According to HaikuNews, new open source nVidia 3D drivers are now ready for BeOS. Included are screenshots of Be’s 1999 era Quake II port running unmodified and 3D accelerated.
According to HaikuNews, new open source nVidia 3D drivers are now ready for BeOS. Included are screenshots of Be’s 1999 era Quake II port running unmodified and 3D accelerated.
Now if someone ported some of these drivers for X.org it would be very nice to have some 3D come out-of-the-box working (i have a geforce 4 mx 440). Open-source rocks again
Also, BeOS is looking very interesting nowadays. Gotta give it a try.
I love BeOS… but this is only about 10 years too late, though, as far as i am concerned it is still the greatest hobby OS out there.
Anybody know if there’s any BeOS drivers for the SIS 760/964 chipset? When I tried to install BeOS Max on my new pc, it was in black and white.
BeOS wasn’t a Hobby OS… It was written by Be Inc. and was intended as a complete SOHO operating systems.
And, IMHO, BeOS is the best thought and best written OS of all time… no matter Linux or BSD rules nowadays… BeOS is still a OS programming gem.
(As a consequence to my interest in BeOS, i’m going trying Zeta 1.0 in the near future. I’ve never been satisfied with Linux, for my Home and Office use.)
The article says that support for newer cards is limited due to the lack of specs from nvidia. I wonder just how much use this will be. Yes, it is great but if you have to have a 5 year old card to get decent perormance out of it then just how much good will this do?
ah, quake era screenshots. Those were the days.
Oh well: You’ve gotta start somewhere and the article also states, that specs for cards of all other manufacturers are available.
Some time ago, I remember several games that were ported using the Be OpenGL HW beta, which were not released (Hexen?). It was stated that they will be released when HW acceleration would be available to the public. I wonder if the authors would release them now ! Also, I wonder if this can be applied to ATI cards, or if it is only nVidia.
This is wonderful news (HW 3D in BeOS), I am very excited. Regarding commercial games, I’ve always heard that a BeOS version of Unreal exists somewhere.
Unreal on beos? Awesome. Wonder if they sold a copy. Does anyone have a list of games available for be, or its derivatives?
Make sure “assign irq to pci” is enabled in your bios! solved the monochrome problems for me although it was a different video card.
People said BeOS had an incomplete Unreal port.
beos was written in the early 90s. open source were to start from scratch, now what software concepts would it incorporate?
exokernel? pervasive multithreading.
Does anyone know if someone is working on some drivers that will give ATI graphics cards HW3D support? I dont think i’ll buy myself a new graphics card just to test HW3D under BeOS, but still this is great.. Keep up the good work.
http://bitsofnews.com & http://tech.bitsofnews.com
BeOS always had Pervasive Multithreading… no need for it to be a ‘new idea’ if it was remade now.
Well, the point is that HW3D on BeoS has always been greatly coveted. It was one of the features that YellowTab promised years ago. Many people assumed it could never be done in ANY capacity. The fact that it actually WORKS now is pretty incredible, and opens the door for newer Nvidia cards and ATI cards being supported.
It is a happy day for BeOS
@Montag
Fairly certain no Unreal for BeOS. There was some talk is all. Don’t think it ever was made – so don’t get your hopes up.
@Anonymous “any new os innovation”
BeOS (Dano) 5.1 had a kernel date of Sept 2001. It is all multithreaded & works excellent. Just lacking a couple of features/things (like OpenGL) & more applications. YT & Haiku are working on bringing extra features to BeOS as time goes on.
Even Linux was lacking stuff when it 1st came out. Took many years for acceptance & now it is noticed, used & talked about. Give Zeta 2-3 years & it will become more mainstream – so long as new apps are made for it or Linux/Windows ones ported over.
It is good to see progress happening. An OpenGL driver will help out with 3D gaming on this OS & attract some attention.
Commercial Games were:
Quake, Quake II, Hexen, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D, Doom,
Better yet, just use an arcade emulator. You’ll be able to play many more games and get more fun out of it. Mame (BeMame), Raine come to mind.
For emulators look @ link below:
http://www.beemulated.net/
“Now if someone ported some of these drivers for X.org”
These drivers for Haiku are derived from the earlier (now effectively obsolete) Utah-GLX project which enabled OpenGL indirect acceleration on XFree86. You (or a distro) could port the Utah-GLX drivers to DRI and X.org, but no-one has bothered
Why not? Because as Rudolf has noticed, they don’t work on modern 3D hardware, so they’re a dead-end.
