BeOS 5 PE Max Edition is based on the original BeOS 5 PE with an additional number of drivers, add-ons, AthlonXP/Pentium4 patches and more software. It includes new development tools from the OpenBeOS team but you will also be able to select the old tools. This is an ideal way to install BeOS 5 off a bootable CD image, for all those who wanted to try out BeOS but they were unable to do so because of the bugs/drivers and patches BeOS 5 PE needs to have applied into it before it successfully run on or support most modern PCs.
BeOS Max Edition 2.1 Released
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 does the author (or compiler to be more accurate) use .img files? I know people have preferences in what they like, but an iso would be universal. Sure I could just download nero, but I’ve had it not play well with easy cd creator (granted that was a while ago, but it took me forever to easy cd back to working order).
I think an img file is the same as an ISO, just rename it to an .iso file and burn
Wow! What a kick-ass job!
BeOS still alive ‘n’ kickin’
Thank you for a great job, I’ll start the download right away and see if my soundcard get’s workin’…. if it does, buh bye Windoze..
Does this version contain a soundrate converter? I’ve got an onboard soundcard (Via686) that only supports 48KHz and with the normal PE, all sounds play too fast.
If not, does anyone know of a soundrate converter for BeOS I could use?
Cool that BeOS is still being updated by people!
The GeForce4 isn’t listed under “Graphics Driver for NVidia”.
Does this mean I shouldn’t even bother?
When I tried to download 2.0, I got a CRC error in the image. Well, let’s hope it works this time …
If I recall correctly, Be Inc. was bought by Palm well before the GeForce4 came out, so that would explain why most (all?) GeForce4 cards aren’t supported by the driver on BeBits.
Better off getting a Radeon, which has an open source driver that can be modified to support any Radeon card.
Adam
I think it’s particulary great how they’ve also made a mini-distribution without all the demo’s and extra applications, for people who like their software lean and mean 🙂
Anyone know when an OpenOffice.org port will be finished (or when free radical software will finaly deliver ?)
I tried Max Edition 2.0 just last week, the installer wouldn’t even start up. BeOS got stuck in the hardware detection phase, I gave up.
I’m trying to put it on my Presario 705CA laptop. Athlon 4, S3 Twister K (savage 4) video, Realtek 10/100. Shouls I just give up, or should it work with this system?
Ben
(Oh, and as for the OOo port, I’m not holding my breath… I’d guess it’ll be a long time coming. I’ll bet FreeRadicalSoftware will release Gobe Productive 3 and have it ported to BeOS well before OOo is usable on BeOS…)
Ben,
If you join the team and help perhaps OpenOffice will get here a little faster…
Is it really true that .img == .iso ?
Rename
The ver 2 had 2 .img files so you won’t have a bootable image if you renamed it. An iso would be great as i wasted a 2 cd’s trying the .cue file . Didn’t work
For data CDs it shouldn’t make a difference. You may want to read this, though:
http://crux.sourceforge.net/faq.php?display=faq&nr=56&catnr=20&prog…
monty
So this is not an option for me. But I don’t understand why does the BeOS community apparently have an aversion towards .iso images? You can make a bootable Cd from an .iso image just fine, so why this d*cking with two .img files?
If I can get BeOS running on my Athlon 4 I might… 🙂
(well, actually, I’m pretty happy with Gentoo’s speed these days. OOo works great under Linux. I wasn’t complaining, just suggesting that people be realistic when it comes to their expectations from OOo.)
You can make a bootable Cd from an .iso image just fine
I don’t think it’s possible to make a bootable BeOS CD from a single ISO. The reason being that the ISO must beformatted BFS and not the ISO filesystem. The only time I’ve successfully made a bootable BeOS CD was by copying my R5 CD with (you guessed it) Nero. Supposedly you can make one by converting a floppy image to an el torrito bootable image, then burning it as the CD’s first track, but I haven’t had any luck with that.
Duly noted.
A good option for me is to have a non-botable CD + a boot floppy. Do you think I could burn the non-boot .img as an .iso and then boot with the floppy?
I tried -all is grey
The P4 floppyP4.img file in the zip is 1.5M something too large to create a disk with rawrite or fdimage in windoze.
The boot.img file 1.4M that comes with ver2 or was it the develpers ver , works but will it access a cd made by renaming the main img to iso for installation.????????????
You need to install “VESA Accepted” from BeBits in order to get color at 60 Hz as there is NO native driver for the GeForce4.x cards.
IT worked this time . .cue file in Nero with a P3 chip. Ver 2.1
Mitsumi 32speed Win2K SP3.
Online with Mozilla
Thanks Guys .
Use isobuster, look for it with google… Can take isos of any type, convert the image to another with a little work.
http://vasper.net/main.php For complete instructions on burning a bootable BeOS CD with Nero ~~~ Works great ~~ Running it now on a …. Compaq Deskpro EN SFF, PIII 933 with 10 gig drive and 300 something megs of Ram. PNY Verto 16 meg video… This is working great !
I have one of those “shuttle PC’s” I think mine’s an ss15g whatever, (http://us.shuttle.com/specs2.asp?pro_id=76) and a lot of OS’s just don’t boot. If I had known it was so finiky I might have gotten another one. Video card is a GeForce4 Ti4200.
If I light up all the safe settings and put the safe video mode to “Standard VGA” I will get as far as the “hand” on a black background. I get that for about 10 seconds then it reboots. Gentoo Linux also will not even boot. (I mean the install CD’s won’t boot). Out of ideas. Anyone?
