Thursday, September 17, 2009

Haiku alpha now available.

I've been playing around with Haiku (and Senryu and even BeOS R5 and Zeta) for a few years and am looking forward to a full-blown version of Haiku.
Well, now the alpha version of Haiku has finally arrived and I tried to install it to my EeePC 901. This latter is the only one of my three computers that I can get the raw version of Haiku to work. I'd lost interest in the VM versions as the raw runs and boots so much faster.
I first tried the iso from here. Now as I don't have a usb-CDrom, I had to use Unetbootin in an attempt to create a LiveUSB key.
The Haiku iso apparently contains more than 14,000 files which is hugely greater than any iso I've used before. As a result Unetbootin needed more than two hours to create the bootable usb-key.
However, after all of this effort, when I tried to boot to the usb-key I get a message saying only

Haiku: Invalid or corrupt kernel image

That left me with only the raw image of the alpha as an option. I installed this as usual using
# dd if="image_name" of="device_name_where_to_install_Haiku"

Next you must make the Haiku partition bootable with the makebootabletiny utility from here.
This runs fine although I have to say that I haven't noticed any major difference from the raw Haiku images I've been using over the last year or so. A potential problem is that the raw image is only 600MB in size which probably only leaves less than 70 MB free for storing stuff.
In any event, it's great to see Haiku advancing.

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