They don’t work for the same reason that although R100 and R200 (Radeon through to Radeon 9200) drivers in DRI are very similar, the R300 driver (Radeon 9600 to X800) which is currently in CVS is very different. Hardware manufacturers changed their designs to incorporate fragment programs, and without information on that you can’t make the card work.
Porting the Utah-GLX code to DRI would make a good summer project for someone with one or more nVidia cards in the supported list (a GeForce 2, and a TNT 2 would be a good start) and a familiarity with low-level 3D programming. Rudolf himself has said he has no interest in programming outside of BeOS, and so when BeOS/ Haiku/ etc fade away presumably he’ll find some other outlet like playing Go or writing poetry.
well there are some inaccuracies in the article(ie. Glide is not subset of OpenGL), and BeOS has been pretty good with 3D stuff if you had the supported hardware like I did. Anyway BeOS is the best OS ever!
While this is certainly good news, 3D support under any distro of Linux as been problematic at best. This is one of the reasons I haven’t installed Linux on my IBM A31p laptop yet. That and the inability to “legally” play DVDs under Linux still remains the desktop challenge. This can be put solely on the hardware vendors for not releasing drivers that can be included in the installation process.
From memory, wasn’t Chris Herboth (sp) working on the Unreal Tournament port? (BTW – unreal classic has been open sourced, so it should be reportable). He was also working on 2 more games (a racing game and one more). Quake3 also exists somewhere (and that should be open sourced this year). Heck, even NeverWinterNights exists somewhere running on a BeInc OpenGL beta. Also, didn’t JBQ or someone else from BeInc also work on SimCity3000? All these projects exist somewhere, on someones hard disks, yet the rest of the world are oblivious to their existance…
Those were the days, back in 1999 when BeOS was the ‘promised child’. I remember playing HW OpenGL Quake2 on R4.52 (september 1999) at an amazing 35fps on my Voodoo3000 🙁
Blame the Wikipedia and fast readingfor the bit about it being a subset of OpenGL – was never a 3DFX man myself, so had to research it somewhere…
Also, as I already did have hardware support (Voodoo 3 and a Radeon 7000), I can say that this exceeds both of them in general driver stability and usability. IIRC, the Radeon 3D gear from Be had software cursors and no overlay, and would hardlock the machine even when not in use
(the article author, in case you didn’t guess..)
This is truely Great News! Linux has never really done it for me the way BeOS has and I’ve been wishing for this support now for years, good to see that a handful of developers/contributers are going so far in such a seemingly short period of time.
Good work all of you, if you are reading this!
JG
All we need now is for people to jump back on the BeWINE project and get it up to speed ( checking the news link it seems nothing has been done since the year 2000)… with WINE’s ever advancing DirectX implementation I believe that this is the best approach for Be gaming for the near future atleast.
Congratz to Rudolf, maybe he should email them to nVidia and ask that they be added to the driver download section
I just wonder why the are bent on NVIDIA support. I thought the majority was buying ATI recently?
Though I do realize that it was only a couple years ago that we all RAN from ATI due to crap drivers.
I just wonder why the are bent on NVIDIA support. I thought the majority was buying ATI recently?
In the Windows arena, they sell pretty evenly. In the linux arena, nVidia dominates due to its better support in linux. nVidia always has their latest drivers available for linux, they install pretty easily, and run extrememly well. ATI puts very little effort into linux drivers. Their latest attempt still doesn’t install very easily, is flakey, and won’t run many games (including DOOM3).
@XDelusion
I think its because there was already some opensource drivers which Rudolf could base his driver on.
Actually DOOM III runs flawless on my ATI.
As for the ATI drivers for BeOS, do they support 3D acceleration? That’s what I’m getting at. If they do, then I’m all up for them, point the way!
I still think this is an amazing improvement in BeOS graphics drivers and it was done by one man. Just think if all the BeOS graphic card driver coders out there begun investigating how to implement 3D functionality…
Go, Rudolf!
This has probably been explainer already *somewhere*, but still. I understand that to enable HW3D you need Rudolf’s newest driver and replace old libgl.so and libglu.so with HW enabled versions … Where is the actual low-level 3D stuff? In other words, if/when an ATI driver with HW3D shows up is it neccessary to change libgl.so again? Not that it is much trouble, just curious…
Yes, Rudolf’s current solution is just a temporary hack.
In the Windows or Linux design there is a separate hardware acceleration module which is automatically loaded by the system’s OpenGL implementation, so support for a new card is as simple (in theory at least) as dropping a file into the right directory.
