Installation Guide

Preparing a Partition for Haiku

Currently, Haiku cannot resize existing partitions; therefore, you either need to already have an empty partition where you can install Haiku, or you need to create one using a third party tool. If your current OS comes with a partitioning tool, try to use that. Otherwise, you can use specialized tools like the freely available GParted LiveCD. A standard 32-bit install of Haiku requires about 1.3 GiB of disk space (64-bit install is about double), so the partition doesn't need to be huge. However, you may want to leave some room for 3rd party applications, so 3+ GiB is the recommended partition size.

Whenever your disk has multiple partitions, you will also need a boot loader such as GRUB to be able to boot into Haiku (and any other systems that you may have installed in the remaining partitions). In some cases, it is also possible to use the Haiku Boot Manager.

Let's Start the Installation!

Insert the Haiku Installer CD into your CD-ROM drive or pop in the prepared installation USB drive and power up your system. You may have to enter the computer's BIOS to set the boot order.

Note that the Installer will take no steps to integrate Haiku into an existing boot manager menu. The Haiku partition itself will be made bootable, though. From the Tools menu you can choose Set up boot menu that starts the BootManager to put a menu in the boot sector to choose what operating system to boot.
BootManager still has a few restrictions that it will complain about if they aren't met: the menu can only be installed on your first harddisk and there has to be a 2 KiB space after the Master Boot Record (MBR).
You don't need to run BootManager if you already use a bootmanager like Grub, in which case you have to add Haiku manually, or Haiku runs exclusively on your machine. The BootManager panel will guide you through installing or uninstalling the boot menu.

Please see below for how you can add Haiku to an existing GRUB installation or how to use the CD to boot into a Haiku installation without adding it to the boot manager.

Adding Haiku to GRUB

If you have GRUB already installed, you can add Haiku to its boot menu. Depending on what version of GRUB you use, this is done differently.

GRUB 1

Configure your /boot/grub/menu.lst by launching your favorite editor from a Terminal like this:

	sudo <your favorite text editor> /boot/grub/menu.lst

You'll note that GRUB uses a different naming strategy for hard drives than Linux. With GRUB it's: (hdN,n)

• All hard disks start with "hd".
• N is the hard disk number, starting with "0".
• n is the partition number, also starting with "0".
  The first logical partition always has the number "4", regardless of the number of primary partitions.

	# Haiku on /dev/sda7
	title		Haiku
	rootnoverify	(hd0,6)
	chainloader	+1

You can see the correct partition in GParted for example.

GRUB 2

Newer versions of GRUB use an extra configuration file to add custom entries to the boot menu. To add them to the top, you have to create/edit a file by launching your favorite editor from a Terminal like this:

	sudo <your favorite text editor> /etc/grub.d/40_custom

NOTE: While the naming strategy for hard disks is still as described under GRUB 1, the naming scheme for partitions has changed. GRUB's naming scheme is still: (hdN,n)

• All hard disks start with "hd".
• N is the hard disk number, starting with "0".
• n is the partition number, which for GRUB 2 starts with "1"
  With GRUB 2 the first logical partition always has the number "5", regardless of the number of primary partitions.

	# Haiku on /dev/sda7
	menuentry "Haiku" {
		set root=(hd0,7)
		chainloader +1
	}

You can see the correct partition in GParted for example.

Additionally you have to edit another file to actually display the boot menu:

	sudo <your favorite text editor> /etc/default/grub

Here you have to comment out the line "GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0" by putting a "#" in front of it in order to actually display the boot menu.

Finally, you have to update the boot menu by entering:

	sudo update-grub

Not using GRUB

If you use an other boot manager than GRUB, please consult its documentation on how to add a new operating system.

Boot using the CD

You can also use the boot CD to boot into your Haiku installation without adding it to a boot manager. To do so, hold SHIFT before the CD begins to load. This will bring up the Boot Loader Options.

First Boot

Once fully booted, you should be greeted by a screen like this:

Some background processing will still take place the first time you boot Haiku, so don't be alarmed by the disk activity. After a little while, the system should settle down. Make sure to read our Welcome documentation that is the default homepage of WebPositive, and go through the Quick Tour which is linked on the Desktop.

Have fun and thanks a lot for trying out Haiku! We hope you'll like it! If you run into what you believe to be a bug, please file a report in our bug tracker. Before filing a bug report, please take the time to quickly check if your issue has already been reported; it if has, then please add a comment if you have additional information, like how to reproduce the problem. If the issue hasn't been reported before, create a new ticket and provide as many useful details as you can.