Exact guide for installing Haiku 6 on 2012 Mac Mini 6,1 with a hi-def monitor

Carl

This is an exact step-by-step guide for installing and running Haiku 6 beta on a Mac Mini Late 2012, also known as Mac Mini 6,1 with an Intel i5 processor and using it with a high resolution monitor. We will use the old boot manager rEFIt to do it. My monitor is a 2160p Philips 4K display connected through HDMI.

You might have to delete all data on the machine to follow this guide.

This is how it looks from the front:

This is how it looks from the back:

Before you start

Messing with Haiku on an old Mac should just be done for entertainment. If you want to do something productive, there are many better options.

SSD Drive

Your Mac Mini works much better with a modern SSD drive rather than the old HDD drive. This is a cheap and easy hardware upgrade and will give your machine a massive performance boost, no matter what system you use. If you just bought it second hand, it’s very likely to already have an SSD.

🚫 These things do not work with Haiku on the 2012 Mac Mini and can’t be fixed:

🛜 WiFi. You need to use an ethernet cable, or you can purchase a TP-Link TL-WN725N Nano USB Wireless N adapter, which works great and is cheap.
🔊 Sound will not work at all.
ᛒ Bluetooth does work with the Logitech K380 keyboard. Not with Microsoft mouse and not with bluetooth speakers. Launching the Bluetooth service in Haiku will not work.
🖥️ Native graphic card driver. The fallback framebuffer is what we will use instead.

The development pace of Haiku is slow. The things above will likely never be fixed.

What you need

A 16GB USB thumb drive. Take care that the drive is of good quality. Fishing up an old pen drive from your drawer can lead to a lot of frustration if it is corrupted.
💻 Preferably another computer to use for flashing the OS installer to the pen drive, and for referencing this guide.
⌨️ A wired USB keyboard (or a Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard)
🐀 A wired USB mouse (or a Logitech Pebble Bluetooth mouse)
⚡ Optional: A Thunderbolt Mini Display Port to Display Port cable for full 4K resolution. Otherwise you can use a HDMI cable. Ugreen has an excellent cable for this.

Let’s get started!

1 Stage: Prepare within MacOS

We will use the rEFIt boot manager to dual-boot Haiku and MacOS X.
rEFIt doesn’t work if the computer has a MacOS X version later than Mavericks. If your machine has a more modern OS, you have to downgrade.

(If needed) Downgrade your MacOS from Internet Recovery

⚠️ This will nuke all your data on the machine.

Reboot the computer and hold Command + Shift + Alt + R to enter Internet recovery mode. It will first show you a spinning grey globe. It takes a long time, so be patient. If it fails, try again. Note: Only holding Command + R is wrong and will not enter Internet recovery mode. You might have to reboot the machine several times to finally enter Internet recovery mode.
If you only have WiFi and no ethernet, it will ask you to connect to a network.
Once inside Internet recovery mode, start the Disk Utility tool to wipe MacOS from your local drive. Select the drive and “Erase”.
After this, you will be able to install OS X Mountain Lion on your drive. If it refuses, that means you skipped step 3.
Before moving on with installing Haiku, feel free to upgrade Mountain Lion to Mavericks, following the easy instructions given from Mavericks Forever: https://mavericksforever.com

Making a Haiku partition

Open Disk Utility in MacOS X
Select your local drive and then the tab “Partition”. Make a new partition with the + button, and give it a nice name that you will remember. You can select FAT as the filesystem.
This process should be fast.

Installing the rEFIt boot manager

Download Refit from Softpedia and install it: https://mac.softpedia.com/get/System-Utilities/rEFIt.shtml
You have to reboot your machine 2 or 3 times before the rEFIt menu starts working. It will show up after that every time you boot your Mac.

Preparing the Haiku installer thumb drive

We will use balenaEtcher to flash the Haiku iso file to a thumb drive. That thumb drive will be used to install Haiku.

