I propose to release a floppy image together with the test images. It’s nice to have these test images, but Haiku needs to get into the wilderness. The world is not made of emulators, it consists of various hardware bits and pieces. I mean it’s time for people to actually use Haiku on real hardware.
I know I can get the tree and on top of the tree there is a script that builds that image. However, I don’t run BeOS - simply because my hardware does not support BeOS. And I cannot see how to get this floppy image on a Linux amd64 box. There is simply no way.
These emulators won’t give you much feedback at this stage anymore - so please let others participate and try Haiku on real hardware. If you feel uneasy about it being alpha software, then put a big sticker on it saying so. It’s not that hard.
I actually think the images (haikuhost and factory) are being built now on Linux - so that will make it more difficult.
I think Sikosis was going to get his R5 box back online - maybe he can build the cd boot image at that point.
On another note, I tried using the “makefloppy” script that is in the repo to create a cd boot image, and it didn’t work for me. I probably did something wrong…
Didn’t know that the images are being build on Linux. But yes, then it’s indeed difficult. What I tried was the following:
enabled the befs driver in Linux
replaced the “/dev/disks/…” part in the script with a different file (THAT I don’t understand: I mean I don’t even have a floppy drive - but I need to have a floppy image that’s then transfered on a CD. Halt, it’s apparently not that easy. An ordinary floppy.img has to be transformed this way:
mkhybrid -b floppy.img -c boot.catalog -a -r -J -V BeOS_Boot -o boot.img directory_name
It never worked out. I always got a rather small image that consisted probably only of zbeos. Then I tried to follow all the steps in the script manually but wasn’t successful either.
I just think it’d be very, very useful to have people test Haiku in the real world. That old image from October 2006 worked perfect except that USB failed completely. Since I believe that USB is in a much better state now, I’d very much would like to test it once again with a bootable CD.
When Haiku goes to Alpha state ( currently in pre-alpha ) then they’ll also likely release a CD boot image for it. ( & it’ll have partitioner & installer too I would think ).
Alpha version of Haiku is coming and could be here by December but no promises. You never can tell when things will be completed in a volunteer project.
That would be great. I think I have a decent piece of hardware that would run Haiku so once the installer and boot cd are available then I can get down to some real testing and bug submitting.