So: having tried Haiku OS on a 2006 Intel iMac in both the 32-bit and the 64-bit variants and on a 2010 COMPAQ laptop (32-bit) and being 100% unable to get a consistent boot-up (either with an external boot disc, or from the home disc) I view Haiku OS as not fit for purpose yet insofar as my Mum (who is 89, no fool and my measuring stick for these things) would be quite unable to “just” turn on the desktop/laptop and be writing her usual slightly barbed e-mail messages to me within 5 minutes.
I did enjoy the functionality of the Haiku desktop, although I prefer the XFCE and LXCE desktops available for Linux and UNIX.
I intend to return to Haiku OS in 1-2 years (even if Mum is dead), when, I hope, I won’t have to piss around pressing odd keyboard keys for donkey’s ages on the 50% chance the machine might boot properly.
Er… you were testing Haiku? Did you open any tickets about these problems?
It’s highly unlikely we will make any changes to support 2006 Intel iMacs in the next “1-2 years”, especially not if there aren’t tickets for them. That’s quite old hardware at this point.
Would be fine to have bug reports of your Hardware, so haiku can get better in the future. Every not default system have problems with hardware, because the most drivers will be written for Windows. Here are only a smal dev Team Wirkung on. They do much a d good work.
But we does not need only people testing haiku, we need people who help and support us.
I will help insofar as I will urge people I know to try Haiku out on any ‘spare’ hardware they have.
"It’s Haiku not “Haiku OS” "
I am not entirely sure how that pedantic comment helps things.
“It’s highly unlikely we will make any changes to support 2006 Intel iMacs in the next “1-2 years”, especially not if there aren’t tickets for them. That’s quite old hardware at this point.”
My remark was not really anent 2006 Intel iMacs Ding-An-Sich, just re the simple fact that “spoilt” types like myself expect a machine of just about any description to boot directly just as soon as the OS has been installed.
I see that you take after your Mum on message generation.
You are aware that Haiku is currently in a Beta state? That is why there is a fairly large Beta 1 on the download button. I can’t speak to your relationship with your Mum but I personally never give Beta anything to mine. My wife is different story since she is a professional software tester.
Well, well, well: as I am one of those Giants with only one eye in the middle of my head,
I obviously missed that . . .
I am, oddly enough, well aware that haiku is “beta status,” but as I constantly play around with beta status software that DOES work (c.f. Mac OS beta versions, LiveCode beta versions, Linux beta versions), I did expect a simple boot (face it, even ReactOS can manage that).
You know, it is a bit strange, how we handle things here, i mean as community, at least if you watch it closely you can recognize some pattern.
If somebody says: “Nah, i wont test non-release version!” we rush and say: “But it is more stable than the official releases of other projects!” There will be some, who will even say they are using Haiku as daily-driver since eons without any major problems (thats me, actually.)
But if somebody test the releases or nightlys and complains about real problems, we just say: “Hey, it is beta/nightly!”
We do this to get as much people involved as possible, but it is morally questionable way to achive that.
So feef free to create tickets for your bugs, this is also a somewhat standardized answer if somebody complains for missing hw support
My own feeling in terms of “community” and “support” is that those are largely nebulous terms
and would be better replaced by “place where like-minded people can communicate.”
Having pointed out that the SINGLE THING that stops me from getting “into” Haiku is that I cannot get a machine to boot in a simple and straight-forward fashion I cannot understand most of the reactions above: an operating system that does not consistently boot without the assistance of external items (boot CD, boot USB media and so on) is effectively useless. With the laptop I used the system DID boot from the hard drice: but only 20% of the time did it boot completely, neither LAN cable nor wireless internet would work at all either.
If the fact that two computers of almost completely different construction, made about 12 years apart from each other played “silly buggers” in a multiplicity of ways everytime I attempted to boot them constitutes a single bug . . .
Now I don’t know who is ducking the rotten vegetables . . . but the plain and simple fact is that beta standard software should be at the stage where one is looking at tiddly-little details: I know this as I have been developing a software package of my own of some considerable complexity, and each time it goes through its next SDLC and beta versions are released I have to do a lot of thinking, alpha testing on a variety of machines I have in my house, and so forth before I can go “Beta”.
If the answer is ‘no’, then say you didn’t. If you didn’t enter a bug (or two bugs) then it will be difficult to track and fix. Evidently, not everyone is having the same issue as you or none of us would be able to boot Haiku. By entering bugs, maybe your issues could have been fixed a long time ago. Or, maybe, they wouldn’t have.
Either way, you can sarcastically complain about it all you want, unless you do something proactive to help it’s unlikely you’ll get much further.
As a Software QA Analyst. To complain about Haiku but offer no detailed information, nor log a bug report is counter productive. Issues, either actual bugs, or usability concerns, can never be addressed unless you participate. You say your done “Testing” Haiku. I say you have never tested it. Testing without bug reporting is not testing.
I am irritated much more i read this discussion. Is you haiku booting or not? When the boot process are stopping, on that symbol? Have you read the user guide about bug fixing, boot fixing, ways to get the system running using the bootoptions? We have a vesa mode for non supported gfx, we have a blacklist for not supported hardware.
You coming in here and i only hear how bad everthing is. Start testing haiku, give it a try, use the tools you can have to solve problems and them you can discuss and now help to get Haiku better.
I succeeded in booting Haiku 32-bit on a 2006 iMac ONLY via the install disk.
I tried ALL the recipes that were suggested on this Forum to get the machine to boot from its home disk to no avail.
On the COMPAQ 32-bit laptop the machine did boot up completely 1 in 5 times; it was completely unpredictable.
Now “irritated” or not, that is how far I got, and I did get extremely irritated for the simple reason that I wanted to turn on my computers, boot them up, and get on with seeing what Haiku could do: but, as, in both cases, the minimum time to get the machines to boot was 12 minutes I installed operating systems (macOS 10.7 and LXLE current repectively) so I could actually get something constructive done.
AS both of my test machines are now “chuntering along quite happily” on other operating systems I am not going to reinstall Haiku on them to get bug reports.
However, after a whole slew of other things, I do intend to install 64-bit Haiku on a far more modern (i.e. 1 year old) laptop that my father forgot to take with him when he died in December. And if you think that is vaguely offensive, you didn’t know my father who had a fairly warped sense of humour he had inherited from his son, just as I inherited mine from my son.
I promise you that my remarks here are NOT intended to be offensive or rub anyone up the wrong way, just a symptom of the fact that I completely misunderstood what the word “Beta” meant on the Haiku website.
But again that happend then? The system crashed? Any error message? The system freezed?
Have you stored any bug message? Taken a photo of the screen? That changes of the boot options you have tried on bootup?
Hey guy only you can descript this.
Haiku is a very smal community with only a hand full developers. They does not can have all hardware around to create drivers. Every developer have its own skills, they does not can be active in all things around. A kernel developer are not a drivers developer. One is good in drivers a other on software developing.
Have you skills to help haiku to get better? Or you only one person Who install haiku and leave it because it was only a test?
This was descript before. Beta because a running system near by releasing a official complete release. But here you get hardware problems too because you can not get all drivers of all hardware with a such smal developer Team.
This is not Windows , Mac or Linux with thousend developers behind.
