I read on OSnews about the alpha release of Haiku. It’s been several years since I installed BeOS the last time so I decided to try Haiku.

I first tried it on virtualbox but I didn’t get the networking to work flawlessly so I decided to install it on libvirt. I expected quite a hassle but it was done in a whissle.

First download the raw image of Haiku and run something like:

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sudo virt-install --name="Haiku" --ram=512 --hvm --accelerate --import --file=/media/second_disk/vm-images/haiku-r1alpha1.image --vnc --bridge=virbr0

Next I had to edit the Haiku libvirt xml to change the default nic model.  I always stop the libvirt service just to be sure. Then edit this file: /etc/libvirt/qemu/Haiku.xml

Make sure the nic looks something like:

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<interface type='bridge'>
<mac address='54:52:00:6a:14:17'/>
<source bridge='virbr0'/>
<model type='e1000'/>
</interface>

I first tried the rtl8139 interface but that isn’t supported by Haiku :s A list of possible interfaces can be found on the libvirt website.

I can now access it via vnc. But Ubuntu has some kind of bug in the vnc client of virt-viewer so it is sllooooooowwwww…