BeOS developer (and frequent OSNews reader) Robert Renling wrote an article about the history of BeOS for BeFaqs.com. The link is dead at the moment because of the Slashdot effect, but there is a Google cached copy available.
BeOS: History, Perspectives and the Future
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Why don’t articles like these don’t get OSNewsed? We should work harder making this site more popular than ./
Anyway, Robert, if you are reading here, can you explain to me what’s Zeta features would be like? I heard of it, but I don’t really know anything about it. Tried searching on Google, no information. The official site has no info too. Is this based on the original Be OS code? Or OBOS code? Or their own code?
Would it come in what would be BeOS 6’s UI? It looked so nice….
>can you explain to me what’s Zeta features would be like?
http://www.yellowtab.com
> official site has no info too
so you say:
> http://www.yellowtab.com
???? I went to their official site, and I agree it has hardly any good info. But thanks for attempting to be informative, it was great while it lasted.
“zeta” is the codename for yellowtabs product “BeOS NG” the next generation Beos.
It is the .. next BeOS as in it has some licensed code in it and some MAJOR driver updates.
There is no official Release Date but please go ahead and send Bernd a letter of appreciation.
The gui has some features youve seen in eugenias own graphics mockups and the one’s youve seen in those presumably leaked beos r6 shots.
about that code:
some licensed parts
some obos code
Lots of their own code
It’s been a while since I have read an article giving the so well deserved praises to the legendary BeOS! It reminds me of the good’ol BeNews.com days. A site where Believers would passionately “Mod” comments up and down. A time when we use to impatiently wait for the next release of BeOS or even the next weekly Be Newsletter containing announcements or hints of the cool new features coming to the BeOS.
I remember the big article about BONE by Howard Berkley (I think). I was soooo happy to read about the cool modular architecture. I remember using Nettle way before BONE and hoping that Be produce a similar wrapper around socket libs and sure enough the hired Howard and cam up with a very similar yet even better API, followed by Bone.
I remember Marcos’ the CDDA-FS as well. Marco also got hired by Be after developing some amazingly cool stuff for the legendary BeOS. I guess the OS just inspired people to write very, very cool stuff!
I remember Eugenia writing many rather controversial article about BeOS, Applications, who’s developing / releasing what and when. Who has gone out of business or is being sued.
I remember the legendary, Sony eVilla. I had a lot of fun with that check out some pictures:
http://www.geocities.com/ycreveco/eVillaPicts.html
How about the Qubit tablets? All the BeOS investors who use to hang out on the yahoo financial bulletin board? Who can forget Ragnar reporting on Qubit from an Expo floor in Boston? We had one hell of a community!
Here is to hoping that Palm announces or delivers a BeOS derivative soon.
Ciao
Yc
P.S. Still living Long and hoping to prosper
Read the article 🙂 It says :
Then there is Zeta from Yellowtab Gmbh that is based upon what we within the BeOS Community refer to as BeOS Release 6, which takes the BeOS we now know and love a step further with support for current and new hardware, up to date open source components such as openTracker, openDeskbar, and a slick new Installer which will allow you to choose from hundreds of applications that come bundled on the CD image.
Does anyone know if it will have a free iso for download (or at least a trial version) ?
The author seems to conveniently forget that BeOS is still a single-user OS with basically no security whatsoever. In this modern world of large networks (like the Internet), that is simply inexcusable, no matter how good the rest of the OS is.
The BeOS does have RSA Internet security.
The hooks for File / System security are there. A very nice scripting environment is already in place as well.
PalmSource would have no problem implementing rock solid system security in a BeOS derivative.
ciao
yc
Yama:
The author seems to conveniently forget that BeOS is still a single-user OS with basically no security whatsoever. In this
modern world of large networks (like the Internet), that is simply inexcusable, no matter how good the rest of the OS is.
Robert:
ah yes we’ve touched this topic before Have’nt We, No i did not as you put it “conveniently forget” that issue since it’s virtually nonexistant, true it lacks a multiuser enviroment per se, But that does’nt affect the usability of the os as it does when you tighten say linux.
what you instead have in BeOS is a single user multi threaded enviroment which WAS never intended to be run as a Server enviroment, sure it has the issue of open ports But then we have PortSentry ported to our lovely little OS.
