QEMU or Q (QUE?) and current path of devel

1

no modification needed here, just setup Q or Qemu ( i have OSX) and setup the VM with the image.You don’t need the dd trick to get it to boot and it works WITH networking. WOW!

haven’t seen that screen in a LOOOONG time.Glad to ‘C’ it.
Also glad to see some standards used on an OS unlike OSX or Windoze which seem to use anything they can that doesn’t build right at all and claim it works ‘ok’.I Prefer delphi/pascal, but C is okay.I find the logic rather confusing though.Might want to include python, it is MUCH easier to code with provided you have the base *NIX foundation to work from.Merges well with C routines.Its pretty common nowadays too.

Now the trick for the live and/or cd install shouldn’t prove THAT difficult.Ya know, do the make bzimage/installer/etc… hell even clone the data from cd and reset the rw bit for all I care.would be nice to see it on disc. YES, I’m quite familiar with the *NIX’es around here, started from red hat, but frequent ubuntu from time to time. Not quite sure where to begin on pulling the BS from the HD though.I’ve heard it done,but like many unix stuff I forget easily.

Have you thought about porting or using some of the free apps common to some other distros? (open office/gimp/etc…)May help it take off if the users out there can actually USE the OS.

–Just a thought.

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Well, there is a way to make a LiveCD, but it’s not as simple as you make it sound.

Disclaimer: the following is not meant to discourage, or put a negative spin on anything - just a “current state of things” type response. I’m sure it will be improving soon as Haiku reaches the Alpha release goal.

Haiku currently requires a BFS partition to boot from… so in order to get a LiveCD with Haiku, you first have to create a bootable floppy image (bootloader, kernel, and enough drivers to get the rest of the way… I’ll explain further down) and compress it, plopping it onto an ISO9660/El-torito track at the beginning of the disk.

But the next part sucks - you have to burn a SECOND track as a raw BFS image that can be located and loaded from. Currently this poses a funny situation for people trying to make a CD as you cannot take a single ISO and burn it to a disc - it must be two separate files (floppy image, raw BFS image) burned in succession as separate tracks on the CD.

Once you have this part working though, you just have to hope that once the floppy image and necessary drivers are loaded that the bootloader/kernel will be able to then locate your CDRom again and find the second track - otherwise everything stops there. See the BIOS has lost control of the boot process at this point, so it’s entirely up to the drivers included with Haiku.

Much of the time, everything works - but there are still ide stack issues, driver issues, and ATAPI support issues that make it tricky in some cases.

Finally, booting Haiku from a LiveCD is a disappointing process… 5-10 minutes later you might see a desktop if all went well. At that point, a percentage of the software may actually fail to run in a readonly filesystem environment - there’s no working RAMFS support yet (that I know of).

AFAIK, DriveSetup still cannot create partitions from Haiku, and especially not from the LiveCD (it failed miserably when I tried to format an existing partition as BFS before).

Long story short: The usefulness of a LiveCD right now is pretty limited. It makes for a pretty bad demo, and you can’t install from it.

3

i get the boot process, i’ve heard how to build a live cd.

But a second partition? BSD/NIX uses either a gzipped bootloader which mounts / (the CD) and continues, much like it does upon booting from a hd.obviously if you cant boot to a hard drive it will be impossible to do it from CD.

dont EL torritos use bootsect.cat file? I’ve managed to get a bootable dos disk from an image before using (toast of all things) burning apps before.(i know the windows version of toast, i think its cd creator works this way)

Ubuntu, our leaping point here, uses ofboot.b on the mac and a linux kernel image.BUt I see the point, like dos, BE needs to see the cdrom /partition first.

what do you mean cant create partition? you made one for haiku to boot off of as hfps.isn’t there a be boot disk somewhere we can use as a launching point until we can make our own?your problem might lie in the fact that BE/haiku like OSX cant format a partiton the OS is standing on.PAin in the ARSE, but it is possible to make another volume that boots. will tinker some more with Q. I need ubuntu installed to build the bootloader it seems.

what about install cd, we could clone an image of to a hard drive similar to what deadmoo did for OSX.Push come to shove of course.it’s not pretty, but it works.