6 ms·

3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that time, but the upgrade was completely s

3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that time, but the upgrade was completely smooth. My idea when I installed Haiku was to make my own version of the "old computer challenge"[1], with an emphasis on using GUI apps. Similarly to @probono (a FOSS dev), I also found Haiku "shockingly good"[2] at being a lightweight, responsive, easy-to-use desktop OS. After some patching, I was even able to compile Tectonic[3], a modern LaTeX engine written in Rust, and Quaternion a Matrix client supporting E2EE[4]. All that running on a single core Athlon 64 and 1.5GB of RAM. I posted some screenshots in a Mastodon threads if you are curious[5] (but my posts are in french sorry :/). And of course this comment is posted from Haiku! [1]: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer-challenge.html https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer-challe... [2]: https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-first-day-with-haiku-shockingly-good-8930cad4bbb0 https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-first-day-with-haiku-shocki... [3]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ [4]: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion [5]: https://mastodon.tedomum.net/@tgoldoin/109554115997967651 https://mastodon.tedomum.net/@tgoldoin/109554115997967651

xattt 4y ago
Around 2001, I ran the contemporary BeOS demo on a Pentium MMX 200 MHz machine with 32 MB of RAM. Even with those limitations, the thing screamed. I believe it was live CD you downloaded and burned. I am absolutely not surprised it works well on Athlon 64.
- drooopy 4y ago
  I remember having the exact same experience on slightly less powerful hardware with that BeOS demo. I remember throwing everything at it and it just kept on going like it was no big deal and me constantly going "wow, wow, wow" haha! It was such a bummer going back to Windows after experiencing that.
- KMag 4y ago
  Ahh, the memories! (266 MHz PII, 64 MB RAM ... maybe upgraded to 384 MB RAM by the time I was quad-booting Debian, Win2k, BeOS and QNX) Maybe I ran BeOS slightly before a demo CD was available, or maybe I just didn't risk burning a coaster. (Remember those days where you had to worry about your OS not being able to feed the CD burner as fast as it was writing?) When I demoed BeOS around 2000, it was on a floppy (I repurposed a free AoL floppy from a few years earlier... by that time AoL was mailing free CDs instead of free floppies). The demo floppy allowed one to format a BeFS partition on the drive, and I think even put the kernel on the drive, but kept the bootloader on the floppy to encourage purchase. I woke up one morning to see the floppy drive light on, and apparently a BeOS kernel or usespace driver bug caused it to spin the floppy continuously all night without moving the read/write head. I popped out the floppy and pulled back the dust guard to discover a thin stripe where the magnetic media had been polished off of the floppy. The drive didn't read any floppy correctly after that; presumably the read/write head was covered in magnetic media dust. I don't remember how, but I eventually found instructions for copying the bootloader off of the downloaded floppy image and getting GRUB to find it, so I didn't need to put my replacement floppy drive at risk.
- TruckerScreamed 4y ago
  Pentium 75 mhz was enough for the BeOS demo. It was almost like using QNX. I believe I tried BeOS on some 486'es too, but if I did not at least it screamed, and burned, as you said, even on a Pentium 75mhz. The only limitation of the 'demo' was that usable space was like locked into 512MB extendable user-space, if I'm not wrong. Please do correct me/this.
  - einr 4y ago
    BeOS never (officially) supported 486 class processors, I can't recall if it actually uses Pentium instructions and won't run, or if it's just super slow on 486. I think it is actually compiled for Pentium.
dleslie 4y ago
How's the support for Samba/NFS?
- waddlesplash 4y ago
  There's a built-in NFSv4 client, but I think it may have fallen a bit behind NFSv4's evolution; I recall hearing you had to turn some feature off in order to get it to connect to a standard exported volume from Linux. SMB is supported by fusesmb, which is available as a package.
  - dleslie 4y ago
    Cool. Network file system support is critical for how I would use it. I've loved the experience for the most part, otherwise. Well, and Emacs support, but that's in now.
phkahler 4y ago
I had a single core Athlon 64 that I upgraded to a dual core back in the day. That was my primary PC until I got a Ryzen 2400G several years ago. All are really great CPUs for many years after they're made. Next up might be a Zen 5 APU. I'm on a slow upgrade cycle...
nortonham 4y ago
oh i loved reading the old computer challenge at the time. Solene did some great write ups about it
deaddodo 4y ago
> 3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that time, but the upgrade was completely smooth. If there is one thing to say about Haiku, their slow and steady approach has resulted in a remarkably solid Kernel and base system. It is extremely light and has a well-built and consistent environment. I've always hoped more engineers would hop on the bandwagon to accelerate development, but what the team has achieved is notable in comparison to other alternative/"hobby" OSes.
bmacho 4y ago
I believe Linux should be even faster, right? Probably it only lacks a lightweight and responsive DE, and a distro with sane defaults, e.g. no gazillions of random processes running at the start. But e.g. the compilation, or anything compute heavy should be faster under linux?
- lproven 4y ago
  I wouldn't have thought so, no. Linux is a huge OS by the standards of BeOS and Haiku, with an early-1970s design and layers and layers of legacy cruft between the kernel and the user. Dr Tanenbaum called it obsolete even 30 years ago: https://www.edn.com/linux-is-obsolete-thread-is-started-january-29-1992/ https://www.edn.com/linux-is-obsolete-thread-is-started-janu... ... and he had a point then.
  - LeFantome 4y ago
    The kernel is not huge though. Even a modern Linux kernel runs on really, really resource limited hardware ( eg. embedded ). As said above, it is all the other crap that takes up memory and slows it down ( and makes it useful of course ). It is not the Linux kernel that makes the Linux Desktop so much heavier than Haiku though.
    - lproven 4y ago
      No, that is true and a fair call. Saying that, the first machine I tried (and failed) to install Slackware 1 on was I think a 486 with 8MB of RAM, and I am not sure 21st century Linux will fit on that...
- squarefoot 4y ago
  It is possible that musl based distros such as Alpine, could somehow compete for having a lot smaller code footprint to execute, but "normal" glibc ones would hardly match Haiku's speed. That doesn't necessarily make Linux inferior; it's just the price to pay for decades of development from thousands of developers and being portable to a huge number of platforms. The upside is we (Linux users) have a lot more software and supported hardware than Haiku, as of today.
UncleSlacky 4y ago
It also runs really well on old netbooks - it's revitalised my Asus EEE 701 4G (even though the screen resolution is below the official minimum requirement), it fits comfortably on the internal 4Gb SSD, and even the wifi works!