Rudolf has quite a lot of work still to do to deliver a basic functional GL implementation, on top of proper modularisation he has to handle all the locking and synchronisation for multiple clients, do windowing and scaling correctly etc. Based on his past performance I’m sure he’s capable of all that, the Utah code can do it so there’s no technical obstacle, it’s just a matter of (a lot of) time.
Yes, it is great but if you have to have a 5 year old card to get decent perormance out of it then just how much good will this do?
Realistically, you more or less need a 5+ year old PC to run BeOS anyway. You could get Zeta, or one of the unofficial BeOS builds in order to run it on newer processors, but the supported hardware list isn’t growing at anywhere near the rate of new hardware releases.
And lets not forget the 1GB memory limit still exists (despite all the diatribe and excuses made by others). Rumor has it that this will be fixed in an upcoming release of Zeta, but I’ll believe it when I see it. To my knowledge they’ve never confirmed whether they even own the rights to the kernel yet (I’ve seen a lot of vague responses out of Zeta regarding this, but nothing as concrete as “Yes”.)
Actually, this isn’t true. I’m running BeOS with full hardware support on hardware I bought retail three weeks ago. The rate of hardware support is actually growing much faster than the rate of new hardware, to the point where support for new hardware is nearing 100% (with the exception of wireless)
Keep up the good work.
Plus
=====
(1)BeOS is super fast.
(2)BeOS is stable.
(3)Direct access to developers ,will add features to program at user request
(4)BeOS programs are usually smaller than most other OS
(5)You can ‘feel’ the OS
Minus
====
(1)Hardware support is good ,however device drivers need to be at a Centralise location.
(2)New update of BeOSMax.
I still think this is an amazing improvement in BeOS graphics drivers and it was done by one man.
And all the men that wrote the original UtahGLX for Linux that he modified to make the Beos driver.
And, judging by the mentions of libgl.so and libglu.so, the people that contributed to the Mesa project.
Just think if all the BeOS graphic card driver coders out there begun investigating how to implement 3D functionality…
You might end up with 2 3d drivers.
i Don’t know what people likes still on BeOS.
I was a fan too, but that was at 4.5 times, the first widley available release. 5.= wasn’t much better.
Of cause it’s easy and feels fast. But this is only because it hasen’t all the functions and technologies we are using today. (like multiuser, user-switching, explorer like filebrowser with file previews and so on).
Another bad thing is that BeIDE. It’s an very poor IDE which allows to code in C++ only (for GUI mode)., but doesen’t know resources or a graphical gui designer. Which means that you have to whol multitasking code (with message queues, heavily inspired by MS Windows), every window, every button, every menu completly by Hand.
Thats the reason why after more then 10 years of development still not only one professional quality apllication exists.
There is no Java, no Flash, no modern Web Browser, no modern Office.
The next worse thing is the BeFS. At its time it was wonderful, a complete 64bit filesystem with journaling.
But it was incridiable slow. Even small programm took a long time to load and the well known searches with saveable queries where even slower.
Be Inc. did a lot of big promises, changed their business model and made every quarter serveral million dollar minus. ( i don’t know what they did with all the money from their investors).
Then there is a little company which had the licence to sell the Pro Version of BeOS 5. They are now using that licence to sell a binary patched BeOS Beta Version as a new OS called Zeta. Very, very strange!
Another small group of people are trying to reimplement the wohle OS as OpenSource (Haiku). This is of course a very cool idea.
I hope that those people will make it better than Be Inc. and implement a good IDE/dev studio too.
Even the best OS is nothing worth without Software.
>now what software concepts would it incorporate?
>exokernel? pervasive multithreading.
BeOS had a very nice White Paper.
It was designed as a Media OS. Which gives digital media streams higher priorities to make them faster.
BeOS was the first OS capable to scratch in realtime with mp3’s and played them even backwards.
It has full, preemtive Mutlitasking, Multithreading and supported symetric multi processing.
My first version ran on a Dual PentiumII 350 MhZ (each of them) and was pretty fast in some situations/functions.
There was also a PPC version, because the Be Inc. founder was a former Apple employee.
But they did also a lot of mistakes in their implementation of ther so called Media OS. Video playback had very poor quality (no interpolation) and even Win95/98 was faster.
Big Videos crashed the whole system. So, not really what i would call a Media OS
>(1)BeOS is super fast.
