Opinions how to get to R1

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61

For sure, there is bound to be unsupported hardware. What’s harder for me to say for sure, is how easily we can make it clear which hardware is supported. You can spend a good deal of time, for example, trying to find the right Lenovo (“Thinkpad” etc.) laptop, which is certainly one of the more widely used on Haiku, and still come up short of a working computer.

There’s a nice hardware database out there, but apparently no field for the touchpad device, so this common issue isn’t to be found there, and of course there are more Lenovo laptop models than you can shake a stick at. You can sift through the annals of this forum and try to follow who’s got what working, and that isn’t guaranteed to work for everyone either. And to make it more fun, manufacturers seem to occasionally substitute chips, so you can buy a wifi card that’s reported to use a chip that’s reported to work on Haiku, and find that it now uses a chip that doesn’t.

Sorry to complain about this without proposing any solution. But, wait … drop in replacement for BeOS … OK, it’s time to start manufacturing a HaikuBox! :slight_smile:

62

Manufacture? No, we don’t have the millions it takes to start up an assembly plant. We need to adopt a limited range of models. One Mini-PC, one laptop, from a smaller manufacturer known to be sympathetic to alternative operating systems. System76 comes to mind, although they are a bit pricey. Then everybody develops for that. ARM? Raspberry Pi 5. And let them know what is happening and politely ask them to share details of any changes they make to the hardware.

Once we know that everything works on those reference machines, we can negotiate with the manufacturer to deliver those machines with Haiku R1 pre-installed. Maybe with some yellow detailing :smiley:.

Oh well, one can dream.

3 Likes
63

Okay…
And do you propose to pay the developers for developing only for a specific piece of hardware?

I’d rather use the computer I have now, and I assume other developers feel the same.

64

I have a professional relationship with Slimbook, which is a company selling both laptops and desktops with Linux distros. It is not an easy task, even for Linux, because a computer involves a lot of components from different manufacturers and each one has his own restrictions.

Said that, as I have access to all their catalogue, I am testing Haiku on all of them and trying to find a good candidate. At least I’ve found a model where trackpad is ps2 and it looks promising. On the other hand, I am currently working on improving i2c trackpad support so we have access to more models, from Slimbook and any other brands, of course, but they lend me any laptop I want to play with.

8 Likes
65

Yep, I know. We’re all rugged individualists. And that’s how we got to the situation @donn describes. If we’re OK with that, fine. But there will never be a “Haikubox”.

66

No, there probably won’t be.
That’s not a problem as such however, the thing is that a HaikuBox only makes sense if you have some commercial interest to sell this, but for that you need a business models, figure out why customers would want to buy it, pay people to develop drivers for it. etc.
Be Had this business modell… but even they figured out that it didn’t work.

That doesn’t mean that slimbook or whoever offering Haiku as an option for select boxes would be a bad thing however.

And on a side note, we can’t make a haiku box right now.
Bluetooth works on no devices. Accelerated decoding of video streams also doesn’t work (especially important for battery constrained envs)

You can’t make a “fully supported” box like that, and selling it to that to customers would be a bit shabby.

@Lt_Henry My trackpad is still suffering from ticket 3, even before any i2c stuff comes in the mix xD

2 Likes
67

You can buy a sticker with « Haiku» logo on the Haiku merchandise, put it on your machine… and great you have an Haiku box :wink:

More seriously one way to help is to go to the donation portal. The more, the better for 2025.

2 Likes
68

I’m not even able to get sound and touchpad working on the laptop I run Haiku on currently. It’s part lack of time on my side, and part lack of access to help from the manufacturer or other people who know the hardware very closely.

Now that would help, if there was some company or project designing hardware, and they would give the support for us to write drivers. But that’s not the case, and we have to force our way through, by reverse engineering or looking at how other OS did it.

Selecting one single machine or a small set, wouldn’t help with that.

