Haiku OS GRUB2 menu entry

Haiku is the current continuation of the old discontinued BeOS system. I had the BeOS installation CD a long time ago and played with it a little when it came out. It didn’t catch on and sort of fizzled out. But lived on as an open-sourced Haiku.

I was surprised to find Haiku as a form of BeOS still hanging around the internet. I have been curious about the various OS that have been developed and how the usability of the different OS compared against the big giant Microsoft and the interesting Linux OS.

The development of Haiku meant it has better support for newer hardware. Even so, it still failed to run on some of my old PC. I think the main issue is the compatibility with graphic GPU chips. Sometimes I have installed it on a PC and it worked and when I moved the same PC to my TV it would hang. And on some old PC, the live CD wouldn’t boot at all.

As for using Haiku OS, for me it is still experimental and not something that I would use seriously. More of a curiosity and to see how far the open-source community could get it to a very usable state. And as a challenge as part of my super multi booting computer!

To install Haiku OS side-by-side for dual / multi booting with Linux, I set aside about 20GB. I should have checked Haiku OS website before allocating. Now come to think of it the storage space that I have allocated was a tad too generous as it needed about 2GB. So a 5GB to 10GB would have sufficed.

The Haiku OS bootloader should be installed in its own partition so that it should avoid messing up the MBR and be able to boot when GRUB2 chainloads to it. Issuing the ‘update-grub’ terminal command would not work as it would not be able to detect this OS. Thus a manual entry would be necessary.

The GRUB2 menu entry is very simple:

menuentry 'Haiku OS' {
   set root=(hd0,x)
   chainloader +1
}

Where x is the partition number of where Haiku OS was installed. If you have set it up on another harddrive, then change hd0 to hd1, hd2, etc depending on which hard disk that you have it setup.

Edit the ‘40_custom’ file located in the /etc/grub.d/ folder.

After editing it, issue the ‘update-grub’ terminal command to update the grub.cfg file to include this menu entry.

Reboot Linux and see if the menu entry would boot up your Haiku OS!

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