Will haiku run on my AMD K6 III?

1

Hello,

is it valuable to try haiku for that PC: the hardware will be recognized?

System: Host: box Kernel: 3.0.21-tinycore i586 (32 bit) Desktop: N/A Distro: Core Linux
Machine: System: VIA product: VT82C597
Mobo: N/A model: VP3-596B-DD Bios: Award version: 4.51 PG date: 04/18/01
CPU: Single core AMD-K6-III (-UP-) cache: 256 KB flags: (-) clocked at 367.530 MHz
Graphics: Card: Matrox Graphics MGA G400/G450 TinyCore Linux X.org: 1.6.1 driver: mga Resolution: 1024x768@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: Rasterizer GLX Version: 2.1 Mesa 7.2
Audio: Card: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97]
Network: Card: Realtek RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ driver: 8139too
IF: eth0 state: unknown speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: 00:10:a7:19:59:e7
Drives: HDD Total Size: 24.7GB (4.9% used) 1: id: /dev/sdb model: SanDisk_SDCFH size: 8.0GB
2: id: /dev/sda model: WDC_WD102AA size: 10.3GB 3: id: /dev/sdc model: QUANTUM_FIREBALL size: 6.4GB
Partition: ID: / size: 681M used: 14M (3%) fs: rootfs ID: /home size: 5.8G used: 198M (4%) fs: ext3
Sensors: None detected - is lm-sensors installed and configured?
Info: Processes: 86 Uptime: 14 min Memory: 44.9/756.0MB Client: Shell inxi: 1.8.17

It will run faster than linux?
(webbrowser)
Radio stream will be possible?

Thanks.

2

Why are there a billion posts like this asking, if Haiku will run on a certain hardware configuration? You even included a bucket full of totally unrelated useless information and expect people to filter through a wall of text to find the relevant bits.

Why don’t you just put it on a CD or USB stick and try? It takes 10 freaking minutes, you can try without installation and it’s even free! Seriously, how easy can it get so lazy people stop posting questions like this!?

Plus, it’s in the Newbie Developer Forum …

3

Faster than Linux? Are you kidding me? A computer made out of relays is faster than Linux. With 10,000uF capacitors across each coil. Running from a watch battery.

That system is a bloody supercomputer anyway. Nearly 400MHz for christ’s sake, I’m going to feel the shockwaves from here when you boot that thing up. It’s got cache memory too, so you know you’re getting the very best speed out of it.

The graphics card is fully supported in Haiku, and I do mean fully. Full hardware acceleration and multiple monitors. CRT of course, LCDs don’t exist yet and you’d never be able to connect one digitally to a Matrox even if they did. The TV output works, composite video into your CRT TV. No 3D acceleration support. It’s a Matrox card, what are you going to accelerate with it, Wolfenstein 3D? It’s going to need liquid nitrogen to handle that…

No clue about the soundcard, it probably works with opensound, but you won’t be needing it: I guarantee you won’t be able to hear a bloody thing over the racket that old Quantum Fireball makes.

There is sufficient RAM for Haiku and a Web browser. There is not sufficient RAM for Firefox. There is never sufficient RAM for Firefox. Did I mention that Haiku has a 64GB memory limit? This is a show stopper for Firefox.

I see you don’t have WiFi. That’s good, not only will you not have to worry about whether it’s supported, but you also retained your anonymity. If your MAC address had been in that copypasta like your wired network card’s MAC, I could have popped it into Skyhook and figured out exactly where you lived. It pays to be careful with cmd+V. Or control+V, with all those Linux distros hell-bent on cloning Windows and its finger-contorting keyboard “shortcuts”…

You will definitely need to burn a Haiku CD. Systems that old do not have any capability of booting from USB. This is not a shortcoming in Haiku, it is because your BIOS was written back in the days when you weren’t chained up and roasted above an open fire for admitting you’re “furry.”

