I’ve been spending some time trying to get Haiku running on my original 2009 MacBook Air1,1**:**
I first prepared a USB with the x86_64 nightly build (hrev60114). The Mac sees the USB and I can get into Haiku’s boot loader, including the “Boot fallback Haiku” option. From there, though, things get interesting.
Normal boot results in a black screen. I then tried going into the boot options and enabling Use fail-safe graphics, but after continuing the boot the machine just hangs. I also tried fail-safe graphics + Disable ACPI, with essentially the same result - the boot process starts, but eventually freezes without giving me anything particularly useful on screen.
Thinking this might simply be a 64-bit compatibility problem on such early Intel Apple hardware, I also prepared a USB with the 32-bit hrev60114 nightly build. Unfortunately that introduced a different problem: the boot environment appears, but Haiku itself doesn’t seem to show up as a bootable system in the same way.
Has anyone here ever successfully booted Haiku on a MacBookAir1,1, or on similarly early Intel Macs with Apple’s slightly unusual EFI implementation? I have also installed rEFInd but the result is still the same with both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of the system (64-bit fails with black screen and 32-bit is not even listed as a boot option).
I’d especially be interested in knowing:
- whether there’s a particular Haiku revision that works better on these machines,
- whether I should be using the 32-bit or 64-bit build,
whether there are any boot-loader/kernel options worth trying besides fail-safe graphics and disabling ACPI - whether this generation of MacBook Air has any known GPU/EFI/ACPI issue that prevents Haiku from booting completely
At this point getting Haiku to actually reach the desktop on this tiny old Air has become a challenge in itself. 