Hello everyone,
I thought I’d give Haiku a shot at running on an old PC I got recently, it’s extremely old, but I figured it might have a chance. The boot disc hangs after reading, with only a blinking cursor at the bottom of the screen. (Related: http://www.notanon.com/reviews/trying-out-haiku-os-on-old-hardware/2010/06/21/)
Anyone know if there is a solution to this?
Specs:
Pentium with MMX, 200mhz
64mb Ram
4mb Virge VX Video Card
If I remember well, the minimum RAM for Haiku is 128 MB.
About the video card, apparently it’s supported:
128MB may be a bit too low for the current nightlies, we will probably bump the requirement to 192MB. Other than that, Haiku should run on that machine, but it will likely be very slow.
It may be better to install BeOS R5.
Try using Haiku R1 Alpha 1 first, it may have the older ATA IDE hard drive drivers that work better with older chipsets, like 440BX. Also while booting, hit the space bar to get to the boot menu and turn off hard drive DMA, then continue booting.
I’ve never really understood why there isn’t a boot option to use the old ATA stack.
There was a kernel build option to use the older ATA driver code rather than the newer replacement. Not sure if it still works.
The old ATA code is slow. It was not updated in the last 10 years or so (alpha 4 was already using the new code). If you have problems with the new IDE stack, just report them and we’ll get them fixed. It makes no sense to keep maintaining two IDE stacks side by side, let’s have just one and let’s make it work everywhere.
This means there is really no reason for the extra work in making it possible to select an alternative stack at runtime from the boot menu, and why making it a compile time choice made sense at the time the new stack was being worked on. Now that it is complete, there is not even a need for that anymore.
i was able to boot some of the post R1A4 nightlies on a pentium 3 utilizing a 440BX chipset…
I’m sure there are some (admittedly old) machines that were known to work with the old code but not with the new? But maybe that has been fixed now (I didn’t ever have a problem).
Thanks for the hint. I’ll have to try the latest Haiku nightly on my 440BX system, just need to dig up a blank CD-R disc.