Erik
Yes … of course it’ll work – it’s an Nvidia card. They all work on BeOS with the Nvidia driver off BeBits. I reckon these are the bests cards to use (nvidia) that is. I’m using a GeForce 2 at the moment. Too slow for Windows, but great for BeOS.
The geforce 4 cards *don’t work* on BeOS with the unified nvidia driver. Supposedly Zeta (yellowtab.com) will support geforce 4 though for those interested.
I tried to install, but the installer didn’t detect my partitions properly at all. It only detected the first partition on each of my hard drives, which wasn’t nearly sufficient.
It’s a shame; I really wanted it to work.
Sikosis, the Geforce driver on BeBits does NOT support *any* of the the GeForce4 models, and it has problems on *SOME* PCs with the GeForce2MX-400 (I have an Asus MX-400 and it works, but others said that some other OEM MX-400s models have problems with that driver) and also the mobile GeForce2GO does NOT work either. All the rest models of GeForce1/2/3 work fine.
Please don’t link to that old benews blurb about BeOS whenever you mention BeOS. And besides, I just tried it then and it’s a 404 to me.Some other link like http://wiki.bebits.com/page/NewbieInfo is alot more fitting and relevant AND helpful.
You can easily make a bootable BeOS CD using the ISO 9660 standard. You add El-Torito boot options, and encapsulate a BFS image. For BeOS users, it’s a better way to just make a .img file though. It’s not worth the extra step to make the main FS ISO 9660/El-Torito. What you can do though is get a silly CD burning program, and get the boot image supplied and use that to make the CD bootable. Any smart/current burning software will know to make it into an El-Torito CD. Stop whining and just burn the dang thing already.
The problem is that none of the newer software recognize my CD burner (HP 9150i), except the one that came with it and WinOnCD 3.7.
>Please don’t link to that old benews blurb about BeOS whenever you mention BeOS
Why not? I was the one who wrote it back then for the exact reason of linking it when I would mention BeOS in the future. The last paragraph is indeed outdated, but the rest of the article is exactly what I would write today too, and it has nice screenshots and it was really carefully written (with only minor grammar mistakes 😉 and uploaded with lots of love back then. For me, this page carries quite some value and memories.
And for the rest of us, we’d like something a bit more up to date. The wiki link that was posted is an excellent overall description of BeOS, with many good links to sites. A general good page to start from.
Sorry, but I prefer mine. It looks better, it has screenshots that people LOVE to see, it gives more infromation about the history and the features that a user can experience with BeOS, it does list disantvantages so we don’t lure people unethically, and only the last paragraph is out of date. Pretty much, the rest of that article is still VALID.
dang. i shoulda read teh comments before downloading! aargh. stupid img file. what a waste of a download. until they can provide a proper iso, i’m black flagging the dl in future.
Eugenia’s right. That wiki page will put people into a coma. Eugenia’s a better marketer.
funny – it is not this hard to transform an .img to an .iso – still it seems a headache for some guys.
Anyway.
The GeForce 4 are -NOT- working! GeForce 3 as the Ti – Versions work very well therefore. If anybody needs the power for gaming & flexibility in BeOS take a look at the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro w/128MB DDR Ram (even those OEMs from Sapphire or Hercules) – the Driver found on BeBits is greeeeaaat.
Bye..
‘coz you need something bootable, and that CD ain’t. To make it bootable, you have to do the procedure with Nero and the big .img file and the small 1.5 MB bootfile. Which, incidently, won’t fit on a floppy, so those who don’t have Nero are, basically, screwed.
Is this NIC supported in this version?
There were some licensing issues ’bout this driver in the past for BeOS…
I began my journey from Windows to Linux with BeOS R4. It worked on my old Compaq but displayed in grayscale only. A lovely OS but no one ever seems to get it to work as well as, say, Debian-based Linux distros. It keeps shooting itself in the foot.
” I’ll start the download right away and see if my soundcard get’s workin’…. if it does, buh bye Windoze..”
Why do people say stupid things like this? Like a soundcard driver was the “only” thing keeping you from BEOS? Please, if that’s all that was keeping you from BEOS you could have bought a $10 used Creative Labs card on Ebay. Somehow I have the feeling this person won’t be leaving Windows anytime soon.
Does anyone know if this version has support for OCHI usb devices. I did not see it listed.
I can’t get it to boot. I have tried both booting from the CD and from the floppy. When it gets to the fifth (disk) icon, it stalls and then prints out “Please insert the BeOS CD-Rom” … I have never seen this before!
Any ideas? Thanks!
I also agree that this fellow will not switch to BeOS just for sound. I buy hardware around the software I want to use. A user simply cannot sit around waiting for the drivers to come out. It can take too long. Honestly, if you want to run BeOS go out and buy a dual PII or dual PIII w/about a gig or so of ram. Get 2 40gig hard drives (BeOS complains about large partitions), and some compliant hardware with drivers readily available. I personally run a K6II w/BeOS.
If there is any scandinavians here you might want to check out this norwegian review of the Max Edition.
– http://www.freakforum.nu/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11311
Hi Richard.
I think you need different boot disk for latest AMD processors.
You can find friendly people using Ozone under Windows and selecting “beshare.tycomsystems.com” as server.
Ozone is available from http://www.ozone-o3.net/