The kernel level security is there.
we can turn services on and of at our whim, we have gpg, pgp for personal protection, userland implementations of Rubberhose.
DEFINE the security issue.
from what I know there are no exploits for BeOS R5 that I know about (back 4.5 there were 3)
cheers
Robert
The concept of user permissions, with a ‘root’ user for purely system admin purposes and unprivileged user accounts for everything else, is a central concept in general OS security. IMNSHO, security should be the #1 priority in all OSs right from the beginning. Compromises may be made in order to assist functionality, but only if they are well thought-out and implemented with care. GNU/Linux does a reasonably decent job here, and MacOS X isn’t too bad either.
My argument has nothing to do with enabling/disabling services at will or running in a server environment. User permissions should be a core functionality of any OS that is networked. From what I understand, with BeOS you are basically running as root all the time.
Like Eugenia, I am skeptical of all BeOS projects. Yet, I have to admit, there is hope in my heart. YellowTab says they have a beta CD that beta testers are using now (with no need to install). They also speak of having many applications, etc. They have their website set up so that new parts of it (like ordering Zeta) can be implemented. They are still sort of a mystery to me despite the fact that they spell out what they were doing while Be, Inc. was still around, etc. Does anyone have a really solid knowledge of what they’re doing and how close they are to releasing a public beta or something like it?
to touch it off from the start then, was/is BeOS a multiuser machine.
no.
is it a flaw, no.
was it meanth to become a multi user desktop workstation, yes there were some implications aspiring toward that.
user permissions are there. i.e. the filesystem hooks yc mentioned
>My argument has nothing to do with enabling/disabling service
oh no need for a firewall on the system…?
PalmSource would have no problem implementing rock solid system security in a BeOS derivative.
True.. the only problem is that they won’t
Why did Palm bought Beos anyway was it to get rid of some
‘concurrence’ or do they actually have embedded plans for it?
Does someone know about this?
Bas
Bas,
AFAIK parts of it will be used in the next version of PalmOS yes, and even though they didn’t really buy the engineers, they were actually part of their plan.
The article has a number of small inaccuracies, for example:
– You should have said “gets two threads per application”, not two processes
– Even the above statement isn’t true: you get one thread per app and one extra thread per window (i.e. a daemon without a UI has one thread)
– BeOS is not completely Posix compliant
– BFS has nothing to do with maintaining the integrity of your partition tables, and it’s journaling, not indexing, that protects the file system integrity
– Some audio hardware had much lower latency than 10ms
– One app crashing not affecting the system isn’t due to “memory management”, but instead due to protected, virtual memory
Hehe eugenia is that you again … ;P j/k
>- You should have said “gets two threads per application”, not two processes
>- Even the above statement isn’t true: you get one thread per app and one extra >>
>thread per window (i.e. a daemon without a UI has one thread)
i realised this afterwards.. i.e. ‘Bwindow’ i missed it by a longshot..
>- BeOS is not completely Posix compliant
oh I do believe it fully posix compliant However, it lacks the posix functionality of some specific calls.
>- BFS has nothing to do with maintaining the integrity of your partition tables, and
>it’s journaling, not indexing, that protects the file system integrity
again typo on my part.
>- Some audio hardware had much lower latency than 10ms
I’ll have to take your word on that one.
>- One app crashing not affecting the system isn’t due to “memory management”, but
>instead due to protected, virtual memory
and memory management has nothing to do with protected virtual memory ?
Cheers!
Robert
Can someone believe that? A New BeOS will be released!!!!! The best thing that can possibly happen to me as a user.
I don’t use it currently because lack of a driver, but I’ve never seen anything like it, it’s the best thing that has happened computers since C128.
When OpenBeOS or Zeta will be released, I have a hard time understanding who won’t start to use it. It has everything, even the most useful apps like Mozilla and some Office suite options… even Photoshop under the name Refraction.
Thank you all of you who make a dream coming true!!!
