User Support Forum

I finally got around to getting some hardware together and getting a new CD drive (mine stopped working) so I could try out the Haiku R1A1 CD I burned some time ago.

I am able to boot off the CD, initialize the target hard drive and install from it without problems (although I'm still not sure what "write boot sector" does, that button doesn't appear in the install instructions - I've tried the procedure with and without clicking that button, before and after formatting the partition - the subsequent boot behaviour remains the same). I installed from the CD on a fresh hard disk without problems, configured my BIOS to boot that hard disk first (instead of my Windows HD), and "nothing happens".

By "nothing happens", I mean the line of dots I see very briefly when I boot from the CD (before the splash screen and icons appear) do not show up - I only get a flashing text prompt in the upper left of the screen.

However if I boot from the CD and use the CD's boot manager (holding spacebar after POST) to choose to boot from the hard disk, it boots and runs just fine off the hard disk, bringing me to the Haiku R1A1 desktop.

I assume that I'm missing some kind of obvious step or mistake in setting up my drive and this is why it won't boot by itself (the Windows Disk Management tool doesn't show a "Boot" flag for my Haiku drive, for example - should it? I can't find any way in that utility to set that flag...).

Any help would be appreciated.

With the Pentium 3 machine working successfully and out the way, my next victim for the boot CD was my laptop (HP Compaq Presario V5000, V2000/V3000 were tested to work and are very similar machines), which currently runs Windows XP. I don't have any intention of migrating my laptop to Haiku yet, maybe when it enters Beta stages, so I used VirtualBox as a testing ground. It's very sluggish (1.8GHz Turion64 and 896MB RAM) but it made it to the desktop, my Alpha 2 disc shoved into the side beforehand.

However, when I went into Network Preferences, the Ethernet and Wireless LAN (Broadcom chipset) were not detected. WLAN was particularly important to me as I use it to access the internet. Haiku does have Broadcom chipset drivers included in the package (unfortunately there isn't much information on what exact Broadcom driver in the technical specifications). All there was in the drop-down menu was 'none'. This was in stark contrast to the Pentium 3 machine where the ethernet pci card was actually detected. Not that this is an internal laptop wifi, incase there is a difference in external ones which have a different method of communicating with the PC.

Also, the wifi was turned on, the LED indicator on the 'Wifi button' was glowing blue as it should be. Anything I can do to resolve this? (This is one of the things A2 was so supposed to achieve in the first place).

Thanks for any help.

BeShare works fine for me if I just want to connect to one of the servers (generally beshare.neonplasma.com) and I can easily download any of the .mp3 files on the server.
However, on my home network where I have two computers running Haiku R1A2, I have some problems.
If I put some .mp3 files in the shared sub-folder of the first computer, they show up in the neonplasma.com list of available .mp3 files on the second computer. However, when I select them to download on the second machine, although the selected file appears in the right-hand box of the BeShare GUI, nothing further happens. It just won't download.
There is no firewall on either machine and I believe I have complied with the stipulations of the BeShare Super quick instructions which says that to share files, just put them in the shared folder and leave the client logged into the server.
Any clues as to what's going wrong here?
Also, does BeShare only handle .mp3 files? The drop-down from the Query box offers only one option which is *.mp3

Everytime I attempt to empty my Trash in Haiku I end up in kernel debugging land. It's not like I have any system files on there, just a boatload of unwanted apps, setup files (zip), drivers, and possibly some Winxp stuff I deleted using Haiku. I don't want to be left with tons of garbage on the hard disk.