One of the reasons I wanted to test Haiku out was to see if it’s BeOS compatibility was really going to be wide reaching. I think this is probably as obscure as you can get, to some degree…
I’m not sure if I am doing something wrong, Haiku seems to recognize the binary as something it can run (and I enabled to be an executable), but it doesn’t seem to be able to read it’s own directory…
Here’s a link to the software (it’s free, don’t worry)
If someone more knowledgable about this OS wants to give it a shot or report back that it’s officially not compatible for whatever reasons (i’m not especially worried about it, there’s plenty more to oogle over in Haiku land, but this was one that convinced me to try out the beta)…
I’m running it with 32 bit Haiku (afaik, maybe not? I think I got 32bit cause I was unsure whether the computer itself was 64bit or not).
Anyway, I got it to finally load the image (It took using quotes around the path name of the image, it didn’t default to look in it’s own directory for some reason) and then the debugger asked to install some libraries and did that, but it fails anyhow. I did notice my sound card doesn’t seem to be properly working; Haiku detects it and audio files will play (I tested out midi in the midi player) and it is responsive and shows audio is being processed, but no sound comes out of my speakers; the last thing that BeSqueak failed on was a vorbis library, so I wonder if it’s just my system and it’s support…
I am tired so I cannot investigate further tonight.
Try to be clear, does Debugger spawned because a program cras or did the runtime-loader complained about missing libs?
If the second, do not forget some libs arent backwards-compatible.
Update: I got it working. I don’t know why, but BeSqueak seems to be hardcoded to expect all of the things it needs to run in home, so I moved the entire zip contents there. It also needed Squeak.2.8.image renamed to just squeak.image.
The only problem now is that it needs some work, I think…it’s slower in BeOS than Linux on the same computer, and the screen doesn’t draw correctly, leaving lots of ‘trails’ behind the mouse where the refresh doesn’t seem to be happening. It might be fixable within the image, though, so I’ll play around with it. I have a feeling, though, it might be the VM implementation. This was the only version released for BeOS that I am aware of and wasn’t exactly a target platform and even the documentation cites it as ‘work in progress’.
I was able to get all the dependencies. If you hit ‘debug’ and install everything it asks for and then put squeak in your home directory, it will load (I think you also have to rename squeak28.image to squeak.image? I forgot, but trying to load an image via commandline didn’t work for me, so I moved everything into the home directory.
But it DOES run, it just has issues with displaying the mouse correctly and I’m unsure if it’s the image (I don’t think they would have released it with such a glaring and obvious bug) or Haiku’s support for BeOS legacy software. Considering how much work is needed to ensure compatibility, I’m willing to bet it’s on the Haiku end/library support which likely with time will become more compatible. Considering the images are identical across all platforms, it’s likely the VM didn’t get much testing (this is the only BeOS version released to my knowledge) or it’s, again, Haiku’s compatibility with BeOS software. I did find another piece of BeOS software which didn’t properly draw the screen, so that’s where my money’s at and there’s nothing I can do to fix that directly, I think.
I’m looking forward to Haiku’s progress and even if it’s not 100% BeOS compatible, I don’t see why the squeak team wouldn’t support Haiku sometime in the future. It takes rather low effort since all that must be maintained is the VM.