BeOS Ramblings

A semi-sensible way to upgrade an ancient Mac to faster/quieter/larger (the drive I had was 2GB, partitioned for MacOS 8.6 and BeOS at that) storage is to use a SCSI2SD device, which allows you to access the file system from a compatible OS with an SD reader, swap "disks" (cards), and so on. But one of these is $98, plus whatever shipping and possibly taxes I'd get hit for; and while its tested with a similar machine (the 6400) , it may not work on my 5400. Plus it'd be a bit more complicated to connect it internally, as the supplied HD in the 5400 is IDE - the CD is SCSI. But that IDE use gave me another option, both a lot cheaper and vastly quicker. One of the bigger European vendors of memory and storage products  is based a few miles from my house, and €22 got me a 32GB short-size 2.5" SATA SSD, and a SATA-PATA adapter; delivered to my office overnight (so the proximity to my house was sort of irrelevant then) This fits, or will fit when I put some anti stati

Two evenings spent wondering why neither wireless card in my laptop (Intel 2200 on-board, ORiNOCO Gold in the PCMCIA slot) would come up, despite having /dev/net entries; searching to find the source code (it appears they were closed source) so I could try step through it, and so on, lead to absolutely nothing. I knew the ORiNOCO was working as Windows 98SE could use it; but the 2200 is too new for it. Both had worked in BeOS before, but I replaced the ~12GB hard drive in this laptop with a 64GB SSD and started from scratch. After going as far as to re-seat the 2200, I decided to start from step one again to see if I'd messed something up. And I had. I'd never installed the net_server addons for either of them. About sixty lines of code that basically does nothing at all unless a card needs or allows advanced configuration; gone under BONE-based systems and yet entirely required to be able to set an IP or use DHCP. I'd also forgotten the Intel 2200 firmware; but with that i

 As mentioned at the end of the last post, I had no functioning spacebar on my only ADB keyboard After an absolutely disgusting cleaning job, I now have a semi-functioning spacebar. But I still want to replace the keyboard. In Ireland, we use UK layout keyboards - not that there's as much change on Apple layouts - but this generally means finding one domestically or in the UK on eBay. The latter location is now dear and complicated since customs changes in January; and the former suffers from the comparatively low use of Macs in the 1990s - they may have been made here, but schools couldn't afford them so they were rarely seen outside of publishing and audio production. I have someone searching their even older stuff looking for any spares they have, plus multi-button mice; but I'm not holding out much hope on a result there. Another option would be the USB Wombat , which is currently out of stock, and a bit of a mess needing a USB hub for two devices and realistically the

My elderly Mac came to me with a Farallon branded DEC 21041 10Mbit ethernet card, which weirdly was not configured in the absolutely borked MacOS 8.5 that was installed on it; but *was* supported by BeOS. And, eventually, by MacOS when I got it upgraded to 8.6 and located drivers for it. Finding drivers for a 1997 network card in 2004 wasn't particularly easy - I can't imagine it'd be practical now at all! This card has since died. It does not show up in MacOS and hangs BeOS hard seconds after boot if it is installed. Before I did any proper investigation in to what cards BeOS PPC supports, I dug around my office parts bins for whatever was available in the way of antique components, and I managed to find an original - and Made In Ireland just like my Mac was - 3Com 3C905TX - 5V PCI card that would definitely work in BeOS Intel, and also a much newer Reatek 8139D card which I believe just needs a device ID hex-edit to work on Intel.  On booting the machine with the 3Com in

Long gone are the days where all my computers ran BeOS primarily, except maybe a modern Mac laptop.  These days, my main machine is a Lenovo Yoga which is unlikely to even run Haiku well - touchscreen, screen position sensor, legacy-free, etc etc... I should probably try sometime but I don't hold out hope. I mainly run R5 in emulation on my work laptop - it has significantly more grunt, as a quad i5 rather than a dual i3 in the Yoga - in Virtualbox using this guide , but I do have two real machines My x86 machine is a Dell Latitude C600 which has been upgraded about as far as it can go - it has a 1Ghz Pentium III Mobile, 512MB RAM, a 64GB SSD, an Intel 2200 miniPCI wifi card (which is too new for Windows 98SE, the other OS on this) and a 1600x1200 screen.  There's not even 2D graphics acceleration - although I think a driver ID hack might make this work somewhat as its Rage Pro based; and no sound driver for the onboard ESS Maestro sound.  But I have a PCMCIA soundcard with Be

BeOS browsing support is now probably at its worst level ever, more or less. The TLS Apocalypse , whereby the majority of secured websites dropped support for less than TLS1.2 has happened; and with most websites now required a secure session to use at all times, this means there's very little you can access with any browsers, including nearly all download sites should someone create a working browser. Even BeBytes  is out of reach. BeOS was never flush with browser options. On x86 you had: * Firefox or Mozilla Seamonkey, last updated for Firefox 3 / Seamonkey 1.9 of 2006 * Opera 3.6 of 1999 * NetPositive 2.2, included in the OS so theoretically from 2000 but with standards support more like 1996 * Netsurf 2, more updated but quite behind the others in capabilities There was also a beta Net+ "3", older than 2.2, with some very basic JavaScript support, and the otherwise identical Net+ in Dano, which had ssleay (a predecessor of OpenSSL) instead of licenced RSA SSL code As