xattt 4y ago

Around 2001, I ran the contemporary BeOS demo on a Pentium MMX 200 MHz machine with 32 MB of RAM. Even with those limitations, the thing screamed. I believe it was live CD you downloaded and burned. I am absolutely not surprised it works well on Athlon 64.

drooopy 4y ago
I remember having the exact same experience on slightly less powerful hardware with that BeOS demo. I remember throwing everything at it and it just kept on going like it was no big deal and me constantly going "wow, wow, wow" haha! It was such a bummer going back to Windows after experiencing that.
KMag 4y ago
Ahh, the memories! (266 MHz PII, 64 MB RAM ... maybe upgraded to 384 MB RAM by the time I was quad-booting Debian, Win2k, BeOS and QNX) Maybe I ran BeOS slightly before a demo CD was available, or maybe I just didn't risk burning a coaster. (Remember those days where you had to worry about your OS not being able to feed the CD burner as fast as it was writing?) When I demoed BeOS around 2000, it was on a floppy (I repurposed a free AoL floppy from a few years earlier... by that time AoL was mailing free CDs instead of free floppies). The demo floppy allowed one to format a BeFS partition on the drive, and I think even put the kernel on the drive, but kept the bootloader on the floppy to encourage purchase. I woke up one morning to see the floppy drive light on, and apparently a BeOS kernel or usespace driver bug caused it to spin the floppy continuously all night without moving the read/write head. I popped out the floppy and pulled back the dust guard to discover a thin stripe where the magnetic media had been polished off of the floppy. The drive didn't read any floppy correctly after that; presumably the read/write head was covered in magnetic media dust. I don't remember how, but I eventually found instructions for copying the bootloader off of the downloaded floppy image and getting GRUB to find it, so I didn't need to put my replacement floppy drive at risk.
TruckerScreamed 4y ago
Pentium 75 mhz was enough for the BeOS demo. It was almost like using QNX. I believe I tried BeOS on some 486'es too, but if I did not at least it screamed, and burned, as you said, even on a Pentium 75mhz. The only limitation of the 'demo' was that usable space was like locked into 512MB extendable user-space, if I'm not wrong. Please do correct me/this.
- einr 4y ago
  BeOS never (officially) supported 486 class processors, I can't recall if it actually uses Pentium instructions and won't run, or if it's just super slow on 486. I think it is actually compiled for Pentium.

