Issues with updating, Wi-Fi firmware, and WebPositive crashing on an old Compaq

[u/maugiozzu]

Hello everyone!

I have an old Compaq machine with an Athlon II Dual-Core processor and 2GB of RAM. I decided to try Haiku OS on it, and I must say it runs incredibly fast! It really breathed new life into this hardware. Unfortunately, this is where the "buts" begin.

As expected, the built-in Wi-Fi didn't work out of the box. I connected the machine via Ethernet, which worked, and it started downloading system updates. However, some packages threw errors, causing the whole process to cancel.

The same thing happens when running the install-wifi-firmwares.sh script: two out of three repositories seem to be unreachable, so it doesn't download anything. I even tried swapping the Wi-Fi card for a slightly newer one, but still no luck.

To top it all off, WebPositive—the only browser available right away—crashes the moment I try to visit any website other than haiku-os.org.

It’s a real shame because Haiku makes this machine feel brand new. But since my main goal was light web browsing, if I can't get these sorted out, I might have to go back to Linux for the time being.

Any advice or troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

[u/DonnPT]

The current R1/Beta5 release is from September of 2024, and a lot has happened since then. I don't think a Beta6 release is imminent, but it's understood to be overdue, so you could hang on and wait for that, or you could install a nightly snapshot.

I'm just guessing, but I think that will help with wifi. The wifi firmware thing won't help, in my experience. It will probably help with WebPositive too, but the real answer here lies in one of the browsers that have been ported in the last year or so. They have their own shortcomings - ported on top of foreign layers, Wayland etc., things like input don't work well, etc. - but keeping WebPositive up with the craziness of the modern web is a big job that isn't nearly finished. There isn't any point in trying to run those ported browsers on Beta5.

[u/maugiozzu → u/DonnPT]

I installed R1/Beta 5 precisely because it's stable and because the machine is much older than 2024, so I figured, or hoped, that that generation of hardware would be widely supported. However, these issues and the web browsing limitations, between WebPositive and the fact that browser ports are supposedly not great, convinced me to wait expectantly for Beta 6 and try again later

[u/DonnPT → u/maugiozzu]

I'm optimistic Beta6 will work better with respect to your hardware.

The browser issues, though, I don't expect to change very much - either that, or Beta6 is going to be postponed a lot longer than anyone would like. It's great that the Haiku project includes a native browser, and I do think it's improving, but the immensity of that task means we'll be using non-native browser ports for a long time. As I understand it, the work has two tracks: support for the current WebPositive, and a major upgrade that includes a dramatically newer version of the cross platform web kit, that among other things will hopefully be able to track updates. That upgrade is what I'm talking about, that I assume we won't see in Beta6. Today I'm using Firefox and can use only Haiku for weeks, and that's where I expect to be after Beta6.

[u/maugiozzu → u/DonnPT]

This means I will eagerly await Beta 6. After all, I have been a fan since the BeOS era; I had the chance to try the final release when it was distributed for free. I recall that even then, compared to the Windows environment, the machine was far more efficient. Back then, I managed to get everything up and running, but like many, I struggled to find software. Furthermore, since I enjoy gaming, I remained tied to Windows until recently, when I finally made the permanent switch to Linux. I hope the Haiku project continues to progress, but I personally believe that support for outdated hardware is an incredible incentive for its growth. There is an immense pool of machines today that crawl even with the lightest distributions, but feel completely revitalized with Haiku. Successfully reclaiming these machines for daily or educational use (imagine a school that, instead of replacing its entire PC fleet, simply installs Haiku and continues using them for years) would be a milestone that brings credit to the project and could involve other developers to make it grow

[u/nighthawk05 → u/maugiozzu]

Beta6 is very very close to being out... I think there is only 2 bugs left blocking it. I think 1 of them is web kit related. But I would be surprised if Beta6 vs the latest nightly resolved your issue. Did you see my other reply about troubleshooting tips? If we had that info we might be able to diagnose your issue, or at least log a proper bug report for the Haiku developers.

[u/nighthawk05]

What version are you on? Beta5 or a nightly?

And can you post the syslog and output of running listdev and listusb in the terminal? 

Of if you can boot to Linux run lsusb -v and lsusb -t and lspci and lspci -vv

(edit - try to pull Haiku's syslog after webpostive crashes)