BeOS Ramblings

I obtained some more blank CDs, but I couldn't obtain a wired mouse (of either type - PS2 or USB). This let me burn BeOS Max 4.1, and realise that Haiku B3 is marginally too big for a CD and needs a DVD. I could just have used blank DVDs for the blank CD needs in the first place, something I didn't think of on Friday night From Haiku, with its partition manager that can actually do complicated tasks (Zeta comes with a deliberately crippled Paragon partition manager to let you resize a Windows partition, but do little else); I created specific partitions for Haiku, Zeta and hopefully R5 if I can bodge it in to working. Haiku works well - VESA graphics, but fully working sound, network, USB and so on. Max doesn't boot, even with all safe mode options on - it is definitely using the RAM limiting bootloader; but I'm not sure I've got the right hacked up kernel installed.  I'll get a wired mouse tomorrow (and maybe a PS2 one too); and see if Zeta will work that way.

Lets ignore that Zeta's ever existence was quite odd! I recently recovered a HP xw4600 workstation from the WEEE cage in work (well, I just didn't put it in instead) with the intention of trying to beat BeOS R5 on to it.  This machine is from 2009, which is very new for R5, but many of us were still using R5 in 2006 on contemporary hardware so its not too much of a stretch. But R5 definitely won't work out of the box - SSE2 processors seem to cause some trouble that requires kernel patching, the dual 3Ghz CPUs will cause severe clock problems without a further fiddling; and the 4GB of RAM will stop booting without a hacked bootloader to limit visible RAM. And I sort of need a decently working BeOS system to actually build such an image from in the first place. So, to Zeta. I've got a "legit" - as in its a real CD - copy of this which I was given by magnussoft in return for building VLC for Zeta; but I can't find it. ISOs are not hard to find.  Its from 200