Don’t you find that this ‘zeta’ thing instead of the original ‘BeOS’ in the deskbar looks really ugly? Besides, on these screenshots there’s a mess of french and german and english languages – messy too. Overall impression is that it was rather hacked together from various sources and… well, it just doesn’t look nice!
to touch it off from the start then, was/is BeOS a multiuser machine.
no.
is it a flaw, no.
I think it is a flaw. Don’t get me wrong, I think BeOS is a great OS from a single-user non-networked perspective. But connecting to the Internet as root (to borrow a UNIX term) is just irresponsible. Not only are you risking your own data, you are also providing an opportunity for skript kiddiez to commandeer your machine and use it to attack other systems. In other words, Internet security is the responsibility of all its users, not just servers.
>My argument has nothing to do with enabling/disabling service
oh no need for a firewall on the system…?
I didn’t mean that. I simply meant that I am only criticising the user permissions system (or rather the lack of it) in BeOS. There is a lot to like about BeOS, but I can’t accept its omission of the most basic form of OS security.
for a script kiddie as you call it to comandeer my system , i would like to see him7hr/it do that from the start as i said, with no running “servers” it is virtually impossible (note virtually) unless you know what you are doing, you cannot apply linux system security to a whole other system.
>> to touch it off from the start then, was/is BeOS a multiuser machine.
no.
is it a flaw, no.
> I think it is a flaw. Don’t get me wrong, I think BeOS is a great OS from a single-user non-networked perspective. But connecting to the Internet as root (to borrow a UNIX term) is just irresponsible. Not only are you risking your own data, you are also providing an opportunity for skript kiddiez to commandeer your machine and use it to attack other systems. In other words, Internet security is the responsibility of all its users, not just servers.
But the Unix idea of users and root is also flawed. It is not very flexible and not userfriendly… As a user I don’t want this system, I just want to use my computer.
I was doing a search for info on “Pervasive multithreading” when I came across:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-1998/jw-07-be_p.html
May be of some interest in light of recent news.
the BeOS kernel is not a microkernel or at least not at all comparable to true microkernels like QNX or L4. It is perhaps more like mach. the BeOS kernel has the filesystem and drivers all in the kernel…
“<operating system> An approach to operating system design emphasising small modules that implement the basic features of the system kernel and can
be flexibly configured. ”
but then again , define basic features… (at this time of age)
http://www.onelook.com/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/bware/dofind.cgi?word=microk…
so Robert, you think Linux is a microkernel?
want to dwelve into that do you, no i dont think linux is in any way a microkernel in its current state But it is certainly making moves towards that design.
Zeta zeta zeta.
For how long has this version of BeOS been promised now?
All i have seen is some half assed screenshots and nothing else.
Bah. OBOS on the other hand
nice to see another swede post here.
robert: There are lots of us swedes here
Me: Belive me – there are a LOT of things going on in the background that’s not reported on the web page.
There’ll be another update this week.
/ravon
Eugenia: >can you explain to me what’s Zeta features would be like?
Yeah, I know what you mean. If you think SGI and Microsoft never fully grasped the meaning of security, they look like the most secured stuff on earth compared with Palm, no offence 😀
Mooh: When OpenBeOS or Zeta will be released, I have a hard time understanding who won’t start to use it. It has everything, even the most useful apps like Mozilla and some Office suite options… even Photoshop under the name Refraction.
Hmmm, Refraction is not even close in replacing Photoshop. Heck, GIMP is closer (Photoshop junkies, don’t go out to download it yet, it isn’t close, feature wise, from the 1.3.9 perspective, to Photoshop). And if BeZilla is as bad on BeOS R5, I’ll pass. And if OpenOffice.org is as slow on BeOS as other platforms, I won’t use it either, though I might use that GPLed Gobe Productive.
Anonymous: the BeOS kernel is not a microkernel or at least not at all comparable to true microkernels like QNX or L4.
IIRC, QNX doesn’t use a true form of microkernel, just a mix between monolithic and microkernel. Mach on the other hand is more microkernalish than QNX ever was…
Anonymous: so Robert, you think Linux is a microkernel?
mkLinux is….. close enough =D
Gah, damn testing account and autocomplete (original zeta rant)
I am Norwegian
Hope you guys update your pages pretty soon.