Version 1.5.63 of balenaEtcher works with Mavericks and can be downloaded from here on GitHub: https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/releases/download/v1.5.63/balenaEtcher-1.5.63.dmg
You can also use another computer to make the thumb drive, if you prefer.
Download the Haiku R6 installer iso image file from here: Get Haiku! | Haiku Project or from the big yellow button on the Haiku home page. The correct file for your Mac Mini is the x86_64 version.
Open balenaEtcher from MacOS and click the blue button “Flash from file”. Select the haiku…anyboot.iso that you downloaded.
Click the button “Select target” and select your USB Thumb drive.
Click the “Flash” button. It should only take a couple of minutes to flash and validate.
Once it is done, click “Ignore” on the alert pop-up saying the disk was not readable.

2 Stage: Install Haiku from thumb drive

Now we are ready to install!

Insert the USB thumb drive if it isn’t already inserted.
Reboot your computer from MacOS
The rEFIt boot menu will show up. Highlight the Haiku ESP boot option.
IMPORTANT As soon as you press enter, start hammering SHIFT and SPACEBAR and keep hammering them until you are shown a MS-DOS looking screen saying “Welcome to the Haiku Boot Loader”
Select safe mode options → Fail safe graphics driver. Select it.
Return to the main boot menu and select “Continue booting”.
The Haiku logo will show, and the gray icons will become colorized as Haiku proceeds to boot.
You will first be shown a license window to OK and then be asked to try or install Haiku. Click "Install".
An alert saying “No partitions have been found etc” will show up. Click “OK”.
Click the button “Set up partitions”
Select the partition you made before with the nice name that you could remember.
Select Partition → Format → Be File System from the menu or from right clicking the partition. It will be fast. Do not begin the installation yet!
Select Tools → Install EFI Loader from the menu. This step is important. If you don’t do it, the Haiku boot loader will ask you to select a boot partition every time.
Now you can click the “Begin” button to begin your Haiku installation.

After the installation is finished, you will reboot your computer, remove the thumb drive, and boot into Haiku from rEFIt.

Remember that you have to hammer SHIFT and SPACE BAR every time you boot into Haiku and select “Fail safe graphics” until you’ve fixed the graphics in the next step.

3 Stage: After installation graphics fix

You now have two ways of booting Haiku from your Mac Mini with rEFIt. Either through EFI or through Legacy Mode. The difference is which graphics driver will be used, and EFI is much better for a high resolution display.

What we expect:

After booting into your fresh Haiku installation from EFI, your screen resolution should be 1920 x 1080 with 24bit color through HDMI output. Or 2560 x 1440 24 bit through Thunderbolt Display Port output.
Click Deskbar → Preferences → Screen to see if it says “framebuffer”. It will not be possible to change the screen resolution or any other screen settings. If it doesn’t say “framebuffer” it means you have booted into Legacy Mode, and your resolution will probably be 1280 x 720. You can proceed to the next step anyway.

Make Fail Safe Graphics permanent in Haiku (easier than it sounds)

“boot” is what the partition you have installed Haiku onto is called, even if you have given it a name of your own.

Go to the folder boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/ and
Open the file called “kernel” by double clicking it.
Remove the # symbol in front of the line that says fail_safe_video_mode true
Save the file. Do not remove any other # symbols.

That’s it! No more hammering SHIFT and SPACEBAR every time you boot.

4 Stage: Some post-installation improvements

Improving Legacy Mode graphics
This is not necessary if you prefer to always boot in EFI mode.

Boot Haiku into Legacy Mode from rEFIt. Remember to smash SHIFT and SPACEBAR
Click the Deskbar menu and select Preferences → Screen
Make any change, it doesn’t matter. For example change the color bits per pixel.
Click “Apply”
The next time you boot Haiku in Legacy Mode you will have more resolution options in the Screen preferences. Not all of them will work.
The max resolution I could get in Legacy Mode was 1600 x 900 with 24bit color.

