X131e and X201 work very well on beta5 as far as I can tell: sound, wifi, trackpads (usable but not nice), brighness control. Sometimes strange stuff happens with the sound like the speakers stop working and sound only comes out of the headphone jack from then on. Not sure what triggers this.
I also tried Yoga 11e and it worked pretty well, too. Some things didn’t work: touchscreen and the (intel 7260) ac dual wifi do not work. Can’t switch out the wifi card thanks to Lenovo’s evil BIOS wifi card whitelist and none of my USB wifi devices work in Haiku. Sound and trackpad work.
Is there some kind of trick to using a trackpad on Haiku? Laptop Input Mode? Even when the trackpad works, I find it super awful using Haiku without a 2-button mouse. The replicant handle is microscopic and it is just about impossible to drag a window while holding a button down. And tap-to-click is just too clumsy for selecting things in menus and lists.
btw, I absolutely love the ability to customize the colors! (I’ve not used Haiku since 2019.) The default color scheme looks like Windows 95 and is painfully bright. Now that it is easy to make things darker, I will definitely spend much more time testing out Haiku software.
Yours don’t have the mouse buttons above the trackpad? No Trackpoint?
I personally haven’t learned to love the trackpoint, though I’ve talked to people who did. The trackpad on my T480S works well enough, but of course no multiple touch support, so it’s no use for scrolling. That’s probably the main reason my USB mouse makes life so much better. (Especially with WebPositive, where i have to “select” the HTML frame before I can Page Down, all too often accidentally selecting an HTML thingie.) When I can hook up a mouse, the mouse wheel will scroll the focus view.
The USB mouse just came along with a keyboard, though, which I got because it was too hard to keep the trackpad and keyboard separate on the Thinkpad. That is, while typing I would accidentally trigger something on the trackpad, and any kind of brain damage would result.
It’s a “Cherry” USB keyboard and mouse, by the way, which has an unusual USB event report structure that doesn’t fit well with the current driver system, so I have to patch the kernel.
x131e and x201 have buttons but they don’t work reliably. Sometimes not at all, sometimes right click is left click. The main problem is the trackpad is tiny on these laptops. Yoga 11e has a decent-sized trackpad, but no buttons.
I just found what I think is the best laptop so far Haiku: HP G60-235DX. After messing around with netbooks and smaller Thinkpads, this old dual core machine feels spacious and comfortable with a large screen, fully working BIG trackpad/buttons, and a nice large keyboard which includes the numeric keypad. Wifi (atheros) works and their are no weird problems (MBR) booting. Thin and light it is not, but I like it.
My father was going to throw it out and asked if I wanted it. It has 4GB RAM a T4200 (64 bit) dual core cpu and I replaced the 320GB hard drive with a 512 GB SSD.
At first I tried MX Linux (fluxbox version) but it was pretty slow. Haiku feels so much faster and was quick to install. I am so glad I did that! Haiku is simplicity and elegance compared to the Byzantine mess that Linux has become.
I’m dual booting for now, using the Haiku BootManager. (Can’t have rEFInd on MBR systems.) Works great with grub installed to the Linux partition’s PBR, not the disk’s MBR. But I might never run Linux again on this machine…
I bought an Lenovo Thinkpad W541 to use as a dedicated Haiku machine. Everything works flawlessly except the trackpad.
The tracking part works properly. Double-tap works properly. But the left and right “button” areas on the trackpad only work intermittently, which is very annoying. Sometimes it will pick up the left “button”, but it will jump the cursor to some arbitrary position across the screen.
I’m ordinarily more of a fan of the TrackPoint stick, which works correctly, except the stupid trackpad is right where I want to rest my hands when typing.
I just noticed the trackpad is hinged at the keyboard edge, and the “button” effect is from the whole front edge tilting down about 1mm when pressed. Presumably it looks for a fingertip in the “button” area along with a signal from a contact under the pad. It’s a used laptop, and I thought there might be grunge under the trackpad, but it works fine under Win10 and Debian.
A minor annoyance, and I’ll probably wind up using a mouse or trackball anyway.
Hi BSG, Linux works around such things in libinput, we do this usually in drivers. You can open a ticket on our bugtracker https://dev.haiku-os.org with atleast the info from “listdev” and “listusb” and the system log.
A developer knowledgeable kn the input drivers can then direct you what more info would be needed to debug this.
I would greatly appreciate it if such hardware tests would be included in our database. Therefore, here is my request: Enter the tested computers/laptops in the corresponding forum section.
I’m a complete newbie to Haiku, so I had no idea. I’ll find the lock delay thingamabob, twiddle it, and see what happens before I annoy the developers.
Keyboard Lock Delay had a very small effect, but the touchpad was still intermittent. As I said earlier, it wasn’t a deal-breaker.
However, I ran into a much larger problem. The laptop worked fine in its docking station, but I only got a black screen when it was out of the dock.
The W541 has “dual video”, with an Intel GPU used in normal circumstances. But when it is in the dock, it switches to an NVidia GPU, which supports higher resolution, more monitors, etc.
Apparently the Windows 10 that I blew away when I installed Haiku had a bunch of special Lenovo drivers. I had repartitioned the drive, half Haiku, half Linux. Debian 12 with X11 has no problem with either mode.
I can’t fault Haiku here; the docking station is definitely an edge case, and even Windows can’t handle it without special drivers. The Debian install uses X11, which was designed to be able to switch sessions between wildly different computers or graphics terminals on-the-fly; which I expect is another thing Wayland won’t do. Not that it is relevant to Haiku, of course.
Dock vs. no dock probably applies to .001% of users, and frankly, the W541’s “dual video” was a brain-damage level bad idea. And since twiddling the trackpad settings did very little, I suspect the trackpad on my machine is either damaged, defective, or perhaps one of those oddball production hardware substitutions that make hardwire driver writers daydream of inflicting grievous bodily harm to the people who make their jobs harder.
Uh… that configuration file… can I use it to force the video to a specific GPU?
If I can just edit the file and reboot, it would be good enough for me. I use the laptop in either the dock or standalone; so moving between the two while it’s running isn’t something I would need.
I’d look at the file for hints, but I’d have to reinstall Haiku first.
I repartitioned the drive again to make some room, and reinstalled Haiku. The first time I installed Haiku, I didn’t have the docking station.
Haiku boots to a black screen when in the dock. But if I push the lever to disengage the laptop from the dock, it boots Haiku fine… and I can push it back down into the dock and it continues to work with no problems.
The VESA spec says the highest VESA resolution is 1280x1024. Haiku runs at 1920x1080 on the Intel video chipset.
It’s an extra step to disengage the laptop from the dock, but Haiku boots very fast and seems quite stable. For now, I’m going to just boot it that way unless you particularly want me to try the VESA mode.
[non-Haiku addendum]
Haiku is sharing the disk with Debian 12. There was no problem installing Debian from the install CD. However, the Debian LiveCD just comes up with a Debian screen and freezes. The latest Puppy Linux also doesn’t want to come up in the GUI mode.
That’s some seriously weird video on the w541. I haven’t seen that sort of thing since the 1990s when you had to pick between different video drivers in xf86config in text mode before loading X.