Experiences in emulating BeOS in OSX

Update: it is probably a much better to look at the official Haiku wiki for more up-to-date information.

A couple of nights ago I decided that it was time to see if I could get BeOS to work on my iBook (it worked but it was very slow). The only way I could get it to work was with emulation. I found the information on various places on the Internet but I forgot to note down where I found it from so I am recreating it here (so that at least I don’t forget how it was done).

For now I am trying to use just the simple BeOS 5 Personal Edition.

• Download the BeOS R5 Personal Edition for Linux from BeBits
• Extract the file that you just downloaded and if you want to, place image.be and floppy.img somewhere
• Install qemu which is a PC emulator. I installed it from http://stegefin.free.fr/qemu/qemu.dmg as suggested on the Haiku Wiki

At this point, you should open up a Terminal window and cd to the location where image.be and floppy.img are. Both files are needed to get BeOS PE to run and so the following should be typed:

qemu -fda floppy.img -hda image.be -boot a -m 128 -user-net

# -fda floppy.img
# The floppy disk is floppy.img

# -hda image.be
# The hard disk is image.be

# -boot a
# Boot from drive a

# -m 128
# Provide 128 meg of memory

# -user-net
# Creates a private network (?)

After a while BeOS will be running in greyscale. Either I would have to enable the safe video mode everytime I booted BeOS or I would have to use one of the pieces of software on BeBits to force the video mode. I couldn’t get the network to work so I was stuck with the problem of how to transfer files to BeOS. I tried to make a dmg but it didn’t work so in the end I made a CD image using the following command:

hdiutil makehybrid -o stuff_for_beos.iso -iso DIRECTORY

At that point the CD image can be passed to qemu by adding -cdrom ISONAME to the qemu command:

qemu -fda floppy.img -hda image.be -cdrom stuff_for_beos.iso -boot a -m 128 -user-net