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).
- "PhOS Intro, Page 1/2"
- "PhOS Intro, Page 2/2"
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