Be, Inc. announced that the stockholders of Be have approved the sale of substantially all of its intellectual property and other technology assets to a subsidiary of Palm, Inc., pursuant to the terms of a previously announced asset purchase agreement between Be and Palm. The stockholders of Be have also approved the proposed dissolution of Be pursuant to the terms of a plan of dissolution. It is anticipated that the transaction with Palm will close within the next two business days. We hope that the sale of Be’s IP to Palm will have a positive outcome regarding the BeOS and the BeUnited effort to license the BeOS source code.
Be Shareholders Approve Asset Sale to Palm
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Hi everybody! I’m posting this from FreeBSD-5.0-CURRENT where I’ve got gnome/sawfish set up to look like BeOS using the DragDome theme. Mostly I miss Eddie, and nautilus crashes because of the alpha state of FreeBSD-5.0-CURRENT, but other than that it’s pretty sweet.
http://www.be.com/press/pressreleases/01-11-12_sale_approval.html
eck, well then have THREE BeOSes out… Any chance we could create a BeOS consortium to specify a standard BeOS (TNG?) API’s. I really don’t want to have three BeOS-like oses which are not at lest source code compatible…
Probably prudent to just see if any one of them actually ships before worrying about having too many, wouldn’t you say?
Let us hope the Helmar and his crew at BeUnited (and that includes you, Eugenia) and can get Palm to release the source code to the group so they can finish R6 (if there really is such a revision) and us BeOS users can rejoice and enjoy our little OS another year. I am with the guy who said he doesn’t want to see multiple BeOS clones out there… me either! I think the only other real candidate would be OpenBeOS that is using the NewOS source that I guess from what I know designed by a Be Engineer! Everything else is irrelevant! No pun intended to the ones working on BeLinux (BlueOS) and the other such projects!
Sorry for the missing words and spelling errors… I just woke up ;-\
Here is a picture of a DragDome theme Peter is talking about..
I don´t think its pretty sweet, I think its pretty ugly!
http://images.themes.org/themes/95/screenshot.jpg
/Konrad
Here is the correct link, and YES i think its still ugly
http://images.themes.org/themes/72/screenshot.jpg
I have to agree with Konrad, the DragDome screenshot is pretty ugly.
Just seems to be missing a little something.
Migrating from BeOS to FreeBSD seems like a bit of a painful course to take… the last time I tried installed *BSD (summer 2000) it was a total failure, and extremely unfriendly. *shrug*
Mandrake 8.1 has a very easy install (I’ve heard good things about SuSE, too, although they seem to be on the verge of bankruptcy) but still… it’s not BeOS. Does run a lot better on my laptop than BeOS did, although KDE really showcases Linux’s extremely sad object loader (C++ under Linux means “SLOW” with a capital “SLOW”)… takes quite some time for windows to appear, but once they’re up it’s snappy enough.
BeOS was the last thing in computing (well, other than widespread OpenGL support) that had me excited. Now it’s just work and frustration. It’s a real pity I don’t like console games more, I could dump computers completely and just suffer with them at the office.
If I still had any enthusiasm left, I’d port Corum III to SDL and we’d release Lunix and *BSD binaries/installers (since the Corum III CD sold by Gobe has all the data on an ISO-9660 partition). Not that there’d be any point, really.
*sigh*
– chrish
hey chrish
suppose, and have a big suppose on this, any chance that the UT you ported would see the light of day should this mythical R6/PalmOS v1/whatever its called now, be released via BeUnited? just thought i’d ask.
also, presuming that there’s no problem with NDAs, what level of driver support would BeUnited be bringing to the table should they get what they want form Palm? loads more drivers? any changes to the kernal? i dunno, thought i’d just ask.
all the best
No, it will never be finished or released. Sorry.
Not sure if you were aiming that last bit about drivers at me; I have no clue at all. Drivers are probably BeOS’s biggest problem right now, since we’re starting to see even CPUs (AthlonXP) that are having problems with BeOS… I have a feeling the BeUnited folks don’t have the resources to develop a large number of new drivers, so you’d basically be getting R5.0.3 with the beta BONE, beta OpenGL (which would mean an “official” Radeon driver), beta Media Kit, etc.
– chrish
Chris, there’s more to the current internal BeOS than just those betas that leaked months ago. The Be engineers didn’t sleep in the meantime, believe me!
But I have agree with you, BeOS was the last exciting thing in terms of computers so far. After that, there’s nothing to be excited about any more – and esp not Linux, IMHO. However, if you get the chance to do so, give MacOS X a try. It’s far from BeOS’ responsiveness, but it’s neat and I prefer it over Windows when I have ‘work to get done’.
