I tried out the new Haiku OS VMWare image the other day to see what it was like.  I was fairly impressed and everything worked smoothly and quickly running under VMWare Fusion on my MacBook Pro.  Today, I wanted to try Haiku OS out on some REALLY old hardware.  I have a little shoebox computer based on an Asus MES-N motherboard.

This system came out long before Shuttle was a household name and was pretty early for a compact desktop system.  This thing is so old that it has not one but TWO on-board serial ports.  It does have an on-board 10/100 network adapter which was innovative for the time.  It’s based on a Celeron 466Mhz, has 128mb of ram and a 30gb Seagate Barracuda I picked up at a local computer recycler in Redmond.

Alas, all of the build-up and pretty pictures is for nothing because it didn’t work.  I’m not sure if it is choking on the on-board video card or if there is some other hardware conflict but on this system, after it reads the Haiku CD, I only get a blinking cursor.  I tried to disable the on-board VGA and popped in a couple of different ISA video cards from another project but neither of those would boot in that system.  Unfortunately I don’t have any PCI video cards on hand.  Luckily I did have an entire other old desktop system though.  This time, a 700MHz Athlon-based system that had a hard drive puke a while back.  It’s darned ugly but it did the trick.

This system has 256mb of ram and I tossed a 20gb Seagate Barracuda that I also obtained from that computer surplus store in Redmond(if they fix their website I might link to them someday).  I popped the Haiku disk I burned in and booted it up.  I was greeted with more icon candy while waiting for the desktop to load.  Once it popped up, it asked me if I wanted to install or run it as a live CD.  This system is for fun stuff so I decided to try the install out.  I was warned profusely to do the partitioning myself and not trust their tool since it is an alpha release.  I decided to live dangerously and use their partitioning tool.  It worked quick and well.  After I was down partitioning, I finally figured out that I had to close the window that the partition manager had popped up in since there was no next button or anything similar.  Once back at the one and only install dialog, I chose the source disk(the CD), the target disk(my new partition) and hit install.

About 5 minutes later, it was done.  Once again, I was left with no real options besides “install”(again?!?) and “quit” so I chose the third option which was to close the window of the installer program.  Miraculously, the Haiku installer knew my intentions and it rebooted the computer.  It even popped the CD tray for me so I could snag that CD out of there.

When it restarted, I was greeted with more icon eye candy but not for long.  I only got to stare at those for 10-15 seconds.  Then the desktop appeared and maybe 10 seconds later, it was ready to roll and looking great.  I sat down and dove into some fractals for a minute and then spun a teapot or two before I powered down for now.  I was a little skeptical that the power down would trigger the soft power function but to my joy and disbelief, the system powered down barely 5 seconds after I sent the kill command.

If it’s one thing Haiku has right, it’s the boot up and boot down sequences.  Those are incredibly slick.  I hope to put it through it’s paces a bit further in the coming months.  When I do, I’ll post my findings here.

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