Haiku VMware Drivers

17 Nov 2012, 17:07 PST

Who could not like BeOS?

Haiku Alpha 4 was recently released, to the excitement of everyone. Or, at least those of us that maintain a strong sense of nostalgia for pervasive multithreading and yellow window tabs.

If you feel the urge to satiate your nostalgia by hacking on Haiku under VMware, you'll find that the current alpha does not fully support the VMware SVGA display, or mouse integration. One solution would be to use VirtualBox, which has first-class Haiku support mainlined into their repository. Unfortunately, at least from my experience, VirtualBox does not have first-class Mac OS X support, and tends to crash my machine.

Fortunately, however, there are actually VMware mouse and display drivers in the Haiku repository; you can either build and install these into your existing installation, or you can build a custom installation image including the drivers -- it only takes a few minutes to build the full OS.

To build a custom image, follow the directions provided in the Building Haiku documentation to configure your checkout and build the standard cross toolchain. Once that's done, you'll need to create a build/jam/UserBuildConfig file and add the following lines:

AddDriversToHaikuImage graphics : vmware ;
AddFilesToHaikuImage system add-ons input_server filters : vmware_mouse ;
AddFilesToHaikuImage system add-ons accelerants : vmware.accelerant ;

If you build a normal image as documented in Compiling Haiku for x86, the in-kernel and userspace VMware drivers will be included. Note, however, that without full guest additions, enhanced guest features will not be available: window resizing will not automatically adjust the guest resolution, copy+paste will not be functional, shared folders are not supported, etc.