But on the other hand, no company would be very interested in providing that support to us until the OS is a bit more ready, I think? Well, someone interested in writing drivers and with time to do it could ask them.

1 Like
69

Yes, I see it the same way, although it would be nice if USB 2.0 was supported so that drivers for USB headsets etc. could be developed after R1 is out.

My priority:

  1. sound (working only over the 3,5mm output)
  2. HDMI out (not working on my laptop).
  3. USB headset support.
70

Even top companies sell same products with small rebranding. Most of the time, they just have a custom case and firmware. There are some “whitebook” laptops where small and big brands build their products on top of.

At this point I think there are tons of well known and documented things we can already do, and we only need time and hardware to test with. ie: modern trackpads (yeah there are some quirks but we are far from newest hid standards), bluetooth, usb webcam/headsets/gamepads, cpufreq, efivars, wmi…

I think we both agree there is no game changer here. Libreoffice wasn’t, Iceweasel isn’t, and having a haiku friendly hardware won’t be. They are just small steps.

1 Like
71

It depends what you get, my current machine is from Fujitsu and I think it’s one of the companies that do their own designs. And even if it’s just firmware, I would have a few questions about that to get my battery charge status working.

Anyway, in the general idea, you are right: hardware isn’t that diverse, and it is not completely unrealistic to support most machines to some degree. A lot of the work to be done is, in fact, not specific to one machine. The HDA driver is not working anywhere. I2C touchpads are not working anywhere. Bluetooth is not working anywhere. Webcams are not working anywhere. And these will require major development on the drivers, and then suddenly start working on 80-90% of the hardware out there. When we get there, we can see what to do about the remaining, most quirky machines.

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72

It’s working on most of my machines, so that statement suprises me a bit.

73

Ok this one may be a bit exagerated, but it’s very far from working everywhere, and it is quite limited. You may get lucky if your BIOS sets up some things, or maybe if you boot another OS first and then reboot into Haiku.

So, yes, it sort of works (as long as you don’t try recording, or changing the output frequency, or dynamically re-routing the audio to different places, …), but on a lot of hardware, the audio just doesn’t get to the speakers or headphone jack. And not even talking about sending it to HDMI output.

74

Trackpad support really needs to be improved - I have not yet come across a laptop where this actually works, as we miss out on widely used non-Intel driver support that is being worked on, fortunetely:

75

Agree there is no killer app (I still remember this debate from the good old BeOS days), but IceWeasel is indeed a game changer, at least for a lot of people including myself, as having a mainstream browser working is quite a huge step into mainstream acceptance or at least visibility.

We could see this in recent media coverage - Youtube works, many more heavyweight sites work, I get my browser tabs and passwords synced etc.

76

For a Haikubook, we could work on getting the next Starbook officially supported - this is the strategy that e.g. Manjaro Linux follows, and it builds a great momentum and delivers free PR for the OS:

(they also have a litebook which would be ideal for Haiku)

I own the Starbook V and it works quite well, except for trackpad and webcam (HDA sound works but doesn’t sound too good).

As a workstation, the Haikubox here could be a start:=)

2 Likes
77

It seems to me that we would do well to take this up a level, and buy a few for Haiku developers that are willing.

Probably not the one that happens to work with Haiku out of the box, if that’s kind of a relic. You want the current hardware direction, if it’s within the realm of possibility for Haiku. Maybe three or four identical mid-range laptops, which I guess would be ca. €1K each.

This isn’t because it will lead to massive popular adoption, which would be terribly premature, it just gives people a chance who are really interested but don’t want to fart around with a succession of not-quite-working trial and error computer acquisitions.

So much lossage with trackpads and wifi. The rest, maybe you can live without while you wait for improvements, but no network access or no trackpad, no use.

1 Like
78

When it’s ready is really the only answer to when R1 will be. There really is no rush, and lets face it, we are already beyond an R1 by any other OS standard…

The Media Kit needs completion.

