The “community” never had any such plans. From time to time we discuss the possibility, but the time, commitment and money just isn’t there. There are even people quite set against the idea.
Agreed. That’s what will boot right now.
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Well, it’s a name, and you could interpret it different ways. Of course, a computer that will reliably be usable with Haiku, but beyond that … If it’s easy enough to spec out a system around some amenable motherboard and devices that all check out with Haiku, then that might be a good answer for some. Print a BeBox caee for it, whatever.
The problem isn’t so much with the principle, it’s the decline of desktop boxes. I could be wrong, but I think the vast majority of people are looking for a laptop, and that would be a lot harder to put together from parts I think.
https://wiki.radxa.com/RockpiX
ROCK Pi X has been discontinued
Due to part shortage, we have unfortunately discontinued ROCK Pi X in 2022.
We hope to see you soon with our next x86 device.
Below is the original content of the page.
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If the developers cannot recommend a well working HAIKU PC and/or a HAIKU Laptop it makes no sense to us as user to think about a HAIKUBOX.
But I would love to know which PC and Laptop is running HAIKU best at the moment!
Knowing the best working parts video, audio, usb, ssd for a Haikubox would be handy too.
There needs to be a highly recommended PC hardware standard that is ever evolving based on optimal support. One of the hardest things for new Haiku users is figuring out their best hardware options to run Haiku.
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I know there is this, but a lot of it is incomplete.
Having known hardware that is officially supported would be good. Having machines that every single thing is supported on would be good, minus things that Haiku doesn’t support in general (webcam).
The problem with user generated hardware reports is that not everyone needs to use everything, so often doesn’t test everything. It should be more like a task. A list of each device/component and tasks to do do determine if it’s fully supported. Also a date of testing. If everything works, it should be put on a list similar to the BeOS list. If it’s a couple things missing that don’t affect use too badly, same thing.
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A Raspberry Pi computer doesn’t change very much, unlike AMD/Intel boxes, so it would be less trouble to keep up to date, once Haiku runs on it, plus they are much cheaper, but fully functional computers, I use one, & it is the equal to my regular i5 computer, in almost every respect.
So, rather than trying to keep pace with AMD/Intel, it would be less work once up & running on a RPi, to keep it up to date…the ideal modern ‘BeBox’.
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Good luck with that. I think this is why …
- There isn’t going to be an officially supported computer, and
- the closest we’re ever going to come is with a common computer system used by key developers. If you don’t have one, you can’t really fix problems; if you do have one, you likely will fix problems, or at least understand the limitations and how to work around them.
The hardware reports are useful, but as you say, not the kind of comprehensive data you need to get this. There’s too much hardware out there, torrents of new stuff coming out every month, and too few users with the zeal for really thorough technical reports.
I really wonder why people always think Raspberrys would be easy to support,quite the opposite is true.
They change a lot with different generations.
They started with some 32bit ARM architecture and switched to aarch64 later.
If Haiku had ever supported that 32bit ARM Raspberrys,that would have meant starting from zero again.
Also,they’re not standardized,not open-source and the driver support can be…difficult…to say the least.
Older generations used to boot using the proprietary GPU which then initialized the CPU,and it needed proprietary binary blobs for that.
I think that has now changed,but still…
Had we ever added support for that,oh well,start from scratch and write a new bootloader.
Also,good luck getting something like Wifi to work.
They use some proprietary Broadcom chipsets (Broadcom Wifi is awful on x86 as well) which doesn’t work on any of the BSDs,and wouldn’t work on Haiku either since we use BSD drivers.
Besides that,x86 is a lot more standardized than ARM,so Haiku can boot on almost any hardware with standard drivers for the most important hardware.
On ARM it will be a difficult journey to get a new SoC/board to boot at least,before getting to support special hardware like Wifi,input devices,… which will be no different than on x86 here.
There are other single board computers like those with Risc-V or Intel which would be much better candidates for a HaikuBox.
Considering that the BeBox was a desktop machine,powerful at that time,and with a lot of ports,a single board computer probably wouldn’t fulfill that purpose.
Most desktop computers already work very well with Haiku nowadays,so maybe just get some desktop machine with reasonable specs,put a Haiku sticker on it and sell it as HaikuBox.
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Raspberry Pi has become the most publicly known SBC for a long time, that’s why people hope to make some progress on it. However given the difficulty of developing on it, it is possible for Haikubox to be based on x86 or RISCV, which our developers have already made some progress on it.
