I am one of those remaining BeOS addicts. I love the BeOS’ responsiveness, its short boot-up/shutdown times and its, well, overall feel. But no one can deny the fact: BeOS 5.0.x PE is getting old. Very old, with a kernel build-time of around May 2000.
Introduction
Of course that’s not the whole story. BeOS may be old, but it is not that much older than, say, Windows 2000. BeOS’ major problem is of course the lack of commercial support. Palm Inc has no interest in bringing BeOS back to the desktop and Be Inc itself has gone down (as far as I know).
So, now we are dependent on BeOS Max (and some others as well) and Yellowtab’s Zeta (leaving OpenBeOS out of this list on purpose; they are far from even beta stage). Well, that is not entirely true. There is another “player” on the BeOS team: PhosphurOS (PhOS). Simply put, PhOS is Zeta’s illegal counterpart. There is one notable difference though: Zeta is a (Be Inc approved-supposedly) distribution of “a” BeOS R6 Dan0 codebase, whereas PhOS is based on the 2002-leaked BeOS R6 “Dan0” release. As far as I know, PhOS is therefore, illegal.
I am not going deeper into the legality questions here, it is not my area of expertise. Feel free to correct me though. And, I am not interested in the “Yellowtab-does(n’t)-have-access-to-the-source-code” thing either (Nicholas explained the situation well recently), the purpose of this article is to simply introduce PhOS, to give you an idea of what it is.
Version/System
I am using PhosphurOS Beta 5, based on the BeOS kernel v5.2, with a kernel build-time of November 15th, 2001 (to be exact: 13:06:19).
Test system:
– AMD Athlon XP 1600+;
– 512 MB SDRAM;
– Ati Radeon 9000 with 128 MB DDR-RAM;
– CMI-8738 based 5.1 soundcard;
– MSI K7T Turbo2 mainboard;
– 40 GB harddisk (25.9 GB NTFS (Windows Server 2003); 7.3 GB BeFS (PhOS); 4.1 GB FAT32 (No OS))
– Standard ps/2 keyboard
– Microsoft Trackball Optical (USB)
Installation
Acquiring the PhOS .iso is not as easy as it seems; your best bet is to go the PhOS forum (http://beoseh.neo-programmers.com/forum/) and browse through the posts; you’ll find the appropriate .iso and the boot.img that fits your needs. Using a .cue you will be able to burn them onto a bootable CD-ROM.
PhOS’ install does not differ that much from, let’s say, BeOS Max’, they both use the well-known BeOS installer (in my experience, the easiest installer ever made). Only instead of “BeOS”, it now says “PhOS”, and the look of the tab is different (it is shiny now). Installation is straightforward; select partition, and start the install. That is all. One important note though: use the DriveSetup tool if you haven’t initialized your destination partition yet; PhOS will install over your old BeOS install without warning. Even though your system will still boot, you will encounter a number of hangs and crashes.
The install went, as you would expect from the BeOS installer, almost perfect. Exactly, almost perfect. There were a few messages (about three) about files being corrupted, but I told the installer to ignore the problem. Nothing seemed to be broken upon reboot. I already knew not to worry, the problem was addressed in the forum.
Almost all of my hardware was supported out-of-the-box (although a box was hard to find). Only my CMI-8738 did not work; this was easily repaired though, the correct drivers are available on BeBits.com.
First Impressions
Immediately upon reboot you will be surprised: you can select a username! Yes, PhOS is multi-user. Every user has their own desktop, and their own resolution. Menus are not personalized, though.
What I really like about PhOS (and Zeta has this functionality as well) are its themeing capabilities. Besides the four “standard” BeOS window decors, eight others are included. Custom decors can be made as well. Nice work.
The desktop itself is not all that different from the other BeOS distributions available; just the well-known Deskbar (for the people unfamiliar with BeOS: Deskbar is the equivelant of Windows’ start menu and task-bar), and familiar icons (trash, home and mounted volumes).
Daily Use
What immediately came to my attention was the poor choice of additional software; I missed a lot of my (read carefully: my) default BeOS applications: BePDF, CL-Amp, Seeker, BeMSN and, most notably, Beam. Of course installing applications in BeOS is as easy as 1-2-3, but that is not the point; these applications should be installed by default. Every modern OS needs PDF-support (however, Windows and PDF…?).
