Meet BeOS 5 PE Max Edition

There are a few BeOS 5 PE “spin-offs” available (three or four), created by BeOS enthusiasts who want to see more of BeOS in the future. Usually, these distros are loaded with lots of patches, additional drivers and third party applications. Vassilis “Vasper” Perantzakis sent us some information on his BeOS 5 PE distro, named “BeOS 5 PE Max Edition“, explaining how it got it all started, where it is today and where it is heading to in the future.A little history first:
BeOS 5 PE Max Edition was created when I first tried to make a backup copy of my BeOS system. At the time it was the professional edition (bought and payed for through amazon.com). When I told this to a few
friends on the Internet, they asked if it was possible to do the same with the Personal edition and perhaps put in some packages that are installed at the users request. I didn’t have the PE installed in my
system at the time, so I downloaded beosonline Developers edition. V1 of Max is based on it, with a few (about 120mb) added packages, drivers and patches. To my surprise it was a great success, and my site that had a 300kbps bandwitdh limit – but unlimited monthly limit – was overrun by download requests. I think what made it popular in the start was the addition of the Athlon XP patch that made it possible to install and run on AMDs newest hardware. After that it was all uphill. I anounced work on the second edition and now we come to the present state.


Present:
BeOS 5 PE Max Edition V2 is based on PE and not on beosonline Developers edition. I rebuild it from scratch, downloading and installing all the drivers, patches and freeware/demos myself. That helped me to create a
clean system without any old stuff from the start. I had most packages added as user selectable. However as with any .0 edition there were several problems. Some stuff were broken due to the luck of testing
time. Booting was not always working from the CD, because of my luck of knowledge on el-torito boot images. Those problems are now solved and I am moving towards the release of V2.1 (November 23rd). One major addition will be the ability to select which patched kernel to use after installation (AthlonXP or Pentium4). Also the CD creation process will be documented for BeOS(cdrecord), Windows (Nero and Easy CD Creator) and Linux (cdrecord) with boot images for both AthlonXP and P4.


Future plans:
a) I am thinking of creating a striped down version of Max, with no additional software, but with all the additional drivers and patches. The additional software will be provided on a separate download with
installation scripts.
b) V2.1 will probably include freeware releases for bone (NOT BONE itself) for those that “beta test” it. 🙂


BeOS is a fast, reliable and modern OS. True the company that created it has closed, but BeOS is so good, that the community is giving it more life than ever. Join this community, by helping the open source versions, bying the Zeta edition and software created for BeOS. This is a true alternative for Windows Desktop. Faster, more reliable and easily configured.

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