The Possibility of a bEEE Revolution

1

I just got my Asus EEE 900 in the mail. It highlights an issue I’ve thought about bringing up to the Haiku community for a year or so now. I know this will show as my first post, but please don’t let this dupe you into believing I’m not experienced or invested in the Haiku project.

So here comes my concerns:
Where is the HaikuBox specification? Why not choose a distinct hardware profile that Absolutely Runs Haiku? A month ago, I would have built it on the spot. Now, I’m pretty convinced the perfect target hardware is already constructed, cheap, and awesome. Enter the Asus eee. Not only is this market going to become highly competitive price-wise (track the prices of a used 2G 701 Surf over the next few months), it’s also the perfect target market. People are already going to be trying a new, open source OS for the first time. There are plenty of reasons why GNU/Linux in the Debian form is antithetical to an easily configurable desktop OS (inheriting all of GNU/Linux’s problems plus the glacial pace of Debian). Throw in the filtration of the for-profit Xandros distribution and you quickly realize all the .debs in all the repositories in all the world are not going to be up to date until at least a 1/4 year after major software improvements have become widely available. If a specialized EEE version of Haiku were available, who isn’t to say that people who tire of the Xandros desktop wouldn’t try Haiku out on the way to the (way way worse than both) Win XP? or even on their way to a better GNU/Linux distribution?

The most important benefit is, of course, that we as a community can begin running Haiku on real hardware with minimal fuss, and , minimal expense. It would have been my number one vote on the poll, that’s for sure.

2

debian appears glacial because you aren’t running sid… possibly one of the most up to date distros in the world

debian stable is what? stable as advertised
debian testing is uptodate
debian sid/experimental is cutting edge

so get your facts straight next time :slight_smile: also they are moving toward a livecd in debian 5.0 so most of you complaints will eventually become irrelevant regarding debian…also currently my experience is that Haiku is MUCH harder to use than Linux and nothing works out of the box because a lot of stuff is poorly documented or the libraries are wrong/missing etc… I do expect that to change but for the time being Linux is still the way to go

supporting the EEE is a cool idea but im not gonna buy a 3-400 laptop to run haiku when it runs fine on a box i built for 20$. I just don’t think haiku is ready for that kind of exposure quite yet but progress seems pretty fast :slight_smile:

3

I think it’d be a nice idea to have something NEW and common to support Haiku. If nothing else it would make people look at new hardware and say “Hey, maybe this operating system based on one from 2001 IS worth giving some credit to”

Because a crusty box I found in the ally certainly won’t make them see it in that light.

Sort of too bad the effort to make the drivers is exceptionally high.

4

Remember the days of BeOS R5? There was the free “PE” edition and the paying box. I was one of those that bought the box without any regret.

I would be ready to pay for an EeePC-ready Haiku version that would install and works flawlessly on this specific hardware.

Does it mean that we should open some bounty on the matter and give my cash to this bounty?

5

On which specific hardware? There are about a dozen models of eeePC and the hardware used varies. If there is tremendous effort to make Haiku work correctly with one specific model, Haiku Inc. would have to explain this, so that people who are interested know to buy exactly this model. Otherwise there will be disappointment.

Further it depends on what “flawlessly” means. Is it flawless if the WLAN hardware is simply not available? Or if Bluetooth doesn’t work with your Bluetooth keyboard? Or if the WLAN works, but it doesn’t support the WPA mode used by the Access Point at your place of work? How about if you can’t watch the “Magical Trevor” Flash video ? Or if you can use the EeePC fine, but you can’t suspend it, so the batteries go flat very quickly?

6

Which hardware? Mine’s of course :stuck_out_tongue:

Well I’d say that most of them share a lot in common. It is mostly the same wireless cards, the same CPU and chipset… Not to say that supporting one model is enough to support all of them; of course not. Whatever, I guess it’s the same than with any PC: you need drivers for them and there are countless devices…

About the “flawlessly” meaning, you are uterly right: this need to be precisely defined. If I had to give my own definition, it would be this one:
(1) all hardware supported (that is with working drivers)
(2) ACPI working, especially the “Fn keys”: enabling/disabling WLAN, up/down/mute volume, increase/decrease brightness
(3) easy installation via a “Live CD” on USB mass storage device (so a working DriveSetup is needed too) – and of course a easy way to make this “Live CD”, too, or the whole “easy installation” point is missed
(4) my definition does not take into account the software part of the thing: if the network server does not support WPA, OK; if Flash is not supported, OK…

But this is my current point of view only.

Maybe that once I will succeed installing (pre-alpha) Haiku on my EeePC I will be happily surprised at the hardware supported and then I will be frustrated by point (4), seeing that the device is supported but I can’t do anything useful with it…

Hopefully I should try it soon.

