[openbeos] Re: Support for Ancient Computers?

  • From: Gerald Zajac <zajacg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2007 15:02:41 -0400

Urias McCullough wrote:

On 7/14/07, Gerald Zajac <zajacg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Recently I attempted to run Haiku on two old computers that are about 10
years old with 200 and 233 MHz MMX Pentium processors, respectively.
The boot process would not start;  that is, the Haiku boot screen did
not appear, and nothing was written to the syslog via the serial port.
BeOS booted and ran okay on both of these computers.


You're experiencing bootloader issues
The bootloader is failing on only these two computers, and works fine on the other newer computers where I have used that hard disk. That is, Haiku boots fine from that hard disk in other newer computers. I'm using Haiku R41492. Could it be some BIOS peculiarity or the north and/or south bridge chipsets in these computers? Both computers use the Intel chips SB82437VX and SB82371SB. 


I have no opinion as to whether Haiku should support ancient computers
such as these;  however, I'm curious as to whether this project intends
to support computers this old.  If not, what are the minimum
requirements for a computer?


Haiku is currently i586-targeted, and therefore should technically
support anything that is Pentium or newer (> 486).

I have successfully booted haiku on several old Pentium machines,
including a P75 laptop with 40mb memory (only was able to boot to a
safe mode shell because 64mb memory is required to get to a desktop).

One computer has only 32 MB of memory, and the other has 64 MB.


In several cases, I also have experienced bootloader issues when
building the disk partition with a newer machines - I'm not sure what
causes this.
I did not build the Haiku image that is being used. It was downloaded from the Haiku website. 

Regards,
Gerald

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