How to install BeOS under VMWare

As I still love the BeOS and I can't install it on new hardware, I tried to install it under VMware. I found many people who said it was working but no one's written an article about how to do it! It seems trivial to do it, but in fact it isn't. Or, at least, it is not so trivial for the average user...

So I've done it. I installed the BeOS, it runs — not perfectly, and it's slow, but it runs! And I will explain you here each step I followed.

I. What you'll need

• First you'll need a copy of VMware (I used VMware Workstation 5.5)
• A software to mount an ISO to a virtual CDROM (I used Alcohol 120%), or you can use a real CD
• BeOS (I used BeOS DevEd 2.2, it's an ISO file and I didn't want to burn it)
• Another OS distro that can run in VMware (I used the free Mandriva Linux distro). I'll explain why later...

II. Creating the VM

First, install or run VMware, then create your VM as a normal VM, set everything you want or need. Create a virtual disk. I created a fixed size disk for performance reasons and also because I thought it could create problems leaving it dynamic, so I didn't try with a dynamic disk.

III. The first problem

The main and first problem I encountered is that the DriveSetup utility from BeOS is not able to partition correctly the virtual disk I created. So here is why I used another OS: to create the main partition on the disk.

I installed Mandriva on a virtual disk and I connected another virtual disk to it. Then I used my Mandriva installation to create a FAT32 partition and format it. Now I don't think I forced to create a VM to do it, so I guess I could use a LiveCD from any Linux distro, but I'd like to give Mandriva a try and also test/compare its performances in a virtual machine compared to BeOS. (And if you ask me, I can tell you that BeOS is really slow!)

Once I got my new virtual disk formatted, I created a new VM using that disk. I booted the BeOS DevEd and installed it without any problems. The problems came later...

IV. Now it's working...almost...

Writing this little explanation, I'm seeing that I haven't done anything extraordinary, and this can be done in few hours. So why did I need to spend my weekend to do it?

Well, in fact, I encountered a lot more problems.

First I tried with a ZETA distro which wasn't working correctly. I had a bug with the input server that I needed to restart every ten seconds because it locked my mouse cursor in the upper-left corner! It installed, but it crashed a lot of times. Whenever I tried to launch the networking panel it sent me to KDL!

So I moved to DevEd, which is a lot more stable. But I still have problems:

• Sometimes, I still have the mouse cursor problem (but less often)
• There is no driver for the network card (an AMD PCnet-PCI II compatible)
• Each time I boot, I have to specify in the boot menu to use a standard VGA resolution, otherwise the app_server won't start
• The sound card works but the sound is choppy. But I have not checked if there is a new driver for the Creative Labs Sound Blaster AudioPCI. I guess it's not a problem from VMware because it works well with Mandriva. (Argh, it hurts to say that!)

V. Conclusion

It works. There is still room for improvement, but it works. It was not really hard to do it, but there is a big lack of hardware support.

I saw that the X server has a driver for the VMware graphics card. I think we could do the same, and improving hardware support for emulators like VMware could be a great thing to attract developers. I managed to install BeOS this way because I don't have my old P3 machine to play with. I only own a new PC and any new PC cannot have BeOS installed on it because of its lack of drivers. [Editor's note: Maybe not always...but my brand new low-end eMachines box runs BeOS Max...]

But be warned, installing the BeOS this way is a great thing if you do not have compatible hardware and still want to use it. But it's not for demonstrating to your friends, because it's SLOW, it's way too slow!