-H-kon
Wow, there appears to be some interest in the eVilla pictures so I am posting a few other of my links here:
http://home.nyc.rr.com/ycrevecoeur/memstick.html
http://home.nyc.rr.com/ycrevecoeur/postr5.html
Here is an excellent link on eVilla from a fellow investor who use to hangout at the BeOS Yahoo finance BBS. (remember LouG1? this is his article).
http://www.cpusales.com/evilla/evmach.html
Correction from previous post: I believe Ragnar reported from Las Vegas not Boston. But who cares where it was from? The point is that our little community had a representative who cared enough to to give us live info on Qubit, Hitachi, Sony, Compaq and others and even have a chat conference after the show to share pictures and comments with the other BeOS investors from the yahoo BBS!
I think Boston is stuck in my mind because that where I attended my first BeOS developer conference. I actually had lunch with Jean Louis Gassee and some other developers! There was sooo much energy behind the OS back then… I still believe that resistance is NOT futile!
Enjoy!
ciao
yc
I’m really really interested in Zeta…
I have been using BeOS since R4. I used 5 pro, 8 moths ago for the last time, because I got my new system and BeOS would not even install on it. :-(( I could not even run install in grayscale.. :-((
All the time that I have not been using it, I miss it really really much… Windows XP and Suse Linux are not even close to what BeOS is…
I really hope that Zeta is going to be released soon. Those MAJOR driver updates may help me install BeOS again!
Wooohooo! BeOS is not dead! It’s alive and I want it back soon…
Why wouldn’t your machine let you install BeOS? What are the specs?
I have never used BeOS, but judging from various screenshots, the window decoration is just horrible. Does the window title always stick out like that? *ducks*
Btw, I couldn’t get to run BeOS on my AthlonXP/VIA KT333 either. I believe there’s a patch for this, though. True?
..pundits will note with a tinge of regret that Apple had offered Be Inc. essentially the same deal five years earlier, for over 100 million USD, but Be Inc. had decided to say no.
I remember reading in either Carlson’s or Amelio’s book that when Apple was secretly shopping around for an OS, Gassee offered them Be for $100 million, but then Jobs got wind of it and counter-offered Next for several times that. Needless to say, Jobs is a pretty good salesman. Amelio was also concerned that Be seemed to be 3 years away from FCS at the time, while Next had already shipped. In other words, Be would have taken Apple’s money if it had been offered.
BeOS may be a single user operating system, but the cat is far far out of the bag for this being an issue for single users.
The biggest area where multi-user might be an issue is within a corporate environement, but even then it having a network login is more effective.
Right now, Unix works pretty well for individual users. I know on my NeXTStation, I did pretty much everything as ‘me’. I would hope others are doing the same for Mac OS X and BSD and Linux.
But what bothers me is the home users running NT/2K.
It seems to be almost impossible to run that system and be functional as a single user, with out admin privleges.
I don’t run it as Admin at home, and I haven’t given my own account Admin privledges, but that system sure is a pain in the ass to run with. I can barely install programs without it screaming at me to be Admin. Plus, I “take advantage” of the “auto-login” to my own account on boot, and that just makes a mess of installs.
“Doc, it hurts when I do this…”
OpenOffice installed without Admin, which is admirable. WarCraft III wouldn’t even RUN unless I was admin. For some reason I can’t use ‘mount’ in cygwin properly as non-admin.
Everyone else I know who runs 2K at home, runs it as admin. They just punted.
The point is that the problem with security is that it’s a real pain in the neck for Users. Whether they understand the ramifications or not, it gets in the way an awful lot.
As long as developers continue to write their code so that they need Admin/root priveldges, a lot of folks are going to simply “stay” in that mode so as to not constantly be hassled by the software.
As long as people are running as Admin/Root, what’s the point of multi-user security if it’s simply turned off. Just because it’s there, doesn’t mean its used.
From a security point of view, what’s the difference between a single-user BeOS and a 2K box logged in as Admin 24×7?
Now, I don’t know about 2K programs, but on Unix, pretty much nothing needs to be root. Servers mostly, anything that is truly “multi-user” as in multiple users simultaneously.
