Recently we've seen the releases of both Ubuntu 8.04 'Hardy Heron' as well as Fedora 9 'Sulphur', to mostly positive reviews. PCWorld Australia decided to pitch these two popular Linux distributions against one another.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
Wow, you have a computer still able to run BeOS?
I'm impressed, this must be quite rare nowadays..
Just for fun, could you measure the time BeOS takes from the bootloader to the functionnal GUI?
I remember 14s on my (defunct) Celeron333 but my memory is fuzzy and nowadays OS take so much time booting that sometimes I doubt that 14s was really possible..
Member since:2005-09-13
Member since:2005-07-06
The machine is actually at work, right now. I'll time it tomorrow morning 
I've been putting it together over the last few weeks as I have spare cash for parts. I've been wanting to run BeOS again and didn't have any machines that supported it well 
As it stands, it is 100% BeOS compatible. Even the motherboard only supports up to a max of 768mb of memory, which is the upper limit of BeOS that isn't patched up
I might stick my nvidia 5500 in it since there are proper drivers now. The CPU is a 1.4ghz tualatin, but I can't jack the FSB past 100mhz, so it's stuck at 1050mhz. Plenty fast, though I don't mind much as it keeps the CPU cooler, too.
I'm probably going to put in a much larger scsi drive for storage and a smaller scsi SSD drive for the OS. Improve boot times tremendously Yes, I spend FAR too much money on obsolete computers 
I'm going to bump the memory to 768mb of ECC PC100 in a few weeks. It's going to be a splendid machine. It's a tiny desktop, not a tower, so it can sit on top of my NeXT
Member since:2005-07-06
OK, just tested. It went from boot loader to being able to use the GUI in little over 18 seconds. This install has always been a bit slower than my old BeOS machine on booting, for some reason.
It is a really weird BeOS "distro". It uses the Zeta Kernel, drivers, bootloader, and Bone installation with BeOS R5 PE "userland" and all the Haiku replacement components and system hacks and updates (AGP driver and such) as well as OpenTracker.NewFS (OpenTracker.NewFS is a heavily optimized version of OpenTracker that was made to speed up FS operations such as directory listing and file manipulation. It's extremely fast compared to the standard Open/Tracker.). It's a weird beast that works amazingly well ^_^
Heres a link to the Read.Me for my install.
I've updated it a bunch and installed/removed programs, so this isn't totally correct, but it will give you an idea.
http://helf.freeshell.org/What_is_new
Member since:
2005-07-06
ubuntu = slow, beos = fast on my hardware.
see? about as much info
(1.05ghz Pentium III-S Tualatin, 128mb ECC pc100, 10k rpm 18gb raptor UW SCSI-2 HDD, ATI Rage Pro Turbo 8MB onboard video, Adaptec 2940uw PCI SCSI controller, onboard 3com 3c905 NIC, onboard cristalfusion CS4236 audio, dvd burner)
Edited 2008-06-03 16:43 UTC