I’m new here and I’ve only been using Haiku OS for around two weeks. I wasn’t sure if I should’ve put this into two separate posts, so please correct me on this if I made a mistake!
I’ve liked it but there are some hardware (maybe just driver) compatibility issues I’ve had. I installed it on a 160GB HDD on a Lenovo ThinkPad T400 and all is great except for the wireless card. The network manager seems to reset every time I close it. From the drop down menu I select the WLAN card and it detects my home networks. I select my desired network and click ok, then a smaller window pops up asking for the password and security type. I select the WPA2 and enter my password and a notification comes up in the right hand corner saying that it’s configuring. It goes away and I close the window. I then open the WebPositive browser and try to go to Google. It then gives me a message saying that the hostname couldn’t be resolved, meaning no internet connection. I went back to the network manager and it showed that it hard switched back to Ethernet. I’m confused as to why this is happening. It was working the first time I installed it. I rebooted and then it started happening. I even formatted the hard drive and reinstalled the entire OS from a CD, but still no change. I find this to be very odd because it was at one point working and I was able to connect to Google and check email. The WLAN card in question works fine on Debian 9 that’s installed on the other hard drive.
The next problem is EFI compatibility. I have two Macs, one is a 13 inch 2006 Intel MacBook (2,1 model), the other a 13 inch 2011 MacBook Pro (8,1 model). The 2006 one will not boot the Haiku CD at all. After going to the EFI boot menu, the CD does show up but is labeled as “Windows”. When I select it I get a black screen that quickly flashes a bunch of white vertical lines, then goes black again. The fans spins up and it gets hot. I had to hold the power button to turn it off. The 2011 MBP has the same boot menu problem where the disc shows up as “Windows”. It does however boot up. It shows the normal Haiku splash screen with the icons that go from greyed out to colored. After that I get a blue screen with a 2 inch white bar spanning the top of the display. I left it for about 15 minutes before giving up and forcing a shutdown with the power button. I suspect that this is a problem with Apple’s messy EFI that has a sort of hybrid MBR thingy that attempts BIOS emulation.
Then lastly there’s the problem with the ThinkPad R60. It has no hard drive and no WLAN hardware installed. The live CD boots to the splash screen like on the 2011 MBP, but then it crashes with some text output and a debug prompt. This is not a BIOS or WLAN card issue but I thought I would mention it too.
I’m most interested in getting the T400 issues solved because it’s the closest to being fully operational under Haiku OS.
Here are the T400 specs:
Memory: 4GB (2GB x2)
Storage: 160GB HDD completely devoted to Haiku OS
CPU: Core 2 Duo P8400
Graphics: Integrated
Ethernet: Intel 82567LM (rev 3)
WLAN: Intel Pro wireless 5100 AGN [Shiloh]
BIOS version: 3.24 (2012)
2011 MBP specs:
Memory: 10GB (8GB x1, 2GB x1)
Storage: 275GB SSD and 250GB HDD
CPU: Core i5 2435M
Graphics: Integrated
Ethernet: Broadcom 57765-B0
WLAN: Airport Extreme (Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0)
EFI version: MBP81.0047.B32