Way back in the day, I was excited about NT. I was all giggly waiting for NT to reach The Users, knowing in my heart that once it was pervasive, that Viruses would be stopped cold. Of course, that hasn’t happened, and perhaps it was a naive view. But, a fella could dream, eh?
So, once again, as with any potentially dangerous technology, it comes down to user education. Maybe we need public service announcements telling people to question where their software comes from, etc?
But I also think we need developer education, or at least some better help from MS to make a single user experience with their home systems a safe and secure one.
Now, I don’t know anything about XP, perhaps they’ve fixed some things there.
LOL Eike, yes, that’s part and parcel of the BeOS. There are pros and cons about it, but one pro is that it makes it easy to drag windows around. One thing I always do to get windows out of the way is drag them down to the bottom of the screen with only the yellow title tag showing. Sort of like minimizing, in a way.
The “yellow tabs” is the default window decor for BeOS, yes, but you can switch them to Win9.x-, MacOS-, or AmigaOS-style decor. Personally, I like the Amiga-style windows. OBOS promises to offer more customization after R1.
And Jay, if you double-click on a window title bar, it hides the window completely. You can then use the taskbar to bring the window back. I also like being able to right-click on a title bar to “move” a window behind other open windows.
These and other features of the OS makes using BeOS such a wonderful experience.
Is security a “flaw” in BeOS? Not for your average home-user. Obviously, if you want to use BeOS in a server situation, you’d want to beef up the security, but PLEASE, somebody, there’s got to be a better way of handling multi-users than the *Nix way. Or at least a way of making it more transparent and less painful to work with. Having a secure system is no good if it’s too difficult to use. And at least as a temporary reprieve, BeOS is safe from viruses and such because nobody’s bothered to write any for it.
Is BeOS fully POSIX-compliant? No, but tell me, is there *any* OS that’s fully POSIX-compliant? I’m not aware of any. BeOS is not a *Nix, but the POSIX-compliance that it does have makes porting *Nix-stuff a bit easier, as the BeBits website can attest to.
Last but not least, I love having a user-friendly OS that doesn’t crash on me. Linux and FreeBSD don’t crash on me, either, but they’re not as easy to use. I use Windows sparingly when I have to, because I hate dealing with its buggy problems.
They can call BeOS dead and buried at the moment, there may be no hope getting the source code rescued from Palm, though. And the prospect of having a truly open/liberated BeOS computing platform will take some time to build.
But the thing is right now is that there are developers building tools and applications for BeOS. I was surprised to see Refraction along with its features. Man! that app is great.
So, yeah, it may be dead as in source code access and development is dead, but the applications part of it has obviously signs of life, though. As long as there are application developments going on, BeOS will continue to move forward at that level. And that’s probably what matters at the moment until the OS is recreated and/or rescued.
The one with the Desktop appears to be a fake as theres cut-out marks on the Yellowtab logo!
Wow, I hadn’t seen these! They look promissing but I thought yellow tab stopped development a long time ago.
I guess not…
ciao
yc
Another Swede here
I read in some recent OBOS-newsletter that yellowtab and the obos-guys are negotiating about things.. They could not say about what but said that “Yellowtab is definitley interested in OBOS”…
Yes, it does look like the logo is pasted in. but, everything else looks okay to me. Maybe they just did that as sort of an identification type thing. I woud certainly not want that on my desktop all the time <g>.
As I understand it, Zeta is based on BeOS PE, plus additional drivers and software. The Yellowtab website is pretty sketchy on information, but I imagine that they plan to switch over to OBOS as the base, piecemeal as the parts become available, until no original BeOS parts are left over. OpenTracker, for example, is already available and can replace the original BeOS Tracker. Eventually, Yellowtab will simply be a “distribution” of OBOS, much like RedHat or Debian are distros of Linux.
Yellowtab may have a license to distribute PE, but they do not have legal access to the BeOS source code, or any rights to make changes to the code, thus they need to switch to something else, like OBOS, if they plan to make any real OS improvements.