No, it damn slow! Just the GUI feels fast. But this is just because it’s missing a lot of features and functions other OS’es have. The BeOS GUI is even simpler than the Win3.x GUI. No wonder that it is fast
>(2)BeOS is stable.
Really? Not more then any other OS. But the apps aren’t stable. Almost every application is alpha or beta stadium.
>(3)Direct access to developers ,will add features to program at user request
Who do you mean? Be Inc. doesen’t exist. The buyer of Be, Palm doesen’t have any interest in it.
If you mean Zeta, well they don’t seem to have the sources and are very limited in developement.
If mean Haiku, well, they have a very long way to go, until it is finished. But maybe they can make a really nice OS at the end.
>(4)BeOS programs are usually smaller than most other OS
Yes, thats true. Thats because they are completley hand coded and have therefore a very small feature/function set, but a lot of errors
>(5)You can ‘feel’ the OS
What does that mean? Because there is no good software you have to play with the OS only?? – Nice feeling i think
Another bad thing is that BeIDE. It’s an very poor IDE which allows to code in C++ only (for GUI mode)., but
Actually, BeIDE isn’t so bad. It is a simple, reliable no-nonsense IDE. Sure it doesn’t offer much compared to MS VStudio etc. but it is very slick. It can be also used to do other languages too and it is quite extensible (via plug-ins) Besides, BeIDE is in fact just a BEOS port of Metrowerks Code Warrior, which was quite an acclaimed IDE at the time.
doesen’t know resources or a graphical gui designer. Which means that you have to whol multitasking code (with message queues, heavily inspired by MS Windows)
Eh, GUI multitasking in BeOS is quite straightforward and mostly implicit. Of course, concurrency issues need to be tackled – as *always*. As for “message queues” (message ports??) you will hardly find anything truly revolutionary in the last, say, 20 yrs. In fact, I find BeOS messaging simpler yet more powerful, compared to MS Windows (You can add any number of custom key-value pairs to your msg and interapp comm is a breeze).
I think you have to take int consideration that the current state of BeOS and derivatives, with exception of Zeta, is more on the hobbyists side than not. It is a relaxing break to have an OS that is mostly used by people that feel not everybody needs to compete with MS or whatever – it is a great OS for enthusiasts and DIY programmers. It is a very transparent OS – imagine a high-tech, modern incarnation of now extinct “home computers”. I for one learned a great deal just exploring the sample code and old Be newsletters. Those people were elite!
The next worse thing is the BeFS. At its time it was wonderful, a complete 64bit filesystem with journaling.
But it was incridiable slow. Even small programm took a long time to load and the well known searches with saveable queries where even slower.
Come on, BeFS speeds are compare quite favorably to those of other modern FS’. If you need fast queries, index your attributes. BeFS is ok but it can do no miracles!
I have 3 machines running BeOS+Bone, Windows XP , Knoppix and Debian Linux,all triple booting.
The Only system that gives me 100% satisfaction is BeOS .
“No, it damn slow! Just the GUI feels fast. But this is just because it’s missing a lot of features and functions other OS’es have.” By Aldi rulez (IP: —.superkabel.de)
You must be using BeOS R0.00001
What is a modern office suite ?
Does this mean to type a simple letter to my friend i need 700MB program installation .
I watch huge videos (650-1gb divx) with vlc and I have never had a problem. beos *is* fast.
stop spreading FUD.
No Browser?
Firefox 1.1-dev here, on BeOS R5.03, no BONE, no patches.
No modern office suite?
Gobe does me fine. True, its ancient and has terrible MS import/export, but OO.o is being worked on by BU (actually worked on, not just vapour)
No Java?
$ uname -a
BeOS crystal 5.0 1000009 BePC unknown
$ java -version
java version “1.4.2-internal”
No Flash?
True…
The IDE situation will not remain with only BeIDE as an IDE, and the GUI editing within the IDE will happen.
And yes, you’re being overly harsh and ignorant on your FUD. While BeOS isn’t perfect, I challenge you to point to the “perfect OS” for all things and PROVE that it’s the perfect OS for all things. I know that won’t happen anytime soon, if ever, because IT DOESN’T EXIST! Every single OS has strengths and weaknesses.
>>>I watch huge videos (650-1gb divx) with vlc and I have never had a problem. beos *is* fast.
“Fast” is a moving target.
The rest of us are already comparing how fast you can view HDTV-resolution movies using H.264.
This guy probably never tried BeOS and is writing from a “review”.
>>>The rest of us are already comparing how fast you can view HDTV-resolution movies using H.264.