EDIT

I’m currently trying it on my EeePC 701 and, well… It’s nice to see the thing boot and work, it’s really reactive and great! But there is no sound, no network (wireless at least, I didn’t tried the Ethernet), of course no ACPI…

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Hi,

No, the hardware is not the same. Even within the 90x range, there’s 2 different ethernet chips (believe me, I ported the drivers to Haiku :P). I know for a fact that even the wireless chip is completely different between 900/901, etc, etc.

Yes it is doable, but wireless is not supported at all, I’m currently working on ACPI (basic powerbutton/lid stuff), but even suspend/resume isn’t supported yet.

So yes, it would be great hardware, but as always, by time we get the hardware fully supported, the models will have changed (again) and the latest version will have hardware not supported :frowning:

Ofcourse, bounties could help to get current Eee hardware supported, but be aware that wireless, suspend/resume, etc is a big deal of work, and since focus in on the alpha, I don’t expect it to be done this year :slight_smile:

HTH,

Ithamar.

8

Thanks for the reply!

Well I guess that it is a problem that always plagued BeOS: the lack of drivers. I would add that, at that time, it was more or less the same for Linux… But since Linux has been recognized and more and more device makers provide a Linux driver; plus a lot of efforts that have been put in massively developping Linux drivers turned out to be quite fruitful in the end. (I remember some news in OS News highlighting that…)

Then, I understand perfectly that someone that would make drivers for BeOS/Haiku/whatever “alternative OS”, if given the choice, would rather make drivers for devices that are most common or, at least, that wouldn’t be put away the next year by the next generation of computers. As you pointed out so painfully…

Which is certainly very different from the user point of view, which basically only see the set of devices he currently uses :slight_smile:

I don’t know how this could be possibly solved. Is it hard to make drivers? I guess that the best way to make sure that my computer get drivers (which is actually a EeePC 701) would to make them myself. I always had the feeling that it was basically how the things worked with Linux ten years ago: you had to have the same piece of hardware than some hacker that did the driver for its own needs, or to be the afore-mentioned hacker yourself :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m working with computers everyday but never attempted to write drivers, afraid of the supposed difficulty of the task. Maybe it’s time I try and make my own idea of this supposed difficulty…

EDIT

By the way, I installed the OSS sound drivers to my 701 Haiku installation and it’s great to hear it making sounds and playing music!!!

Next is to try making the Ethernet chip work, people says a driver exists. Is it this driver that you say you have wrote for the 900/901 series? Well I’ll try and thanks in advance, at least for your help for the whole community if not for me! You have my greatest respect that I deserve for drivers makers :slight_smile:

EDIT 2

Wooohoo! The Ethernet works out of the box in Haiku! You just have to plug the wire :slight_smile: no driver to add… Perfect!

Now I’m looking forward to the ACPI and wireless support :stuck_out_tongue:

9

I have to absolutely agree that the eeePc, and other sub-notebooks are the perfect market to go when we have a stable Haiku.

This will also show as my first post, but I’ve been following the project for a year or two, running images on a Virt. Machine, and have loved the development progress. I would like to eventually get involved in helping move the project forward, but for now, am extraordinarily happy with testing, pushing the system, and generally getting it to run on real hardware.

As such, I’ve burned a USB of the 5-22 nightly to work with on my 4g EeePc (I really like testing on “older” hardware :P), and it runs well off the USB. I will move the dev image to a faster medium, and will probably compile my own image with some adjustments made for the EeePc.

I always love BeOS, and have dreamed of this project’s existence before I ever found it. Now that I have, I am enthused with the progress that has already been made. I will continue to dedicate the majority of testing time of Haiku on the Eee, simply because I believe in both the OS and the platform.

With the sub-notebook market exploding (especially right now :)), an easy-to-use, powerful OS is just what the market needs.

I look forward to continuing to contribute, in whatever small way I can, to this project.

10

Hey Jonathon, cool you’re having fun!
I agree, netbooks are an exciting new target for Haiku. Especially the GSoC project for an ARM port could be a nice opportunity for a userfriendly OS on low-power hardware. My only concern at the moment is power management. My notebook always runs full-throttle under Haiku. That just won’t do for a device used for its cordless mobility.
Anyone knows about the hurdles of implementing 1st class power management?

11

1st. we have to wait for the HAIKU Alpha 1 release. This will take its time, since there are still blocker bugs to be squashed down. Like copying between two bfs-partitions.

2nd. the boot process or the setup/install has to be improved. There is not much testing until the Alpha 1 will be released. So many hardware will not work the time the Alpha 1 is released (I guess).

3rd. After the HAIKU Alpha 1 will boot and install on more systems, the developer will have their time to develop new projects, such as driver… at this time there will be some more new models for a netbook, and the trend will be gone at this time…