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!