Well, IIRC Video Lan Client lets you play movies at 8X, and, according to the features page at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html , H264 support is the same as on Linux, Windows, or Mac so… I take it you don’t keep track of new BeOS software?
>>>Well, IIRC Video Lan Client lets you play movies at 8X, and, according to the features page at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html , H264 support is the same as on Linux, Windows, or Mac so… I take it you don’t keep track of new BeOS software?
H.264 support in videolan is based on the x264 codec project — highly experimental, not very good. I take it that you don’t keep track of the x264 project?
Secondly, it’s not about just playing hdtv-resolution movies. Microsoft has been demoing —- playing multiple hdtv-resolution of star wars ep. 2 (two years ago) trailers — each movie trailers in their own separate floating windows wondering on the desktop. With the latest WinHEC demos, they played high-def movies projected onto 3d objects.
Thirdly, it’s about having more than 4 gigabyte of ram to do hdtv encoding/authoring. It’s about even the lowly imac that can do HDTV authoring via the free iDVD software.
This guy probably never tried BeOS and is writing from a “review”.
No, i was a registered Be Developer.
I bought 4.5 and later 5.0 Pro und tried to use it much and tried also to code with it.
Of course i’ve never used Zeta or OBOS/Haiku.
You are now saying that it is a hobby OS.
But it wasn’t!
It was a full price, commercial OS. It’s founder Jean-Louis Gassée promoted it as the media Os and said that it is better than windows or mac or linux, again and again and again.
>>>I watch huge videos (650-1gb divx) with vlc and I have never had a problem. beos *is* fast.
Yes, today this might be true.
How long is this functional? As long as Be Inc. exists this wasn’t prosible. The System crashed completly when you tried to open an mpeg file of that size (divx wasn’t supported of course).
Thats no fud, thats the truth!
I’ve never said that todays incarnations of BeOS are still that bad. But the System out of the box wasn’t that good.
Btw. VLC is a loosy player under Windows compared to Nero’s Show Time 2 or WM10. It is very slow, crashes the video when you try to jump forwards or backwards in the video.
I used it under Linux, but not because it is good, only because it is the only one supporting a wide range of formats.
Firefox 1.1-dev here, on BeOS R5.03, no BONE, no patches.
Don’t tell me that it runs without regulary crashes or rendering issues or even fast. Can’t belive that.
The last Mozilla port i see on beOS was simply unuseable and the so called NetPositve was like Netscape 2.0.
I don’t tell you fud.
Just download the free version of BeOS 5 and try it for yourself
This works of course only if you have very old hardware, because it didn’t boot on newer one
“No, it damn slow! Just the GUI feels fast. But this is just because it’s missing a lot of features and functions other OS’es have.” By Aldi rulez (IP: —.superkabel.de)
You must be using BeOS R0.00001
What i meaning with slow is not the GUI! It is pretty fast of course.
I mean the execution of big tasks. I know its hard to find an application that do any serious and needs really CPU time. But there were a view of them.
Just load a large webpage with lot of pictures on it.
Code mp3’s, copy large files, edit video or audio.
Then you will see hoe slow it is compared to Windows on the same hardware!
And thats what counts, not the speed of the GUI.
Just load a large webpage with lot of pictures on it.
Code mp3’s, copy large files, edit video or audio.
Then you will see hoe slow it is compared to Windows on the same hardware!
This absolutely contrary to what I’ve got on my dual BeOS/Windows2000 box – I’ve got and AMD XP 1600+ system and encoding an ogg file with same qulaity is even a sec or so faster on BeOS, other than that, raw processing power is defenitely very comparable without a whole lot of surprises
… which is only logical. I don’t even get it why exactly BEOS should be so much slower than Windows – *or* vice-versa! I mean, the only thing increasing execution time with non-GUI apps is OS overhead – this depends on ctx switch times, number of concurrent tasks etc, so it will actually vary significantly also from a Windows setup to a Windows on the ident HW (let’s suppose we have an console app with same source and gcc compiled)! But as far as default setups go, BeOS has actually *lower* overhead than let’s say Windows XP, so I find it very hard to believe than other setups, similar to mine show any different results.
this depends on ctx switch times, number of concurrent tasks etc, so it will actually vary significantly also from a Windows setup to a Windows on the ident HW (let’s suppose we have an console app with same source and gcc compiled)!
And on memory management strategy, used CPU features (APIC, 3DNOW, SSE,..), Chipset drivers, file system speed and so on.