Chrish! I’m sorry to hear you’ve lost your enthusiasm. 🙁
I actually got into FreeBSD before the focus shift. I really love it! All the attention to detail it requires forces one to understand what’s going on and IMHO is the correct approach to take for a UNIX sort of system. I’ve tried to like Linux (the latest versions: debian, Mandrake, RedHat) but it just doesn’t appeal to me. The FreeBSD Ports tree, the way you build the kernel and the system, it all just seems like the “right way.” 🙂
As far as gaming goes on FreeBSD… it’s pretty rough! For all the twiddling I like to do getting X from CVS is just too much. I guess X 4.2.0 is on track for better FreeBSD support, we’ll see.
I agree 100%, DragDome is ugly when you compare it to BeOS, but as far as X goes it’s doing the trick. You have to remember to take these things in context, Konrad. Besides, there are *much* uglier WMs for X and it’s ahellofa lot more preferable to me than supporting Microsoft!
One of these days I’d like to check out solaris:
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/keys.cgi?intel
check out solaris:
I’d recomend it… but when all said and do, it’s still a UNIX[1].
ChrisH, I don’t suppose begging would help 😉
[1] From a home POV, it’s still a no-no IMO.
I have used Solaris, but not in a production environment. If you want games, there’s really only one platform to go – Windows. As much as it pains me to say it, it’s true. However, that said, that’s the only reason to use it. You can accomplish the same tasks in just about every other OS; I absolutely hate Linux. And gnome/sawfish is a slow, flaky piece of trash. I still use BeOS for what it does well. And you just cannot find that kind of responsiveness in any other OS! That said, I don’t use it as much as I’d really like, but I think there will be changes in that realm over the next few months. I think BeOS will live on, and actually be improved and usable by the masses. BeOS was excellent when it was young – developers houses saw that, and would learn it, code in it, and release some nifty software. Independent developers saw that you could port to it and released some really ugly software. BeOS is a dream OS (wet dream for some); one that never really came to the conscious reality we live in every day. But it was close – and I think for it to succeed developers, individuals and dev houses, need to learn it and code to it, in it and stop relying on ported crap from Linux. There’s a reason Linux software is crap; if there is an R6, and I think there definately will be, let’s not force it into oblivion by the same routines that helped bring it down before.
MacOS X looks interesting, but I’m not willing to drop $4k Cdn on a proprietary box just in case it turns out to be something I like. 🙁
Neverwinter Nights (from BioWare) will be my next “platform” by the look of it. They’ve done almost everything I wanted to do in my RPG engine (well, it’s tied to D&D 3rd Edition and I wanted to be game system agnostic, but that’s only a minor quibble from the player’s point of view)…
I put Lunix on all my boxes just to have a semi-stable environment to use for non-gaming, without the constant threat of viruses. It’s certainly no fun (at least KDE gives you a decent C++ API, and current XFree gives you hardware-accelarated OpenGL, at least on 2/3 of my systems).
– chrish
$4kCnd? You should maybe consider an iBook – it starts at 1300 USD, and if you don’t like MacOS X you still have a decent Linux laptop for a good price. At least, I haven’t found a $1300 x86 notebook that runs >4hrs on one battery.
Actually, I like FreeBSD. User friendly it isn’t, but I find its configuration and maintenance to have an edge over all the Linux distributions I’ve tried in consistency, stability and, well, logic. (Those Linux distributions recently included Debian, Slackware and Gentoo, and have included Mandrake, Red Hat and SuSE in the past.) Most configuration options can be tweaked by editing the /etc/rc.conf file.
For a window manager under any Unix I’ve become an advocate of XFce. It’s not terribly attractive, but it’s very fast and responsive and it’s easily configurable entirely from the GUI. (Most attempts at this under Unix fail, in my opinion; adding new programs under KDE and GNOME is like pulling teeth compared to XFce. Nothing’s been as easy for this as BeOS, but XFce is at least on a par with Windows.) Aesthetically it’s nothing like BeOS, but in use I want a GUI to basically get out of my way–and it does a respectable job of that. It also comes with an Explorer-like file manager which, I noticed, keeps ‘live’ views of the file system. XFce also supports GNOME and KDE ‘hinting,’ anti-aliased fonts, yadda yadda.
I haven’t played around with OS X yet to any real extent. Most of what I’ve heard about it suggests it fails the “get out of the way” test, albeit not nearly as badly as most Unix window managers (and as badly as I suspect Windows XP does, but I haven’t used that one at all).