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Using BeOS/Haiku...

Tupin

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 7, 2009
Messages
436
Location
St. Louis, MO
Since I'll never be able to afford a BeBox barring some sort of windfall, I kind of want to get a BeOS system set up. I've read a bit into the manuals, apparently some versions just installed with Windows and others were main installs? I would want the second, as I want a dedicated BeOS system. Anyone around here have experience with it?

As for Haiku, if I am reading it right, is for semi-modern/modern machines, as it apparently can run on something as slow as 400MHz? What would be a good machine to install that on?
 
I tried Haiku once and it ran perfectly snappy on my piddly little 1.6GHz Atom machine with 1GB RAM. I dunno how it does on slower machines, though.
 
BeOS was fairly snappy on a Pentium II or late era Pentium (200 MHz+). Dual socket machines are preferred; I think Be's Intel based developer systems had something like dual Pentium-133s. Though this depends on what you are used to. If you run DOS + Win 3 off a multi-gigabyte RAM disk on a current higher end CPU, nothing old will come close to feeling reasonable.

For Haiku, late period Pentium III or newer is probably a good baseline. It seemed a little slower than the BeOS on equivalent hardware. I haven't tried it on systems manufactured within the last 5 years but a Core2 should be a good fit. Really new systems want to be run in 64bit mode and would be rather wasteful dropping back into the limits of Haiku.
 
The BeOS (4?) disk that I have you can install either way...from within Windows or you can boot off the CD straight into the installer.
 
I'm sure once you have actually done the Windows install when running BeOS PE there is an option to do a virgin install on a clean hdd. I can recall doing this on my Celeron 400 at on at least on occasion and booting directly off the BeOS hdd.
 
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