dleslie 4y ago

How's the support for Samba/NFS?

waddlesplash 4y ago
There's a built-in NFSv4 client, but I think it may have fallen a bit behind NFSv4's evolution; I recall hearing you had to turn some feature off in order to get it to connect to a standard exported volume from Linux. SMB is supported by fusesmb, which is available as a package.
- dleslie 4y ago
  Cool. Network file system support is critical for how I would use it. I've loved the experience for the most part, otherwise. Well, and Emacs support, but that's in now.

phkahler 4y ago

I had a single core Athlon 64 that I upgraded to a dual core back in the day. That was my primary PC until I got a Ryzen 2400G several years ago. All are really great CPUs for many years after they're made. Next up might be a Zen 5 APU. I'm on a slow upgrade cycle...

nortonham 4y ago

oh i loved reading the old computer challenge at the time. Solene did some great write ups about it

deaddodo 4y ago

> 3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that time, but the upgrade was completely smooth. If there is one thing to say about Haiku, their slow and steady approach has resulted in a remarkably solid Kernel and base system. It is extremely light and has a well-built and consistent environment. I've always hoped more engineers would hop on the bandwagon to accelerate development, but what the team has achieved is notable in comparison to other alternative/"hobby" OSes.

bmacho 4y ago

I believe Linux should be even faster, right? Probably it only lacks a lightweight and responsive DE, and a distro with sane defaults, e.g. no gazillions of random processes running at the start. But e.g. the compilation, or anything compute heavy should be faster under linux?

lproven 4y ago
I wouldn't have thought so, no. Linux is a huge OS by the standards of BeOS and Haiku, with an early-1970s design and layers and layers of legacy cruft between the kernel and the user. Dr Tanenbaum called it obsolete even 30 years ago: https://www.edn.com/linux-is-obsolete-thread-is-started-january-29-1992/ https://www.edn.com/linux-is-obsolete-thread-is-started-janu... ... and he had a point then.
- LeFantome 4y ago
  The kernel is not huge though. Even a modern Linux kernel runs on really, really resource limited hardware ( eg. embedded ). As said above, it is all the other crap that takes up memory and slows it down ( and makes it useful of course ). It is not the Linux kernel that makes the Linux Desktop so much heavier than Haiku though.
  - lproven 4y ago
    No, that is true and a fair call. Saying that, the first machine I tried (and failed) to install Slackware 1 on was I think a 486 with 8MB of RAM, and I am not sure 21st century Linux will fit on that...
squarefoot 4y ago
It is possible that musl based distros such as Alpine, could somehow compete for having a lot smaller code footprint to execute, but "normal" glibc ones would hardly match Haiku's speed. That doesn't necessarily make Linux inferior; it's just the price to pay for decades of development from thousands of developers and being portable to a huge number of platforms. The upside is we (Linux users) have a lot more software and supported hardware than Haiku, as of today.

UncleSlacky 4y ago

It also runs really well on old netbooks - it's revitalised my Asus EEE 701 4G (even though the screen resolution is below the official minimum requirement), it fits comfortably on the internal 4Gb SSD, and even the wifi works!