Haiku working great from hard drive

I finally got Haiku working from hard drive. I got some help from the Haiku chatroom to get it up and running. Ran the bootable command to make the Haiku partition bootable and then played with the grub a little bit to try and get it working. It seems there is some problem with grub and I am not that familiar with grub and linux to fix it. Even though grub did find the Haiku drive when I ran then update-grub command, when I tried to boot grub would throw some error messages. I was able to type in the same set of instructions from the grub prompt and Haiku would boot just fine.

The instructions I typed in the grub prompt are:

set root=(hd0,7)
chainloader +1
boot

I set the same root in the 40_custom file and ran update-grub and it found Haiku in that partition upon update. Still, for some reason it would not boot.

I was surprised how less memory and processor Haiku was using. It was around 100 MB RAM...that was all it was taking!..and it was FAST and very responsive. It almost seemed unreal, especially because it wasn't using much processor capacity and it was still fast. I tested a few Haiku apps, they all worked great. I will start playing with it more and post what I find. So far I love it. I believe Haiku will make a mark in the OS arena. It may take some time before they come up with a stable version as well as more apps. It will be certainly interesting to see.

Windows 7 Vs Ubuntu Linux Vs Haiku

My new laptop came with Windows 7. I was excited, but not very, because it’s just another Windows operating system. I do like Windows 7, but I always wanted to try alternative operating systems. I have tried Ubuntu installed in a USB earlier, so this time I decided to install it on my hard drive.

I made a partition for Linux, it was pretty easy. I used Windows to make the partition. Once I made the partition, I used the Windows Ubuntu installer located here: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/windows-installer . This, I believe is the simplest way to install Ubuntu to run alongside Windows. It was pretty easy and upon reboot, the Windows menu was updated and it prompted me with two alternatives “Windows 7” and “Ubuntu”. One I select Ubuntu, it will take me to the Grub menu where it again lists both Ubuntu and Windows 7, as well as the Windows 7 recovery partition.

Ubuntu was fast, easy to use and came with the free Libre Office. I haven’t worked much with it yet, but from what I saw it was very similar to Open Office, and they both are very good alternatives to MS Office suite. And hey, they both are free!!!. So far I love Ubuntu and have been making it a point to choose the “Ubuntu” option at log in as often as I can. Now with two operating systems running in parallel I would not panic too much if my Windows starts acting up! I will have all my data in a drive dedicated only for data files, that way my data files are not at the mercy of Windows' reliability.

Another OS that I wanted to try recently was Haiku. I have tried it in the past installing it in a USB drive, but it did not work that great with my USB and I wanted to give it another chance. I followed the instructions and created a Live CD and using which I formatted another partition that I created for this, and installed Haiku in that partition. It seems after that I need to add Haiku to my Grub, if I am using Linux along with Haiku. I tried, following the instructions in the website but haven’t got much luck so far. I am currently working on it and may post this question on the Haiku forums. It still works great from the Live CD though, but I really want it working from the hard drive to get the full experience

For those who are not familiar with Haiku, I really recommend you read up on that. It’s a really cool operating system based on the BeOS. It’s fast, light weight and heavily multi-threaded. I was really excited as I was reading about Haiku. I hope they have good success with this and I am even considering contributing to some of the Haiku projects myself. It is really worth checking out. Their website is: http://haiku-os.org/

I will post more on these operating systems in the coming posts.