Fixing font antialias
This is not necessary if you use Haiku at your monitors native resolution.

Click the Deskbar menu and select Preferences → Appearance
Select the tab Antialiasing → Antialiasing type → Grayscale

Software Update
Just for good measure run the software update from Applications → Software Update

Carl

This guide is exact as to my personal experience, having recently bought a second hand Mac Mini for. If anybody is having any problems or issues, feel free to ask in this thread. Or if you would like for me to test something specifically on the 2012 Mac Mini.

Any suggestions on improving the guide is of course appreciated. If you know how to take a screenshot from the boot manager or a screenshot of an open menu in Haiku, please let me know.

Atomozero

Carl This guide is exact as to my personal experience

You've done a fantastic job. I wonder how we could work on identifying the weak points of the drivers for these machines to improve their development. These are extremely interesting machines; I actually own three of them because I used to use them in the office.

Carl

Atomozero Thank you very much! And good question. I'm waiting for delivery of a USB WiFi adapter that some people have said will work for this setup. If this works, then the remaining problems would be audio and display driver. Well especially audio since the framebuffer is pretty ok to use.

Kevin

Thanks for sharing!

Carl

🛜 WiFI Update:

TP-Link TL-WN725N Nano USB Wireless N adapter works very well with Haiku 6 on the 2012 Mac Mini and can be purchased for cheap on Amazon or somewhere else. I would like to update the guide if possible. Note: It has a max speed of 150 Mbps.

Atomozero

Carl Just out of curiosity, do you see the edit post button?

Carl

Atomozero No, it's only visible for a short while after I have posted anything. Maybe there's a time limit?

Atomozero

Carl
I can't today, but I'll look into it tomorrow. It's weird

Kevin

Atomozero I am also unable to edit my posts

Atomozero

Carl It was set so you could edit it until someone replied. Now I've changed it so you can always edit your own post.

clasqm

So just by relpying you could stop an edit and expose someone's blunders for eternity? That is just EEEEVIL!

Carl

Atomozero Thank you very much!

⚡️Display update

Haiku R6 works great in 4K resolution 60hz on the 2012 Mac Mini with a Thunderbolt Mini Display Port -> Display Port cable. Using the framebuffer. The OS adapts the size of all elements perfectly, so everything is crisp and correctly sized. Graphics performance are just as good as on lower resolutions.

Note: There is some kind of graphics glitch where one pixel wide line of every window border becomes transparent at high resolutions.

clasqm

This is a very high-quality post, but like all forum posts it will eventually bubble downwards on the list and be forgotten. Sure, you can search, but only if you already know that it is there.

I would like to suggest the following change to the Forum (without knowing if the software can handle it, so adapt as necessary)

Create a new category. For the sake of argument let's just call it Tutorials. This category is not directly selectable by members. Articles worth keeping are copied in there by the forum manager(s). In the case of this one only Carl's original post and his direct follow-ups would be copied there, without all our side-tracks about editing posts etc etc

I know, it's yet another thing for the manager(s) to do. But It is a way to preserve valuable information.

So we write as usual. If a post is of high quality, likely to be of long-term interest, and generally useful, it is copied into Tutorials (copied, not moved) and discussion continues in the original post.

And we can always politely suggest that management should consider preserving a specific post ...

Carl

clasqm Thank you very much!

But wouldn't this category "Getting started" already fit very well for tutorials and such? For me, I'm happy if people can find the guide with a Google or Kagi search, or if their AI assistants can use the information. I would guess that most people would do a web search first rather than looking at forum lists.

Right now this guide is very prominent since it's the only thread in this forum category 😉

Also, if anybody wants to take my guide or just parts of it and use it for an article or blog post, please feel free!

Carl

Update: I can confirm that the Logitech Pebble M350 Bluetooth mouse works very well with Haiku R6 on the 2012 Mac Mini, using the Bluetooth USB-A dongle which comes included with the mouse.