Linked by Tarmo Hyvärinen on Thu 5th Feb 2004 20:41 UTC
Lindows.com offered LindowsOS Developer Edition free for one day, GoogleDay (Whatever that is, I don't know, google's birthday perhaps?) so I decided to test it. My favorite distribution this far has been (and still is) Slackware Linux, which has always, well, just worked. I've been using Linux for some years now, I use Solaris at work (I work as software designer). Trying out Lindows after Slackware was totally different world, and here's some of my toughts after trying out Lindows.
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If I am not mistaken, BeOS dynamically detects hardware and loads appropriate drivers on every boot, but it does it fast enough to go from POST to desktop in 15 seconds or so (I'm sure everyone's heard the "I took a HDD with BeOS on it out of one computer, stuck it in another, and the OS booted with out so much as a complaint or 'New Hardware Found' wizard"
In general BeOS does not try to load drivers for nonexistent hardware - but this is in part dictated by various system servers. For instance Media Server will check what kind of audio and video capture devices are present and then try to load the appropriate driver - if the exact match is not found then the next best driver is tried or the server disables its services. I suppose kernel provides info on what kind ow hardware there is - you can sure see in in the Devices Preferences app.
The same trick happens with the App server and input server.
All in all pretty neat - I tried BeOS on a newer AMD system and it detected my soundcard, graphics and video capture card perfectly - without saying anything of course, as there is no concept of "device detection dialogs".