BeOS Ramblings

So the Intel 1000 card is marginally too new to work, the Realtek 1000 PCI card has a known PCI ID bug that identifies it as an 8129  that I'm not even going to test the BeOS 8169 driver for, and the 10/100 Realtek cards are all newer, cost reduced chips and not "real" 8139s either. So instead I tried another identical Broadcom card - with identical problems So instead instead I reset the BIOS settings to default (except for then reinstated the SATA controller changes); and got a fully working network card again. Seperate to that, looking at the SATA settings, its clear that it will only emulate one IDE controller if using the combined mode as I am now. I do think that I'm now stuck using one SATA port and one port on the IDE controller; meaning I need to find an IDE DVD burner (something I had tens of in the past) and not try my SATA BD-RE drive.

Some slow messing around with this machine has got me a bit further along: * USB and storage working with USB.patches and the usb_scsi driver * An Audigy2 has been ordered from eBay * HLT is now enabled, so the processor fans are not running at full speed - but as I've no audio yet, I don't yet know if I need to do any of the workarounds require to stop it messing up audio So the PC is working, or will be, to a usable standard. But I decided to run BeRometer, and found out that the perception that its working fairly quickly is likely due to the lack of seek time on the SSD - its actually hideously slow. Copying a 608MB file from one partition on the disk to another took slightly over 8 minutes - and while this isn't an ideal disk I/O test, there's not a lot of others you can do. So sub 1MB/sec throughput on a SATA150 controller (the limiting factor in hardware here - the SSD is SATA600). But low throughput has to be expected, as when BeOS R5 came out, ATA33 was the newe

Some months ago, I was trying to force BeOS, or some derivative thereof, on to a somewhat too new for it HP xw4600 workstation It didn't work. Having since dug up some PS/2 peripherals, I've now tried again using a HP dc7600 19" tower - not really high enough spec to call it a workstation, but a business machine none the less.  This came to market in Q2 2005, rather later than Be stopped providing driver updates but well within the community support era. Specs are, as obtained: Pentium D (P4 Dualcore) 2.8Ghz 512MB DDR2 40GB Maxtor SATA hard drive (I think this is a transfer from an older, failed PC it replaced - I'm also surprised to see SATA that small!) Soundblaster Audigy SE PCI sound card Onboard Broadcom 5751 gigabit network card 8x USB2 ports (6 rear, 2 front) Intel HDA audio DVD-ROM (no burner - rare in 2005 but businesses often specced these out for data loss reasons) PS/2 ports Serial port Parallel port Out of the box, well, after telling the BIOS to ignore th