I find Seeker quite important as well (Windows Explorer-clone). Tracker is nice, but for advanced file-management, I simply prefer a file-tree. Beam is important as well, since I just cannot seem to get used to BeOS’ standard way of organizing email (via the file system). It makes no sense to me, but that’s probably just a matter of getting used to.
For browsing the internet NetPositive and MozillaFireFox (v 0.8) are included. NetPositive is over. The default BeOS browser is too old, too slow, and too simple. FireFox is, as we all know, a very capable browser. The only problem is that the build included in PhOS is too buggy; installing a more recent build will fix the problem. There is Flash-support, but not integrated into the browser; only a stand-alone Flash-player is installed. No IM clients are installed by default. I immediately installed BeMSN (can’t live without it).
Since BeOS was called the “multimedia” OS, it is of course interesting to see how well PhOS performs on this area. Playing DVD’s is a breeze; VLC (v 0.7) does the job quite well, but you’ll have to do with only stereo; I could not get 5.1 support. Too bad.
SoundPlay is included in order to play music files. SoundPlay is quite a capable application by itself, but the version included in PhOS (4.8.1) crashes when trying to load a music file. Also setting a different skin will crash the program (yes, some people actually care about that). A more recent version is unavailable. Too bad, again. And that is also why I whined about CL-Amp not being included; CL-Amp is a simple music player, but, as far as I know, it always works.
I already knew attempting to retrieve images from my Canon PowerShot S50 digital camera would be useless; I still gave the included “Camera” a chance though. It failed, Canon cameras were not on the “supported” list. It would be futile to test other BeOS image retrievers; I already gave them a chance when I was still running BeOS Max v3. Too bad, once more.
The greatest problem on BeOS is of course the lack of a decent office-suite; Gobe Productive is a decent piece of software, but, after checking out there website, I came to the conclusion that they do not offer Gobe Productive v2 anymore (it is included in Zeta, though). So, we are kind of forced to use AbiWord. No, there is no alternative. You will have to…. Well, you will first have to install it; AbiWord is not included in PhOS. Weird. The available version is an old one though… Version 1.0, while the most recent stable release is 2.0.6. Anyone interested in maintaining AbiWord for BeOS? Or even better, anyone interested in porting OpenOffice to BeOS? Please…? Spreadsheet functionality is available as well for BeOS (Sum-It), but, Sum-It also isn’t included in PhOS…
When it comes to stability and responsiveness, no one can beat BeOS/PhOS. The UI is so responsive, that it takes some getting used to when you come from a Windows or Linux world.
System Settings
Maintaining a BeOS system was easy. PhOS is no different; literally. A few changes here and there though; the most important one of course being BoneYard. Since PhOS uses BONE instead of net_server, the configuration tool is different as well. BoneYard is also easy to use, though.
Another addition to the “Preferences” menu is the “Control Panel”. Here, you can add/remove users, and switch between Development-kits (PhosphurOS/BeOS R5). The CP is far from finished though; it says: “It would appear I am STILL not doing ANYTHING cool here :-/”. More to come, I am sure of it.
Conclusion
PhOS is a very good “distribution” of BeOS. Even though I have been pretty negative about the whole system throughout the review, I would still say that I am more satisfied with PhOS than I was with BeOS Max (not to say that Max is a bad product though).
It takes some work to get a decent system up and running, you need to download a lot of applications, but it is worth it. The overall feel of PhOS is just more “up-to-date” than Max’ feel.
But that is me talking; a BeOS fan. How about the average user? Well, to be honest, the average user cannot do much with PhOS (or any other “free” BeOS distribution, for that matter). With the lack of a decent Office Suite, BeOS is no viable option. I must say that I have not yet tried Zeta.
So, for whom is PhOS a good choice? Well, for anyone running an “older” version of BeOS, who does not want to buy Zeta (yet) and who is not offended by the legality issues.
