I’ve used Haiku for some time on a EeePC 901 (part of multiboot) and was looking forward to the Alpha.
However, as the EeePC 901 has no optical drive (and I don’t have a usb CD drive), I used Unetbooting to create a LiveUSB from the Haiku Alpha 1 iso
While Unetbootin seemed to successfully create the LiveUSB (BTW, this took 2.5 hours because of the huge number of files in the iso), when I tried to boot to the usb-key, I got a message “Invalid or corrupt kernel image” probably because the syslinux bootloader that is used by Unetbootin doesn’t get on with Haiku.
So, I had no option but to download the raw image and dd it to my Haiku partition. This worked fine (after making the partition bootable),
However, the 600MB leaves only 63MB free space which doesn’t leave much room for exploring the Alpha.
Any chance of a 1GB being made available?
Alternatively, does anybody know how to increase the size of a raw image?
An option to install to USB flash probably ought to be added to then installer at some point
In the meantime someone might bother to create a 2.5 GB alpha image and zip it up for you but obviously that wouldn’t be the optimal solution
You know if you have Linux on your EEE you can build haiku from source http://www.haiku-os.org/node/2500 it isn’t too hard but requires a bit of patience
Thanks for the reply.
Just to mention that I’m multibooting a few Linux OSes as well as Haiku on the EeePC 901 as a result of which I’m rather “spatially challenged”. Therefore a 2.5GB image would probably be less useful to me than the current 600MB image as at least I can install the latter.
The 1GB size I mentioned in my first post was chosen with care.
I have actually used the compile option you suggested on this little machine some time ago but seem to remember that quite a lot of space was required which, once again, is not currently available to me.
Instructions once posted somewhere by Marco Nelissen, which I’ve kept locally:
“
Create a file with dd. In a Terminal type:
dd if=/dev/zero of=image.img bs=1024k count=640
Replace 640 with the size in megabytes you want the image to have. Then type:
mkbfs 2048 image.img; sync
This will create a filesystem in the file. It’s important to use a block size of 2048 bytes here, because BeOS can’t handle logical blocksizes that are smaller than the physical sectorsize of the device. Since CDs use 2048-byte sectors, you need to create 2048-byte blocks. “sync” needs to be called because otherwise you might get an error message when trying to mount it. Lastly, mount the image:
mkdir /mnt; mount -t bfs image.img /mnt
The (empty) “disk” will now appear on your desktop, and you can start copying stuff into it normally. When you’re done, unmount it and and burn image.img to a CD.
”
I don’t know how that might work within Haiku, or in your already restricted space, but I did successfully use it a few months ago to make a 2GB image for a bootable USB thumbdrive.
The main issue for me was the step of copying over the contents from the original small image; I had a lot of kernel crashes and many partially copied files before it was complete. (This within BeOS R5 with the NewFS Tracker, which may or may not be relevant to my troubles.) Good luck.
I managed to install Haiku to a USB stick. I booted up the CD (ISO burnt to CD-RW) with said USB stick (4gb) inserted into the desktop booting the CD. I then proceded to install Haiku as i would on a HDD, and wrote the bootloader to the MBR. Now i have a completely full 4gb USB stick with Haiku booting on it that i can now use on my EeePC and my desktop.
I’ve also tried the Alpha on my EeePC.
Downloaded the raw image, dd-ed to an usb dongle and booted up the netbook.
You can install from the Haiku itself, if you have the partition ready on the SSD (I did not).
All you have to do is create a new partition and drag and drop all the files over. Haiku is like the old Mac OS; this will actually work and remain bootable. What I did once I had my first raw image booted is to create another 30gb partition and initilize it BFS from within the raw image. Mount the new partition and from the Terminal issue “makebootable” to it, this fixes up the offset in the boot record and you only have to do it once. Then just drag all the files over, add the new partition to your boot manager and you’re good to go.
You can keep the old, small partition around and then whenever a new image comes out or you build a new copy from SVN you can boot up off it and upgrade your main system by copying the “system” folder off the ISO into your big partition.
Thanks to everyone for the various suggestions.
However, I’ve only tried out the one from K_Shaw and this worked like the proverbial charm. Absolutely perfect. Indeed, I have to wonder why I didn’t think of this myself.
So, now I have a 1GB partition with Haiku Alpha1 installed and almost 500MB free. Very cool. 
But, rather than hanging on to the smaller partition, I deleted it (really need the space) and when I need to upgrade, I intend to download the iso in Ubuntu (on the same machine, and has about 800MB free), mount the iso, also mount the Haiku partition in Ubuntu and then copy across the system folder from the iso.
Many thanks K_Shaw