The window decoration is ugly it really is. But that is better in Dano where you can choose from some cool ones. But the look can be changed in R5 to by holding down Ctrl-Alt-shift and open the menu now you will se Window decor in the menu where you can choose from Windows,MacOS and Amiga look, you can also use window shade to change color on the ordinary BeOS look. Their is a path for Ahtlon XP at http://www.BeDrivers.com and also a boot image for floppy Disks.
Give it a try!
Zeta may be cool but…
To really win over BeOS developers & users these days you gotta be better than DANO and that’s not easy! With BONE & related command line tools, new UI APIs, XML APIs, pretty solid CIFS etc… DANO is hard to beat.
That’s why I wanna wait for PalmSource.
ciao
yc
Just wondering, but why did you totally skip and fail to aknowledge BlueEyedOS?
People seem to back away from B.E.O.S due to it’s Linux underpinnings, why? BlueEyedOS has the same, if not greater chance of succeeding than any of the other BeOS clone projects – they at least dont have to worry about the kernel, they have a TRIED, TESTED and PROVEN one, wheras OBOS has..well NewOS’ – I’m not saying it’s a bad kernel, but it’s very young in comparison with Linux’s and yes, in my mind being young isn’t a good thing, Linux’s kernel has thousands and thousands of eyes looking over it’s code every day, fixing bugs, improving it. It seems like a sensible choice.
I dont care which group brings me BeOS, all I care is that it works like BeOS, handles like BeOS, then hell it’s good enough for me, who is going to care what goes on under the hood, other than those who wish to develop it? Certainly not the users.
The phrase blindly optimistic comes to mind!
gavin:
the linux kernel is afaik a very new one that implements features of the
systemV and the BSD kernels But linux is also the oldest of the new
Open Source operating systems.
Multics>unix>linux…..
But I dont want to push it to say that linux is what we want as a underpinning for the beos clones since it has security issues that a New User will find very hard to fathom.
and remember they (B.E.OS)have to Patch the linux kernel to get some latency speedups.
NewOS is afaik a Very solid Kernel, good robust design and has some very interesting issues at hand
I agree with you on the fact that i do not care who gives me Beos , But i have some demands I want seen fully implemented in the beos clone of my choice.
so to be honest, i dont see any notion of my wishes in the B.e.OS teams effort, BUT I do support their Great WORK!
Yellowtabs Zeta is on the other hand a Very interesting and Fruitbearing product.
and as far as wishfull thinking goes, oh please.. if you are that cynical get out of the open source world.
Cheers!
Robert
>Yellowtabs Zeta is on the other hand a Very interesting and Fruitbearing product.
Please, if it grew fruit it would not be a operating system, it would be a farmer
(I’m not sweden, I’m brazilian, the firstly…. hehe)
Well guys,
We, BlueEyedOS members, are wanting a OS that do all that BeOS did (and more, of course). If we have a linux as our kernel, this not import now. Only are wanting, that our work will be finished and all the people will see that us not would wrong!
Thanks for all!
Michael VinÃcius de Oliveira
BlueEyedOS Webmaster
hehe michael.. i hear you got some fiiiine women over there in brazil
DDDD
is it at all true
Shh, Robert. There’s a lady running this site, after all. 😉
Micke, thanks for the information! I’ll try out that Athlon XP patch. 🙂
(Not Swedish, either, although my first name almost sounds like you could buy me at IKEA.
eike… hehe so your not that ikea stool i looked at the other day…
btw
wasnt it “Brown eyed fool” ?
D
j/k
cheers
Robert
I personally am a fan of computer security. While I am saddened by the lack of a multi-user environment in BeOS, it does not stop me from using it as the only OS that I need.
I live with house-mates and I do not trust everyone who is able to get physical access to my computer. It is my hope that multi-user will be availiable in the future on my favorite OS. Currently I have a boot password set through BIOS and a screensaver password that I activate whenever I will not be able to attend to my computer. I will keep this setup until one of the OSBOS projects release a version with multi-user capability and be able to run everything i currently run. I hope OBOS will be the one to do this, as IMHO it closely follows the BeOS ideals that attracted me to this platform in the first place. This will probably not happen until sometime after the monumental R1 milestone. Oh well… this is something worth waiting for. Maybe I will be able to learn to program in time to help with making this a reality. 8^)
I realize that not everyone wants multi-user. For some, it is a requirement. Would it really be that difficult to make it an option? If you want single-user ease, just tell the OS and it will be so. Want multi-user security? Likewise.