To clarify, I decided to give grades on the different aspects of the OS:
– Install: 9/10 (without the glitches a 10/10 would have been possible)
– Hardware Support: 5/10 (my hardware already presented problems, let alone more exotic stuff)
– Ease Of Use: 8/10 (this is purely the use of the OS)
– Speed: 10/10 (no clarification required)
– Overall Polish: 9/10 (the UI is very consistent, and I just love tabs)
– Functionality: 3/10 (PhOS is useless. Only people like me enjoy it, in a production environment, it is useless)
About the Author:
Thom Holwerda is a regular visitor on OSNews.com and has contributed more than once. His first computer experience dates back to 1991 (a 286 entered the household). Over the years he has played around with several computers, but it wasn’t until 2001 that he really started to experiment OS-wise with computers. His favorite operating systems are Windows Server 2003, Mandrake Linux, BeOS. He also has an affinity for the QNX Neutrino RTOS. Thom also contributes to the SkyOS project, being responsible for the Dutch translation.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
I think it’s great to see that there exists some free distros. Both phos and Max do a good job. Since there is really no point in going for the “be-alikes” until OBOS get’s closer I think phos and max do very well (since not many could want to pay for that sort of product at the moment).
Besides, it’s interesting to see Phos is mostly a 1 man job and it’s still in beta stage…. it might be a good follow-up once it matures a bit
…shame over PhOS and Zeta. They should let BeOS rest in peace. This systems are only ugly, patched hobby systems. And in case of Zeta you’ll get it only for much money. Bye BeOS.
The sound in Phos seems to be broken.
A few people have had problems.
Looks like it’s back to Max.
Is it a true multiuser OS? Or something like win98 user profiles? eg. to install something system wide do you need an admin password?
Thom wrote…
So, for whom is PhOS a good choice? Well, for anyone running an “older” version of BeOS, who does not want to buy Zeta (yet) and who is not offended by the legality issues.
Thom that’s funny. Are we to be offended by Yellowtab selling an illegal version? I think the guy who makes PhOS was against them for selling something that Yellowtab has not declared as legal by providing proof.
Does PhOS have support for USB mouses.
Or does any other BeOS distro? Besides Zeta of course.
usb mice work
or you could try a ps/2 adapter
I already knew attempting to retrieve images from my Canon PowerShot S50 digital camera would be useless; I still gave the included “Camera” a chance though. It failed, Canon cameras were not on the “supported” list. It would be futile to test other BeOS image retrievers; I already gave them a chance when I was still running BeOS Max v3. Too bad, once more.
As far as I know, the Canon PowerShot S50 should work under PhOs(if it is recognized by the USB driver). Try Exposure with the PTP protocol(@ Bebits). Don’t forget to configure your camera to the PTP protocol.
grts
Jixt
Reminds me of AMIGA. The good ones always die young.
Porting OOo would be an absolutely massive job. Don’t hold your breath on this one. Abiword 2.06 would require GTK+2 being ported to BeOS.
Does PhOS have support for USB mouses.
Yep, if you read the System Specs of my test machine you should’ve seen I have a USB trackball.
I recall a conversation on here a long time ago about porting big OSS projects to Beos.. the problem is that Openoffice still includes much of the code for StarOffice 5.2, which is kludgy to say the least and poorly suited to porting to a new platform.
BeOS isnt sufficiently unix-like for it to be an easy port.
I’ve tried PhOS, version 4 and version 5. I’d like to view as a sort trial version of Zeta. It boots fast and a browser like firefox start’s extremly fast. From all operating systems i’ve tried is Beos the one that stole my hart. Just look at the way how simple it is to install a driver or remove one or installing software.
Anyway I know almost for sure these operating systems won’t survive. There’s only one reason and that’s the lack of good software.
I’m looking forward to things like a SkyOS which look more promising.
There are a couple of fixes for sound, one that I know worked for me, and one that may work. It worked for someone else. I was able to get functioning sound by replacing the relevant sound driver in PhOS with BeOS PE’s driver. I found this out at BeOSJournal’s forum site. Try a search there for whatever your information is, as well as the site the above author gave for PhOS.
Some older versions of Soundplay apparently work on PhOS, I have not tried it yet.
a lot of energy is put into something that is dead in the water and sunk. No matter how much energy you put into restoring beos, its not even come close to advanced OS of the world. Does it have .NET no… nor will it ever.
Would say “let it die”… but its already dead.
