BeOS under Bochs
I’ve been playing with the BeOS a little recently. Unfortunately, it’s starting to get a little long in the tooth: It won’t support the i810(?) graphics in the Pentium2 on my desk at uni, and apparently it won’t boot on CPUs with the latest SSE-type extensions.
The plan instead is to boot it under Bochs and use it there. It seems like “BeOS 5 Personal Edition” (the free one) must be booted (initially at least) using a floppy disk and a system image on the hard disk, in the partition of a host operating system (either Gnu/Linux or Windows). So far, I’ve created a 700mb disk image, and a single partition on it formatted as ext2 (this tutorial on creating disk images using the loopback device is incredibly informative). Into this partition, I copied the ~500mb BeOS image (“image.be”). I now expect to be able to use Bochs to boot a combination of this disk image and the floppy image from BeOS5-PE. We shall see how that goes…