BTW… I have never had any internet related problems due to the singleuser-ness of BeOS. If anyone has had such problems, I don’t know anybody who has heard about it. That says alot IMHO since I always perk my ears up when security problems are being reported and I am always in the BeOS hotspot, BeShare.
Great article xcasex, and Cheers! 8^D
—
Jeremiah Bailey
a.k.a. drimmeeper
In my BTW statement I meant to say “internet security related problems” sorry if there was any confusion. 8^)
—
Jeremiah Bailey
a.k.a. drimmeeper
The thing that really I can’t understand is why you are keeping “secret” the source.
OBOS, from the first day of its life, has been a “community” thing, while BlueEyedOS has been closed, closed, and closed. It seems you don’t want the community involved in that project.
This is bad, IMHO. If You decide not to keep up the BlueEyedOS project, the community is left with nothing. If
Michael Phipps decided to drop the project, the source is there.
Can you get the point?
Robert, You hear right: Here in Brazil we have the most beatiful women of the planet! It’s a paradise!!!!!! hehe
Jeremiah, BlueEyedOS IS multiuser (We have Linux).
Jack Burton, do you want see the sources??? JOIN US! Maybe when us have finished BlueEyedOS, Guillaume will release then, maybe… I have full access to sources, If you want have too, don’t think two times!
Michael VinÃcius de Oliveira
BlueEyedOS Webmaster
robert renling: But I dont want to push it to say that linux is what we want as a underpinning for the beos clones since it has security issues that a New User will find very hard to fathom.
I don’t see it hard to fathom. Of course, it you put it plainly like most Linux distributions do, well, it would cause some confusion. But if you do it ala Mac OS X (the best model for this), I don’t see how it could be confusing.
My personal reason to be sceptical about B.E.O.S is personal very negative impression with half-anonymous french man who said that he is person behind Blue(Eyed)OS. Both in mail and in chat on BeShare.
I wish not believe that he was Gillaume, but who knows.
It was something like worst example of linux-haxOr, with disrespect to community, arrogance and lack of moral norms.
Sorry.
Hi guy!
Where I saw the name “Guillaume Maillard” I also had a negative impression.
But, since June, When I receive your first mail, I changed my mind! Guillaume is compreensive, a nice guy! It’s very good work with he! (until my girlfriend, Maila, and I wants put in our future son the name Guillaume Maillard! (of course, maybe in five or seven years… hehe)) But please, not attack Guillaume, He’s not arrogant! I can maybe be arrogant, but not he!
Ahhh! In BeShare or IRC, Guillaume is always under the nick “BlueOS”.
Michael VinÃcius de Oliveira
BlueEyedOS Webmaster
Also i’m wondering if someone says:”Yes, it is based on linux kernel, but isn’t yet another linux”. Nonsense. Linux IS linux kernel. By definition. And all those distros (RH, Mandarake, Lindows etc etc) aren’t “linuxes”, but “linux(kernel) based solutions”.
Just checked out their web site. $39 for an updated BeOS seems decent to me. Problem is it seems they are only going to offer it on DVD. I hope they realize not DVD players are not as common ad CD-ROM drives. I will not be able to buy a copy from them because I will not be able to install it.
I think you missed my statement about OBOS more closely following the direction BeOS should have taken. Don’t get me wrong, as I have been following B.E.O.S. progress from time to time, I admire the work your team has been doing.
While I am not totally against using the linux kernel, I would rather not deal with Xfree. I have had many problems getting Xfree to work with my hardware (I can do it, but not with out a bunch of work that I’d rather not do). I have tested Xfree on my box under Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, and have yet to find Xfree easy enough for my needs(I am an end-user learning to program).
I really like the diversity offered by all of the OSBOS projects, and with BU’s initiative look forward to a rich future for BeOS computing.
P.S. As I have free time, I plan on helping with testing the various OSBOS projects. OBOS as I have mentioned will be where I devote most of my attention, but I am not forsaking the other projects. 8^D
Cheers for great work!