…..and does it suffer from Sasser attacks???? – oops! no, it doesn’t – obviously a more advanced form of OS then 🙂
If you dont like BeOS, then dont use it.
What do you mean its not advanced? Becuase it doesnt support some of the thirdparty applications and Frameworkes? It has NOTHING to do with the OS itself. The ONLY os that supports .NET fully is Windows.
So is Linux/*UNIXes advanced enough for you?
If you check the newsitems here, you will see its not a Dead OS we talkin´about, its the opposite its an OS on its way back to the TOP.
/Ann O. nymous
I don’t understand the people who still concerns about Zeta legality.
I mean, yellowTab is not a guy jumping around selling stuff made at home with his CD burner. yellowTab is a real company, it has a real headquarter, there is real people working there, there are other real companies buying and selling their products, and they got real money from a real bank (and you know, banks doesn’t give you money without warranties). The simple thought of all this being done illegally is just ridiculous.
Dano, not Dan0. Nowhere does it say “Dan0”. Theres “Dano0” which is what you get when you use BONE on R5.03.
We Can read a lot of bullshits here… I think it’s normal after this kind of article… I just don’t understand why people who just don’t know about BeOS just talk so much about it… Yes, it must be because it’s a dead OS….
There are people working on OOo, but it’s really hard. I heard a developer from this project saying that “it’s much more code than a hole operating system”.
Mimicing me…
yellowTab is two guys jumping around German TVs selling stuff made by others. yellowTab is a two-men company, has a little room, there is a seventeen boy as a webmaster, there are other real companies suiting them for selling their product without a formal license and they got huge debts. The simple thought of all this being done illegally is an unavoidable suspect.
…..and does it suffer from Sasser attacks???? – oops! no, it doesn’t – obviously a more advanced form of OS then 🙂
What’s the fun of creating a virus that would affect only 0.1% of the computers?
Funny how a already small community concentrate on figth each other than be a bit more constructive. Does anybody think it will help BeOS when its splitted in Phos, OpenBeos, and Zeta. The only way to get a small chance for a long term survival is stand together now and catch up with other OSs. BTW the same also applies for Linux with his zillions of distributions which are all about the same but not compatible against each other.
Why the heck did Palm buy BE anyways??
“…..and does it suffer from Sasser attacks???? – oops! no, it doesn’t – obviously a more advanced form of OS then :-)”
As much as I love BeOS, it was/is a very poor OS concerning security. No account whatsoever, no real right permission, etc…
> Why the heck did Palm buy BE anyways?
The correct question is: Why the heck did Be sell BeOS to Palm?
Because no other companies were available: Sony was the only other potential buyer but the eVilla experience was a complete technical failure and soon abandoned.
Don’t also forget that Gassee has been in the past a member of the board of directors of 3com
I know I’m no moderator here, but please: could we keep the discussion on topic, namely, PhOS?
I think the mere fact that PhOS, BeOS Max, Zeta, OpenBeOS and others exist is enough to show BeOS ain’t dead.
Is it a true multiuser OS? Or something like win98 user profiles? eg. to install something system wide do you need an admin password?
I tried PhOS Beta 5 a couple of months ago. The multiuser functionality added by PhOS is simply a login window that makes /boot/home being moved around so that different users can have different copies of it. The login process doesn’t give any kind of new security. You will always have UID 0 (which is normally named root in unix and baron in BeOS) after you log in. You can also skip the login window by hitting ctrl-alt-del and pressing ‘Restart Desktop’.
After trying PhOS I decided I liked PE 5.0.3 with BONE alot more. Hopefully the OBOS networking stack will be of equally or higher quality in not too long.
To the guy who complained about the title:
As far as I know the most accurate name of Dan0 is BeOS 5.1d0, which is a pretty good reason to spell its nickname the way I just did.
>BeOS ain’t dead
It’s Gobe Productive, ePicture, Moho, Personal Studio and the few other non-amateur BeOS software that aren’t dead. They have all been ported to Windows and the nostalgic users can run them there more flowlessy than on the broken Media, OpenGl, Print System and TCP/IP stack of Dano.
