on the Thinkpad acted identically to how Haiku did. It was only when I removed the laptop from the ultrabase and booted up from the linux in the internal drive that the laptop’s ethernet port became useable. Thank you for clarifying this for me!