Viva la OSBOS!!!
—
Jeremiah Bailey
a.k.a. drimmeeper
>I don’t see it hard to fathom. Of course, it you put it plainly like most Linux >>
>distributions do, well, it would cause some
>confusion. But if you do it ala Mac OS X (the best model for this), I don’t see how
>it could be confusing.
rajan.. i could be wrong but does macosx really run _any_ typical linux daemons …
well thats my 2 cents so…
“Heaven forbid I be criticized
Heaven forbid I be ignored
I have abused my power forgive me
You mean we actually are all one”
Just a bit of poesie in this crusade, sure, B.E.OS is linux powered, hate it or not, but stop boring us with unconstructive comments.
If today, OBOS and/or B.E.OS are not ready it’s the fault of the community which preffer chating than coding/thinking. But one day, sorry I don’t know how, you will be able to boot under one of them and will start to regret and me to laught at you.
There are no internal war in the developper community, there are more interactions between OBOS and B.E.OS than you could think. Ok, you need screenshots, we don’t have new screenshots, then you can continue to call it ‘vaporware’, we strictly don’t care!
Regards,
Guillaume
Personally, I don’t want security features in my home computer. I don’t need to protect it from anyone (local or networked). If multi-user and security features ever become part of BeOS, it damn well better be possible to 100% disable them because I don’t want them. I don’t want ’em.
Now, in a multi-user environment… at work… yes, it is nice to have. The MacOSX machine we run at home has multiple users and there again it makes sense. But my own personal computer, my BeOS machine, is MINE alone! I also run Windows XP Pro on the same machine… profiles gets in my way more times than I care to count. I have no option of removing or hiding this feature 100%. Auto-logging into Administrator makes it seems transparent until you have to go to safe mode or look for the contents of the Desktop/favorites/send to/etc folders… which are buried and copied several times over among all the profiles you cannot remove… as well as all the other useless crap Windows has on my drive that I don’t want or desire to see… and so on…
And no, MacOSX is not the “right way” to do things… security on that OS pisses me right off. I log in as me, I have administrator rights. I go to install an app and it asks me for my name and password AGAIN. If I fail to enter the password, after 3 tries, it tells me “sorry, try again later” and STUPIDLY passes the process back to the installer which continues to try installing software. It then fails when it cannot copy files (because I didn’t log in a second time). Though it still is allowed to make a folder.
What the hell kind of half-assed security is this? And should I add that you have to be cognisent of TWO user names on this OS? One for humans and one for the 8-character limited stupid Unix underpinnings. Duh, hello? I thought Macs where the most user-friendly things out there? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Prettiest, yes. But who cares about reality, right?
really it is up to a third party product to emphasize security . since most workstations are used today by a single person.
so the unice way is not outdated yet but i dont consider system login as per (root,guest) and so on to be feature on the os.
I do however consider it to be a integral part of the boot process to provide a login/password of my choosing, possibly in the bootmanager itself.
But there are many ways to implement it.
also for schools I would recommend intranets (with a login/pass on the page be it some sort of .net / mono derivative) for file storing/sharing and lessons.
We should however with the osbos os’s implement a security framework towards internet security.
I’m coder. BeOS coder. Was also *nix coder before, and no wish to return after using BeOS. Even with beos-like API wrapper. And screenshot is last thing what i wish to see. Attitude counts.
Linux IS linux kernel.
Not quite. An *operating system* is more than just the kernel, it’s also the tools necessary to maintain the operating system. So, the Linux operating system is more than just the kernel. The distros are simply variations on the Linux operating system.
If Blue-Eyed is going to be using tools that are radically different in form and function than the Linux distros, then it can be called an independent OS separate from the Linux OS.
But that’s the main source of confusion for me about Blue-Eyed: just how compatible will it be with Linux software? Such compatibility would be a good thing for some people, and give Blue-Eyed a niche that OBOS won’t have. But such compatibility might constrain the Blue-Eyed developers in what they can do. I dunno.
has the media kit (which was broken in r5 pro) been fixed? can someone post the pics of the nabox fake r6 screenshots?