The GUI is great. We love it, the reason it may look “dated” is we got it right 20 years ago. Also, I use the E-mail app every day and I love it.

Complete and debug the native API. Promote native development through tutorials, educational videos, online classes etc…

And remember, every thought is a prayer- see Haiku in it’s ideal form, then take action.

6 Likes
79

Seems you just want to listen audio, but not record any.
I have microphones (possibly piezo) in my laptop but even that does not come up as an input device.

I understand it was written media kit is broken
(I thought here more posts in other themes here earlier when devs shared this why some multimedia stuff does not work, not what shaka444 wrote above … it’s a coincidence, as I red that sentence later :wink: ),
but I do not know exactly
is a built-in microphone is part of HDA audio driver or just somehow relates it, is the media kit issues knows by devs relates to it any way … I just experience this part doesnot work. By media settings the input tab is empty. Earlier when a working Win7 was installed on the same Dell laptop computer it was at audio settings and appeared when selevted HDA audio device as an input device, and I could record voice.

Other question is that I used Audacity then, but on Haiku itself this SW does not work reliably - so audio recording problematic on software level too.

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80

I do not enlist here what parts missing for me to get Haiku R1, as I think the way that waddlesplash follows now is the best.
I mean if the stability and reliability grows more in case kernel and userland it’s better for everyone who uses Haiku as a daily driver, just as me.
I admit, I do not use my Haiku driven PC for work activities right now - actually I have no more IT or IT related working tasks where the weighing of uses cases are different.which features available in an OS, but all others than work : yes, I use it. Including government sites’ usage where I could administer documents and taxes, so not all the funny parts of my life, and entertainment, but important and serious ones

Since Beta4 I can install and boot Haiku reliably - that is the most important thing in it — as a daily driver.
When Beta5 was 1-2 months came around the corner … I switched to Haiku Nightly, I had not done clean install, but upgraded both nightly and beta version , and around holidays I could migrate onto an 512 GB USB thumbdrive in both cases, so now I have backup in a Beta5 key, and also have 2 backups in same system on a half capacity drive as well.
So backup restore question may solved.

To get R1 the community needs patience, as you could see many seemingly independent development matches surprising fruits … vice-versa in the last 4-5 years.
This way have VPN support, faster network, a debugger for devs, more compatibility layers … and yeah, of course, browsers.
Personally if I can take a mention about it : Haiku R1 targets BeOS R5, and beyond … I think the multimedia shold be targeted better, which includes optical media support as well, some old stuff like midi format (that I do not clarify here what I mean on it I may post a theme about it as lastly I hunted to play it conveniently). That way a computer could be used for offline usage - not needing a network access basically if the media is present in the storage or removable storage, and of course if someone wants on a media server even which might not accessed via Wifi LAN…
I understand nowadays a computer with a network access is a must for many people - especially due to modern services and consuming digital content, however if you learn/study something … people may use their phone if network is a must.
Haiku also targets a personal usage desktop OS, so it requires that to all of us accept that this way Haiku must cover very different interests.
We must be patient what part of an OS how important and for which goal need them in Haiku.
Some for daily driving and some for retro computing that also a huge area … I mean some just want to add a new chance for a hardware dusting on a shelf, but hard to left away due to belonging memories or got from a friend … or some of us thinks that other people would learn things how it is working, how they can use it …
I’m a bit skeptic about it lately, so I just lightly laugh/smile on people here envisioning crowds wants to learn Haiku. Some people not even learnt their smartphone, so I do not mention their PC - envisioning crowds switching to Haiku … a bit utopistic, especially how the conveniency of persons beeing growing.

A word like a hundred : with patience. :cowboy_hat_face:
Week by week interesting developments starts.

Lately a chinese developer shared that :
he/she had begun porting Haiku 64 bit freshly …
targeted a MIPS processor derivative, chinese manufactured processor family - LoongArch.