Be sold BeOS to Palm because Palm needed the multimedia capabilities of BeOS and the know-how of its engineers. Be had nothing to lose as the OEM desktop market was locked out at the time.
A more pressing question I have: Palm, if it is doing its job of protecting its IP, must surely know of this project and others. Has Palm contacted any of the developers of the rogue BeOS distros?
>BeOS ain’t dead
It’s Gobe Productive, ePicture, Moho, Personal Studio and the few other non-amateur BeOS software that aren’t dead. They have all been ported to Windows and the nostalgic users can run them there more flowlessy than on the broken Media, OpenGl, Print System and TCP/IP stack of Dano.
First of, all I’d like to know who I’m talking to.
Second, I think it’s kind of pathetic of you to compare the BeOS to Windows. I explicitly named PhOS/BeOS’ shortcommings, I explicitly said it’s not for the average user, so you haven’t added anything new to this discussion.
Anyone else anything constructive?
Why is it that every time an older OS is talked about wars start up about it being dead or not dead?
I use BeOS PE max v3 as my main OS. Never had any problems with it. It works flawlessly with all my hardware and I have yet to have any problems with it. If you don’t like it or think its dead then fine, thats your opinion.
.NET is a requirement for being an advanced OS now?
>Be had nothing to lose as the OEM desktop market was locked out at the time.
Have you an idea of how many users downloaded and easily installed the Personal Edition on their desktop? Hundreds thousands. A free edition was a good idea in order to attract new developers (count how many Java/UNIX hackers are approaching Darwin/Mac OS X) but for the declining Be platform has not worked.
> I think it’s kind of pathetic of you to compare the BeOS to Windows.
I didn’t compare the two OSs. I only said that who had a great time with BeOS can still make a great “alternative” experience by running those nice programs on Windows.
I think it’s kind of pathetic to compare the present hobbyst BeOS developers with the original great team.
That’s a good one, .NET needed by an OS to be deemed advanced… that falls in the same class as the preposterous netcraft/newsgroup stats in the *BSD is dying trolls.
I think the guy who makes PhOS was against them for selling something that Yellowtab has not declared as legal by providing proof.
The majority of justice systems I know of consider you to be “innocent until proven guilty”. That is you are legal until proven otherwise, you do not need to be “declared legal”.
Saying something is illegal without being able to prove it is putting yourself in line for being sued for libel.
BeOS is dead
An OS is dead OS when nobody is using it, updating it or developing on it.
The fact there are distributions, people using them and developing on them pretty much proves BeOS is alive and well.
Dan0 Vs dano
See here:
http://www.blachford.info/computer/pics/BeOSDANO_2.jpg
Case closed 🙂
Stuff about Dano being incomplete…
Incomplete it may be but this thing is one of if not THE most stable OS I’ve ever used. (I have plain Dano, not PhOS).
.NET
What exactly is .NET going to provide that any modern system today can’t already do?
Palm has nothing to do with the previously freeware BeOS version released by Be Inc.
Besides OpenBeOS is a S.O. build from scratch well, from BeOS specs and manuals, like Linux from Unix.
JPS: True enough…but I’m referring to projects like PhOS that admittedly use leaked code. In this day and age, it is somewhat boggling that Palm would not approach the developer regarding the legal status of the code being used. Personally, I’m all for keeping BeOS alive in any and all forms possible, but from a strictly business perspective, Palm’s inactivity is odd.
“What’s the fun of creating a virus that would affect only 0.1% of the computers?
”
Absolutely right, and therein lies the beauty of it. Surfing the Net without worrying whether all of the latest patches are installed, whether the patches will work, whether an agobot will slip in anyway, etc.
“its an OS on its way back to the TOP.”
If you take a fish and pitch it up onto land and watch it flop, that is what we are seeing here. BeOS is the fish.
Not quite… They are accessing the tech for sure. And if the market “oportunity” appears they will jump on the “rogues”… and they will have 2 choices… Stop… work for Palm… (the 3 choice isn’t)…
They have what they wanted. The engeneers…
The rest is worthless for them as it is, and as time pass, less value it has (for them at least).
Now, if they opened a “BeOS depot”… and cather the current userbase (whatever small it is in term of the global market)… Then the platform would have a shot in the long run (as it is, openBeOS will be i presume the way to go as it isn’t tainted).
