The tools you need to compile software for Haiku, or to compile Haiku itself, depend on the platform that you are using
for building Haiku.
The Haiku operating system can be a very convenient development environment for working on Haiku, but using
Haiku is not strictly necessary. It may also not be practical to use Haiku in some very special cases,
such as when writing some drivers - using a virtual machine to test your changes may be much more practical.
It may also be a bit slower as far as compilation times are concerned, but performance has massively
improved over the years. Occasionally, building Haiku within Haiku can be problematic if the host
is significantly out of date compared to the version being built. In this case, cross-compiling Haiku
from another operating system, or updating Haiku to a newer version should fix that.
Due to the various ways that extended attributes are implemented in various file systems, some will present issues that need to be considered and others will simply be unusable. This page aims to clarify which file systems have extended attribute implementations compatible enough with Haiku’s that they can be utilized during cross-builds.
Note that configure auto-detects the extended attribute capabilites of the filesystem you have asked it to configure a build on, and will automatically select “full”, “ref”, or no usage at all based on the filesystem’s capabilites. If you would like to check what it has selected, you can view the build/BuildConfig file in your generated directory, and check the values of HAIKU_HOST_USE_XATTR and HAIKU_HOST_USE_XATTR_REF.
There are a wide range of options and configurations available to boot Haiku, from from modifying the boot sector, to configuring (and possibly installing) a boot manager. For an overview of the various booting options available to Haiku, please check out this page of the Haiku User Guide
Using Makebootable
makebootable is a low-level Haiku tool to enable x86 MBR (legacy bios) systems to boot from the active Haiku partition.
As you should know, Ryan and I worked actively on the WebKit port during this summer.
I won't say this port is perfect, because many parts need to be improved and stabilized.
Anyhow, I think it's a good idea to provide a way for people to build it and not moving in the dark.
Building WebKit on Haiku isn't so hard but can be really long.
This is the top page to be used as the index for all the guides.
Using a USB flash drive is one of the best ways to install Haiku. It is also the only way to really try and enjoy all the features of Haiku without touching your hard drives. The Haiku live CD is limited by the slow access time of CDs and still lacks a few features due to the added complexity to run on a read-only media. Note that running off a USB flash drive might still be a lot slower than a real hard drive depending on your model.
Do you want to hand out Haiku Installation DVDs to friends and colleagues? To help distinguish it from all the other DVDs that litter people's desks, we have a nice little DVD paper sleeve you can print out and fold yourself.
Use this WonderBrush file (903 KiB) as a template for your personal sleeves. Please respect the Haiku trademarks, if you plan to distibute those sleeves.
HAIKU R1 Alpha 4.1 Release Notes
These are the release notes for HAIKU R1 Alpha 4.1, a critical bugfix update for our fourth official release. For this fourth alpha release, we strove to provide an improved version of Haiku that is more stable, introduces more features for both the end-user and developer, and has a greater chance of properly booting on more hardware.
We have tried hard to make this release as good as possible. Still there are a few known issues and missing features, some of them collected below. Please keep in mind that this is alpha software, which means it is not yet feature complete and still contains known and unknown bugs. While we are mostly confident in the stability of this release, we do not provide any assurances against data loss.
Boot Loading Options
Haiku supports booting via the traditional BIOS boot system as well as the more modern UEFI boot mechanism. See the UEFI guide if you plan to use UEFI, or your hardware doesn't support BIOS booting.
Welcome to the Haiku installation guide! This document will help you install Haiku on your computer, guiding you through the Haiku installation one step at a time. Depending on your hardware configuration, the installation process can take ony a few minutes.
Preparing a Partition for Haiku
Currently, Haiku cannot resize existing partitions; therefore, you either need to already have an empty partition where you can install Haiku, or you need to create one using a third party tool. If your current OS comes with a partitioning tool, try to use that. Otherwise, you can use specialized tools like the freely available GParted LiveCD. A standard 32-bit install of Haiku requires about 1.3 GiB of disk space (64-bit install is about double), so the partition doesn't need to be huge. However, you may want to leave some room for 3rd party applications, so 3+ GiB is the recommended partition size.
To create your Haiku Installation DVD, you need to burn the ISO or Anyboot image to a DVD. There are many different ways to burn an them to DVD. Shown below is a list of links to how to guides and/or DVD burning applications for various different operating systems.
If you'd like to create your own DVD cover, we have instructions on how to print out and fold your own sleeve.
A word of caution on burning DVD images:
Some disc burning software may try to be "clever" and won't burn the Anyboot image properly. The following image burning applications are reported to work properly:
- Burn 2.4.1u
- CDRecord
- InfraRecorder
- K3b
Using CDBurnerXP 4.3.2.2212 must currently be advised against, as it reportedly has produced faulty DVDs from the ISO images.
Ubuntu Linux
FreeBSD
OpenBSD
- Open a terminal and look at the output of dmesg for your cd burner, here it's "cd0":
$ dmesg | grep cd
cd0 at scsibus0 targ 0 lun 0: ATAPI
5/cdrom removable
cd0(pciide0:1:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2
- As root, use cdio to burn the ISO image. Note the "c" at the end of the device name: "cd0c":
$ cdio -f cd0c tao Haiku.iso
macOS
Windows
Using cdrecord from a terminal (most flavors of Linux/UNIX, BeOS, etc.)
In most flavors of Linux/UNIX, BSDs and in BeOS, you can also burn the ISO or Anyboot file to DVD using the cdrecord command from the Terminal.