In all that, BeOS never was good and is completly outdated today.
I’ve looked at the VLC page and i am still right with my statements.
Look here for yourself: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html
Look at all those red fields at the BeOS Version
This no fud, this is the truth.
Eh, GUI multitasking in BeOS is quite straightforward and mostly implicit. Of course, concurrency issues need to be tackled – as *always*. As for “message queues” (message ports??) you will hardly find anything truly revolutionary in the last, say, 20 yrs. In fact, I find BeOS messaging simpler yet more powerful, compared to MS Windows (You can add any number of custom key-value pairs to your msg and interapp comm is a breeze).
Have you ever coded on Windows, Linux or Mac?
Sure you can do this stuff all by hand too, but you didn’t need that!
No resources means that you can’t stick all your icons, menus, and other stuff of the application into one single file. You have to fool areound with hundreds of single files.
A modern IDE provides you a graphical, easy to use gui designer and builds the needed skeleton with the neccery code to implement the gui elements and their handlers autmatically.
Another issue is that the BeOS GUI API is limited to c++.
Most apps are a mix of c and c++. So if you want to port one of them, you have to redesign it.
As far as i know there is not a single port of a GUI app which comes close to the quality of the original.
Why is that? Because BeOS developers can’t code, or BeOS have a poor API? Think about it!
good news everyone.
There will be a new version of BeOS MAX.
http://www.beosmax.org/
Maybe it runs again on my Hardware, then i can prove what the fans here said,..that it is fast and good in video viewing
Firefox – its COMPLETELY stable, and theres no rendering issues, at all.
As an example, I’ve had it open, on a net_server box, connected to the net, connected to BeShare through a web gateway, for three days. FF on Windows XP Tablet Edition leaks so much RAM its unusable after three hours, let alone three days
Yet more proof you haven’t used BeOS much this century.
As goes VLC – out of date features list.
VCD/SVCD works. Audio CD works – play the wave files the filesystem seamlessly translates for you. DVB even works – not in the source yet, but it does work, and there are both screenshots and those that have seen a demo of it working.
Multichannel – done, not in source that I’m aware of, but public builds of it available
The networking problems are down to the maintainer not building for BONE – easily rectified by an enduser
No Flash?
True…
At least we have a FlashPlayer. It does the job
@ Aldi
BeOS is not perfect (yet). It was never really finished back in 2001, but is very useable for the most part. It probably won’t be complete until 2007, but progress is happening. (It died (was abandoned) in 2001 & is slowly being resurrected).
YellowTab just *recently* got the ball rolling by hiring additional programmers to work on it. Before it was just a handful of guys probably just trying to make sense of the code (or waiting to incorporate Haiku improvements). The pace has increased at YT & improvements/bug fixes/new features will start showing up gradually.
For the most part, BeOS works very well & the average user will enjoy using it.
There is a fairly recent version of Firefox released for it (works good).
VLC only has experimental h264 (which is not that good), but DivX HD (720p) should work well on BeOS (http://www.divx.com/hd).
It is true, that limitations or bugs still exist in BeOS and not as many applications as Linux or Windows, but this will change eventually if you give it time. (Linux went through the same thing in the early years. How many supporters/users did it have when it 1st started out?).
Most of BeOS (& clones) that are available are still mainly based off of Be Inc’s version of BeOS 5 back from 2001 and given time the OS will be updated with newer code.
I’m hoping that more applications will be ported from Windows or Linux to BeOS/Zeta to help gain it greater public support & acceptance.
I believe PhOSB6 & Zeta to be the better BeOS versions currently out there. Try out PhOSB6, but keep in mind it only has minor improvements from BeOS 5. Prediction, by 2007/2008 Zeta (and maybe Haiku) will be the popular, updated & better BeOS versions out there & have a pretty good userbase.
PhOSB6 Screenshots. (Copy links into webbrowser URL to view. Will not work if you click the links).
http://looncraz.tripod.com/b62.png
http://looncraz.tripod.com/b61.png
PhOSB6 Download (*Check your hardware to make sure it is supported; ie: NO SATA support, etc.).
http://royalinc.ath.cx/external/phos/download.asp?id=21
As Zeta keeps ketting a little better each time and continues to make foward progress. Fix existing errros with the kernal and BFS. There are still people who say that it can’t be done. Yet here we are with it stareing them in face as being done, yet they insist it can’t be. This just goes to show that the averable zelot has no mind or iq of their own. They are like lemmings….let them go…