BeOS MaxEdition 3-beta1 is released (260 MB). This distribution of BeOS, based on BeOS 5 PE, has support for more hardware than the normal BeOS 5.0.3, including support for P4s and new AthlonXPs. Burning the booting image is a bit more involved than usual, as it is not a plain ISO image, so please read the readme file before burning the file. Elsewhere, there is a new donation project to help get OpenOffice ported over to the BeOS.
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This is barely related to the topic, but...
What's the Java support on BeOS like? Are any JVMs supported and if so, what version? I may just give BeOS a second look (I tried it way back in 4.0 days, when you could install it to a Fat32 partition alongside Windows) if it has decent Java support, I want my software "ported" to as many platforms as I reasonably can.
No JVM is supported.
Zeta might have some support for the "Personal Java", just to run some applets and stuff, that was just some work Be has done because of their Internet Appliance project.
But talking about "real" Java, there is none.
For more info on what BeOS has and what it lacks, read here:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3809
This Beta doesn't like usb mouse & keyboard :p
Let's hope this will Change in the final as I don't want to go back to my old PS2 mouse when my Explorer or my wireless Logitech work really fine on any BeOS
I'll probably donate something, even if the outcome looks doubtful - it's something BeOS needs desperately. A lot of people criticize OpenOffice as "bloated" and "slow", but feature-wise it's certainly better than many of the alternatives. The OpenOffice.org homepage posted a link to a nice article that compares it (favorably) to MSOffice:
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/magazine/technical/openofficewrite...
Yes it would be quite "alien" to BeOS, but relatively few BeOS fans complain about Mozilla. It doesn't look like Gobe Productive 3 will be a possibility, and AbiWord is far too spartan unless all you need to do is write letters. Need it be said that besides a good browser, a capable office suite is essential for an OS you don't have to reboot out of frequently.
OpenOffice looks like it has a future, and may garner a more substantial user-base than most other Office-alternatives. If you don't need this many features in an office suite, you don't have to use it, but many people actually DO. It doesn't make the extra features "useless, unnecessarily confusing bloat".
I'm completely ignorant of matters like "root-less X servers", but does anyone know if the challenge refers to a port using X, similar to what was done for the MacOSX port? (I read that changes in Zeta will improve the possibilities for such a port?)
Even an attempt to port OpenOffice certainly deserves more visibility in the BeOS community, so I'm certainly glad OSNews mentioned this!
The person that said there is no Java in BeOS is wrong. There is the Kaffe JVM for BeOS. I think it supports Java 1.1. Its not much, but I used it for all of my data structures assignments this last semester for school. You can get it at www.bebits.com.
Also, the PE of BeOS still installs in a 512M folder on a FAT32 or NTFS partition.
Brennan
>The person that said there is no Java in BeOS is wrong
No, that person is not wrong.
I know about BeKaffe, I reported on it many years ago.
But the point is, BeKaffe is a _joke_ compared to real Java today. Hence, there is no real Java for BeOS. Plain and simple.
>Also, the PE of BeOS still installs in a 512M folder on a FAT32 or NTFS partition.
Not on all NTFS partitions. With WinXP and Win2k3 the NTFS fs has changed a bit and many users have reported problems. For some people it works, for some others doesn't.
I assume the answer is no but still I ask this question
Is there any driver for GF4 in BeOS Max v3?
>Is there any driver for GF4 in BeOS Max v3?
No. You will have to use VESA.
missing in this release are the athlon and p4 boot floppy images. does anyone know if they are actually needed still? i skimmed the readmes and changelogs and didnt see anything that pertained to this, but i might have missed it
Oph
I don't know who posted this but Java and OpenOffice are already officially sanctioned projects between Sun and beuntied.org.
If anyone wants to help work on OpenOffice you are welcomed to join the team at http://www.beunited.org under the develop link.
The Java project already has enough developers and is proceeding nicely.
Regards
Simon Gauvin,
President, beunited.org
But then, the fund that I cared about was a failure... and the company has so-called "come back..." Come back as what, no one can tell...
Well, if OpenOffice is already a project in development for BeOS then hopefully the donations will be an "extra" insentive for them to get it done faster 
I've been waiting for beunited to get this done for too long now. I'll throw in a couple bucks for the cause.
I like BeOS but I don't like this distro.
BTW Eugenia, I've noticed you've linked directly to the ISO image. This is actually a bit of a taboo as the more courteous thing to do is to link to the download page of the sight or similar. It allows them to provide mirrors from several locations and reduce the bandwidth on their main server.
After changing this, mod me down if you will.
Matthew, please don't take me for some kind of fool, there was a real reason why I did this. For me, and I suppose for many others, the Maxedition link from SF does NOT work. I emailed the author, and he can't seem to understand what the problem is, but thing is, I can download all apps from sourceforge, but for this app, I can't get linking no matter what mirror I try. I had to "reconstruct" the link by myself and that's why I link directly.
Takes me to the SF mirrors list for the file, they work properly.
they don't here. Here is my proof:
http://img.osnews.com/img/3820/max.jpg
And yes, this is happening for ALL mirrors that I try.
But these guys release something at least =)
Vesa driver not good enough for me, as long as I don't get proper gfx I stay off it =(.
Rumours say though that there is work being done right now on the GF4, that's why me curious if they had an early release of the driver or so...
Cheers!
missing in this release are the athlon and p4 boot floppy images. does anyone know if they are actually needed still? i skimmed the readmes and changelogs and didnt see anything that pertained to this, but i might have missed it
Athlon XP and P4 support have been intergrated for the setup. During installation you still can choose between P4 and AthlonXP kernels.
Leaving it to the default will work on all, but SMP. For Pentium SMP you have to choose the P4 kernel.
i have no idea what you people are talking about with the java, bekaffe worked the first time for me and phoenix or opera always see java pages just fine. i use beos to check my hotmail and stuff so... who cares. beos has pearl and php and everything you can think of. it runs a DOS prompt for christ's sake. i have an old unix emulator that is so old school that on a 1024*768 screen you cant even read the font. beos has no problem seeing ANY working hardware. key word is working. alot of beos users DO have USB mice, keyboards, printers cameras and yes even CDburners. who knows what you will acomplish once you actually try.
i have been installing beos from the MAX ed CD lately, sometimes it doesnt boot all the way on a pIII. this is what i do... first, get a CD called XBEOX from http://www.bebits.com that CD, thats what you will use for a sort of 'safe mode' k? ok so... the beos MAX ed will most likely take forever to install from its own "safe mode," watch the APM drivers, the Gif translators, and there might be a few other things that prevent beos from booting, oh... fast IDE disk controllers. cant use certain IDE controllers for some reason, donno... someone said that they had to use the built on one first then get it working then transfer it... ok so... no big deal, personally i use SCSI. ok so... basically what i am saying is... there hasnt been one PC ever that i havent been able to install beos onto using those 2 CDs. eventually, u can figure it out and if you look hard enough the programs to do what u need to do ARE actually out there. yeah, abbi word is bad, but who cares?!? MS would gladly sell you a version of MS word for BeOS if the demand was actually high enough. shoot... i bet the most complaining about BeOS comes from windows users anyways ;ppp
well... i dont want to start an arguement cause that's not cool... i use the following OS's: BeOS PE and MAX ed upgraded to whatever, mac OS9 (yes on a mac), amigaOS 3.0 (3.1 soon as i get an expander and the roms, or just start softkicking on boot again.), DOS, and um... no NT or linux actually. hehehe... beos is so good that it replaced anything that i could ever need to do with NT and unix so ;PPP