In the end, time will tell
Someone made a post saying that BeOS having all these forks is just like Linux, where all these distros are incompatible with each other. It’s true that BeOS probably should unify, but Linux distros are not really “incompatible” with one another. You can run Gnome 2.6 on Mandrake or Debian or Redhat or SuSE or whatever. All the distro maker does is choose a package management system, a default set of free applications, and some sort of installer/configuration tool. From there, users are free to compile & run code, or download packages of types their distro supports. Arguably the three most popular package formats are gentoo’s ebuild, debian deb and the “de facto” rpm standard, but source is the lowest common denominator and some distros support more than one (debian can install rpms with minimal pain, for example).
The reason this happens in the Linux world is because there’s so much free stuff out there from disparate sources that it makes sense for someone to put it all together. This isn’t like MS Windows, where everything is coded in-house at Microsoft and so they can package it up real nice (or Mac OS, where everything is coded at Apple, etc.)
The result of their being “idiots,” as you foolishly said, is that users can have a system with powerful applications (like IDEs, productivity suites, browsers, email, web/ftp servers, databases, etc.) about 30 minutes after popping in the distro install CD.
So stop pretending this is a bad thing.
I tried PhOS a few months back and couldn’t get it to boot. I think there’s a newer version released since my attempt. Even though it wouldn’t boot, I was able to extract some of the ‘new’ apps and demos for use in BeOS PE 5.03.
-Bob
omeone made a comment that there are no virus for BeOS because of it’s small market share. While true, I don’t think that is the whole story. Imagine a group of Window virus writers sitting around, trying to design a BeOS virus. So they try to do the things that make Windows virus spread so fastm but they get all sorts of problems.
One) Unlike Outlook, you can’t get code to execute just by openning a message.
Two) Unlike Outlook, you find most message readers will not excute HTML code.
Three) Unlike Outlook, Bemail does not just run code that is double-clicked, it asks it you want to save or run it first.
Four) There are so many diffirent web-browsers versions making a buffer overflow that will execute properly is very hard.
Five) None of the web-browsers have the same long standing bugs found in Mircosoft’s version. The updates keep killing them.
Six) There are not alot of unneeded services running on the TCP/IP ports to take over. Windows seems to have a number of services running because Mircosoft find them useful to be available, not because the user needs them.
Seven) Most services available under BeOS are defaulted as OFF. Relates to #6 but is not the same.
However, if the user opens an unknown attachment (which many users do), it could easily send itself off to all your friends then wipe the entire HDD. Security only goes that far.
You are right about the other stuff though.
Keep up the good work guys! Keep the BeOS flame alive. One never knows what it will evolve into.
Troy
http://banther-trx.homeunix.com
Mimicing me…
Instead of mimicing, why don’t you try to reply with serious arguments?
yellowTab is two guys jumping around German TVs
One of wich was brave enough to risk his house, and the other one is a banker.
selling stuff made by others.
If you want a legal copy of a newer BeOS, you’ve to get it from them, sorry.
yellowTab is a two-men company,
Actually, they are about ten (I don’t know exactly), and they get their salary.
has a little room,
“little room”? It’s an office, it isn’t little and it isn’t a room.
What did you expect, the Microsoft campus?
there is a seventeen boy as a webmaster,
If you can pay a professional webmaster, you’re welcome.
there are other real companies suiting them for selling their product without a formal license
Gobe is a one-man company making no products, but it is a real company. Oh yeah.
And from the yellowTab site: “The problem stems from the fact that he does not wish to send us an invoice for payment. We have made it clear to him that we need this to legally fulfill the terms of the contract.”
and they got huge debts.
The fact they got a debt means they got a loan from a bank.
I can imagine the scene: Bernd enters a bank, calls the manager, and says: “Hi, I’m Bernd and I want to sell software, but I haven’t any right to do this. Would you like to fund me?”. The manager replies: “What if they catch you?”. Bernd: “Nah, nobody cares about this software”. Manager: “Ok then. How much do you need?”
Someone should turn this into a comic strip.
The simple thought of all this being done illegally is an unavoidable suspect.
And I suspect your car is stolen. Can you give us an evidence that you bought it?