Speaking of BeOS installs

So I decided that, having a 2000-era system laying around, I’d give BeOS R5 Max a shot. It’s a “T-Bird” Athlon running at 1.4GHz, so I used the AMD-flavor ISO. It boots right up to the installer without any trouble, but when it gets to the little notice message-box after the initial load/boot, it either freezes, or doesn’t recognize input. (Nothing but the message box is on-screen, so I can’t tell.) I’ve tried it with both PS/2 and serial mice, and no luck; I think it doesn’t recognize the keyboard either, since the “OK” button doesn’t respond to a keypress and I can’t seem to change the focus with the tab key.

It’s a Rhino KM133A-ASE board (VIA KM133 + 686B chipset;) does anybody have any experience with installing BeOS on this kind of hardware, or any general insight into what might be causing this problem? Am I missing a step somewhere?

Couple of questions:

  1. why BeOS R5 Max when you have Haiku ?
  2. why talking about BeOS in Haiku forums ?

…just out of curiosity…

  1. Because I have plenty of systems that can run Haiku, and not so many that are potentially feasible for BeOS. Added to that, Haiku is, while exciting, still very much in development, while this copy of BeOS is a number of versions in to a commercial, professional OS. And I’d just like to get a feel for where Haiku came from and what it’s aiming for.

  2. I saw someone else posting a BeOS thread, got the idea to try it, and came here when I had an issue.

I never saw it myself, but heard about it regularly back in the day, from people trying to build or run my stuff on their setup. I don’t remember the details, but “Max” suffered from some breakage in the standard libraries, it wasn’t just R5 with some extra goodies. That wouldn’t explain why it doesn’t run for you, I’m just saying that for the sake of a look at what was BeOS, R5 itself would be better. You won’t like it - Haiku is way more useable - but it’s what it was.

You aren’t trying to run with 1Gb or more of memory? BeOS was not up for that.

And in between plain BeOS and Haiku is BeOS with OpenTracker, Mail Daemon Replacement, etc.

Hello,

had the same problems with this version of BeOS. As i remember, i’d start BeOS in save mode and removed MemoClipboard from autostart.

regards,
Morbid

Nah, 768MB, which I believe is the max that the board can support.

I’m not really concerned about BeOS being more “ew, old” than Haiku; I’m perfectly comfortable on Windows 98 systems so I don’t expect fancy-schmancy modern glitz. I just want to give it a try and see what it’s like.

Hmm, thanks, I’ll give that a try. As I read you get into safe mode by pressing space at the BeOS boot screen?

Yes, press space on start up! Hopefully it works for you! Or maybe in /beos/system/boot/ and search and edit the file SetupUserEnvironment. There’s somthing like &MemoClip, i think.

How do I specifically disable MemoClip from the safe-mode menu? It gives me some options to work around hardware problems, but that’s it, except for an “advanced” menu that just gives me a text box to (I presume) type boot options into…

Just boot up with, use fail safe mode and set resolution of screen to 1024x768 at 16/8 Bit and boot up with this settings! This works and i used it because it’s much more comfortable for me. But you can also choose 640x480 or 800x600, if you like. BeOS should start in Vesa Mode and than you can proceed to modify Autostart or the File SetupUserEnvironment in /beos/system/boot/.

I don’t know, the “ew, old” stuff is coming from your own head. I oversimplify, but the big mistake Be made was one that some of the commercial UNIX vendors fell into in that era, and Microsoft - they had a whole working POSIX file descriptor thing, but left sockets and other such stuff (select(2)) out, I suppose because not required by POSIX 1003.1. This goes back before the mid-'90s when BeOS became generally available, and I guess folks didn’t fully anticipate the importance of socket applications, and could implement POSIX 1003.1 without really appreciating the reasons behind the way UNIX works, and there was a sort of commercial disdain for the Berkeley thing. Whatever. The upshot was that many socket applications would simply never work on BeOS. The next release after R5 was supposed to fix this with a Berkeley style network stack, and there were various sort of bootleg versions of that for a while, but certainly not a finished supported product. The Haiku crowd is generations later, and they get stuff like this in a way that the BeOS engineers did not. And probably software engineering in general. I’m not dumping on the BeOS engineers, they were gods, but it’s a different era.

If you want to see something interesting, unfortunately you’d need a BeBox, but the early public releases were something different. Particularly the filesystem.

Did it work? Any Progress?

No, no luck so far. All of the safe-mode options still result in it getting stuck at that notification box with no way to dismiss it.