Use a CD-R. If your system is that old it’s probably a 1x or 2x CD burner, and they cannot even burn to high-speed CD-RW discs. Assuming it has a CD burner…but then Napster is getting pretty big, there are lots of good reasons to shell out 300 pounds on one…

I’m not even going to assume your system has USB. Even if it does, it’s certainly not USB 2.0 high-speed. A removable “USB stick” back then meant opening the lid of your PC and hot-swapping IDE plugs into bare hard drives. Remember to always insert the power before the IDE cable and vice-versa on removal. It helps to have metal-to-metal contact with the case to ground the drive before you insert the power plug. Failure to observe these warnings will destroy your state-of-the-art hardware in a flash.

Lucky your BIOS is just about new enough to boot from CD. A couple of years older, no chance. All operating systems come on floppy disks after all!

I think you will be surprised how fast Haiku can perform. If for some reason it doesn’t boot, you could always try BeOS R5 instead. BeOS had very high system requirements, you needed a whole Pentium to run it. I’m pleased to say your system easily meets those demands, where many fall short!

4

It should run fine… I have a trasmeta laptop that runs Haiku fine except for the fact that it doesn’t have enough ram (only 244 not enough for Web+ but probably enough for Netsurf)

You seem to have plenty ram to run about anything that exists for Haiku. Haiku is limited to 4Gb per process in any case even if you have more. So firefox for instance could only access 4G even if you had 16… but you could have other programs running in the rest of that ram also able to acess up to 4Gb each untill you ran out and so on.

I don’t think you will find streaming audio easy… there probably are apps to do that but no flash or audio tag support in the browser and media player doesn’t support streaming so try for VLC maybe.

The transmeta does stutter when I do multiple things… like mp3 + browsing but you might have better luck since you would have a much better disk controller I imagine and way more ram.

5

[quote=cb88]
I don’t think you will find streaming audio easy… there probably are apps to do that but no flash or audio tag support in the browser and media player doesn’t support streaming so try for VLC maybe.[/quote]

I can confirm this works well. The R5 VLC binary will play MP3 streams under Haiku.

It does not have “open URL” in the menu, so the OP will need to do something absolutely horrifying: open a terminal. Oh my god, the sky is going to fall, did VLC drop out of Richard Stallman’s beard?! To play a stream:
cd /boot/apps/vlc (or wherever you put it)
./vlc http://www.example.com/stream.m3u (your link goes here)

Note that Richard Stallman’s shift key is broken. He probably had to remove it because that bloody great beard keeps pressing it at random.

I hear somewhere that an older version of Soundplay works under Haiku? I have not seen this, nor do I know where to get a sufficiently-old version. Soundplay works well for MP3 streaming on BeOS.

Failing that, look at the .m3u or .pls file in WebPositive and download the mp3 streaming link inside. Start playing it in MediaPlayer a few seconds after the download begins to simulate streaming. This will pose problems for the large-capacity Quantum Fireball hard drive if the show is long.

Audio and video tag support in the browser would be a wet dream. I will not be able to contain myself if this happens!

I believe there are broken things in Haiku’s scheduling and timing that can cause this, probably in drivers or the scheduler. In an ideal world a real-time priority thread would never be preempted by a normal priority thread like a browser. Alas it doesn’t seem to be working. I even experience the odd break in audio on this liquid-nitrogen-grade supercomputer (1600000000Hz Atom.) The problem might be isolated to a single driver that abuses CLI / STI. Real furs don’t need no stinking CLI!
At least Haiku seems to be able to keep up with the video refresh rate at all times. After 15+ years of Linux on the desktop, they still haven’t nailed that one. Stuttering mouse pointer when busy? No problem for Richard Stallman, he just strokes his beard when the system becomes busy, and so much beard hair gets shed and picked up by the mouse ball, the mouse is ruined (like his shift key.)

You could try removing drivers to isolate the problem, or see if it is related to disk access or some other operation. It would be delightful if Haiku could be fixed to work as well as BeOS did with multimedia playback on a busy system!