At the same time, regardless of creating a Haikubox or not, if people are still insisting to develop on ARM platform, it is better for them to focus on 1-2 devices first, preferably open sourced. For a highly standardized x86, success on a general x86 device means a very possible success on other standard PCs. For ARM, weak relationships and compatibility among different devices means success on the specific device does not necessarily help on developments on other devices. Therefore any further development on it should be focus on specific devices instead of any devices in the whole architecture.
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The best hardware is the one you already have. How many new users do you think go with “this OS looks cool, I will buy an entire new computer just to try it”?
The compatibility list is useful for existing users, when they are considering an hardware update. But for new users, they probably already own a computer?
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Awhile ago, the intro of the Pi 5 made it more of a serious choice for certain projects. The availability and cost of prior models during a lot of inventory problems, cost markups, and tariff shortcomings affected users getting one.
As this was happening, the x86-64 variants were catching up as well as the RISC-V development.
Leading up to the RISC-V work done on the HiFive Unmatched board by X512. There is the HiFive Premier P550 as well (i.e. possibly untested).
Other developers and “daily driver” users have “known working” IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads with specific working A/V, IP WebCam(s), Wifi adapters, and USB Audio devices tested. Ref: I got a laptop for Haiku
Other dev/users have custom workstations,laptops, SBCs, etc… with some hardware devices working or not.
So, available compatible hardware is not a major issue. The hardware compatibility lists exist for BeOS R5 and Haiku. Mainly, check if the needed hardware drivers prevent a release of Haiku R1beta6…
I guess it depends on how you define “major.” It’s possible to find one of those Thinkpads, but it takes a fair amount of research through conflicting or ambiguous info - there are a much larger number of Lenovo laptops that won’t work, and even the ones that do aren’t really 100% on the trackpad.
The right way to look at this, I think, is not “BeBox”, but “DayStar”. Back in the brief period when Apple opened up the Mac to clones, BeOS had also moved its PPC focus from the BeBox to Macs, and DayStar came out with a MP clone that shipped with BeOS 3 install media along with MacOS 8 or whatever it was then. And of course BeOS ran spectacularly well on it.
Sadly, a dead end path for Be, but it was great for them while it lasted. It just couldn’t go anywhere because of Apple and PPC. The issues for Haiku, if something like that could be set up with one of the small outfits that do their own laptops - Slimbook, System76, whatever - are more about whether it’s a good product and can be supported across model generations.
23 posts were split to a new topic: Microsoft and EFI
That’s not the case. OpenBSD has been supporting Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 wifi chips via their bwfm driver since 2020. That driver has been later ported to NetBSD, so they also support wifi on RPI0W/RPI3/RPI4. And FreeBSD folks just need to stop pretending wifi is not a necessary thing (oh well, they have big plans for 2025: https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-On-Laptops-WiFi-802.11g).
It was a while back that I quit using Linux and tried various BSDs on my Raspberry 400,seems I missed some progress since then.
A blog post from 2021 says Wifi doesn’t work: NetBSD -current on RPI4 Model B (8GB RAM) | Astr0baby's not so random thoughts _____ rand() % 100;
The official NetBSD site says since version 10 it does: NetBSD/evbarm on Raspberry Pi
When I tried,I was using some nightly version since NetBSD 10 was not yet released,and on that nightly there was no Wifi.
Also,no Wifi when I tried FreeBSD,that seems unchanged today.
And if I remember right,I couldn’t get OpenBSD to boot at all on the Raspberry 400 when I last tried.
Today there seem to be more and easier tutorials than years ago,maybe I should give it a try again.
At the same time, some signs show that Rpi may turn to RISCV in future. The latest Rpi pico 2 is a dual-architecture CPU with both ARM and RISCV support. Pico itself doesn’t qualify to support a desktop OS, but if they release Rpi standard with ARM RISCV dual architecture in future, it might be easier for developers to work on Haiku for Rpi using RISCV core.
Get out the HAIKU beta 6 first…
evl. with better install routines for UEFI and or auto partition!
GUID initialization, UEFI-partition, and HAIKU-system-partition?
If it is possible for using a single drive only!
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Maybe we should ask the Chinese at Deepseek who have released their “R1”. Of course it is unlikely to have created so much of a splash as our R1 will!
Come on guys, keep it together please. None of this is getting us closer to R1. I hate to see the moderators inbox full of flagged posts 
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