Marcus Overhagen of OpenBeOS has just released the alpha of the new Media Kit. It’s a bit feature-light at the moment, but already usable.
OpenBeOS Media Kit Alpha 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
… and closer! I don’t know about the rest of you avid OSNews readers, but I can’t wait until the full “1.0” release of OBOS!
The Media Kit is extremely complex thing to code, and that requires a huge amount of talent. That Overhagen has gotten this far shows once again that OBOS has an extremely bright future. When they hit R1 and aim for R2, OBOS will obviously not just take up pace with competing operating systems, but we can probably expect them to run like crazy people for R2.
For those who doesn’t know, heavy development has actually already started on R2, both in terms of concepts and ideas but also actual development.
But most important right now is the huge kudos we owe Overhagen and his teammembers.
I know that many people don’t like Eugenia’s pessimism about OpenBeOS, but I’m beginning to get a little annoyed. Mainly with the fact that they DO NOT update their status page. It still says at the bottom copyright 2001-2002. So many people have complained about it in forum and the suggestion box. How hard is it to update that? It’s a huge morale booster to see progress progress in such a tangible form, it gets people excited. Another thing is the name which most people completely forgot about. Months ago they announced a naming poll where you voted from 15, in my opinion, not so good, names. They tricked us, and then they sent something apologizing…but we are STILL without a name. When is the name coming? “When the new website design is done.” Bullshit…this is all just stalling. I appreciate the effort that’s gone into this project, and with some snooping one can find that LOTS has been done, however they are shooting themselves in the foot by excluding anybody who doesn’t have access to the CVS and cannot see what’s actually happening. Eugenia, I beg of you…you seem like a fairly influential person in the world of BeOS, runnig this website and all…can you not try to plead with them to keep the public informed? It’s so crucial and they’ve dropped the ball so many times. It’s such an easy thing to do…just get some of the teams (we can accept the fact that some of the teams aren’t doing jackshit, but it looks like a lot of them have made tangible progress since that chart was last updated) to e-mail you when they get another “block” done, and for God’s sake, decide on a bloody name! As you can see, this is fairly frusterating to me and I’m sure to many other people.
Lord, this is long-winded and probably repetitive.
… and closer! I don’t know about the rest of you avid OSNews readers, but I can’t wait until the full “1.0” release of OBOS!
Hehehehe… I´m excited about it, too. I still have R5 installed in a little partition to play once in a while. Unfortunately, it doesn´t support very well my sound chipset, which is an AC97 I guess (can´t remember right now and I´m at work), and can´t get the display settings to work the way I want (like I do in Linux and Windows).
Also, I knew BeOS a little bit after they released Personal Edition for free and then got sold to Palm, didn´t play with it too much. Nonetheless, it is the fastest desktop OS that I ever saw. Even today, I like to open several MPEGs and play them at once to impress my friends.
I hardly can wait for a full release of OpenBeOS.
Cheers,
DeadFish Man
Please DO NOT reply to trolls like rowel. If you don’t reply to them, they just go away. All they need is attention.
I will just say that most of what you said is factually incorrect. For start, we are not weaiting on the new site design (not for a long time now) as it is complete and I can tell you it is awesome (IMHO, anyway). We are now waiting on the non-profit stuff to be finished (as Michael pointed recently in the project mailing list). When that is finished you will get the complete package. You havge 2 options here. Be patient or not be patient. Either way it won’t change how long it will take to get everything sorted out and the new site/name to be released.
getting closer, but definitely getting
Outstanding!
Congrat to the MediaKit team. This is really awesome work. I missed Marcus demostration at Begeistert, but now I can try it myself. Great work all MediaKit contributors…
/Konrad
I think you just proved my point. 😉
I will just say that most of what you said is factually incorrect. For start, we are not weaiting on the new site design (not for a long time now) as it is complete and I can tell you it is awesome (IMHO, anyway).
How would I have known that? I follow OpenBeOS’ website quite carefully, and last I heard, they were waiting on the new website design to release the new name to the public. Whether or not that is true or not is irrelevant…that’s all the public would have ever seen. If something happened that’s preventing you from releasing the name, TELL US. People can tolerate lateness, things not getting done on time, or conflicts. People are, however, not accepting of not knowing what’s going on.
You havge 2 options here. Be patient or not be patient. Either way it won’t change how long it will take to get everything sorted out and the new site/name to be released.
I think that what you’re not realizing is that I, along with most of the audience of OpenBeOS’ progress, are just so left out of everything that there is nothing to be patient about. It’s obvious that you’re not still tallying votes or creating the website…the problem is that we don’t know what you’re doing. What is the reason for us being left out of the loop? It’s not some secret club…it seems that sharing as much information as possible could do no harm.
I’m sorry if I sound ungrateful…I’m very appreciative of what everybody is doing, and I appreciate the enormity of the task and the complexity. I’m just trying to convey a sense of hopelessness among the audience. I know that nobody is purposely trying to alienate your very captive audience, but it is happening and there are very simple ways to avert it. Alert us of the progress, and don’t make empty promises. The status page would be a start. 😉
You didn’t read all of Bruno’s post. OBOS is still waiting for the non-profit organization paperwork to go through (so they’re a registered company).
Congrats Marcus and everyone else who took part in this alpha release!
It’s good to finally see some progress. I was beginning to agree with Eugenia about OBOS dying. Looks like it’s developers have yet again proven me wrong. Congrats to the OBOS team.
Way to go Marcus and team. The MediaKit is one of the 4 pillars of what makes BeOS unique (the others being the Kernel, the App/Interface kit, and the BeFileSystem). 2 of the pillars are functional (alpha/beta), the other 2 are also making amazing progress. Expect great things by the end of the year.
Looks as if I’ll be paying out my Milestone prize before the years end 🙂
BGA and many others doing very well for sure, but I must admit the critics here. That statuspages update far to slowly and that the organisation stuff isn’t fixed yet sort of sucks too. But that’s Phipps stuff…. think he should try to work with the VM and just annonunce they need someone to administer the organisation work.
and BeOS is hardly dead, I think this is another step showing the public this.
Also noticed is that status page actually has updated today..
And one final note. Someone had AC97 sound… Marcus recently released new drivers for that one too.. check it out on BeBits
I sincerely hope that the Media kit will more fully
support TV cards when its finished, in particular the
closed captioning support that one of the developers
for the Max Personal edition said was unimplementable
due to certain needed changes in the Media Kit. As
I am hard of hearing and use my TV card for my primary
television viewing device this is very important to
me, and it should be an importtant feature in any so
called Media OS. Here’s to hoping that eventually I’ll
have a BeOS that will run on my flaky SiS730 based mobo.
I seem to have trouble mostly with getting the onboard
audio to work, the video chip is doable if you select
the resolution either via bootsafe or via the utility
(I forget its name right at the moment) but even though
I’m hard of hearing I’d like to be able to _hear_ my
MP3s!! (Or maybe its _because_ I’m hard of hearing that
I don’t find the system speaker driver to be of much
use. . .?)
–iWindoze
It warms my heart to hear about progress on OpenBeOS. I really hope it turns out to be as fast as R5.
even though i’ve used BeOS for all of 20 mins without a working inet connection … i was really impressed by the very concept … it has a certain zest that i can’t describe.
i really look forward to this projects R1 release. who knows, i might be competent enough in my coding skills by R2 to actually help out
>>You didn’t read all of Bruno’s post. OBOS is still waiting for the non-profit organization paperwork to go through (so they’re a registered company). <<
Which should take all of about 5 minutes. My lord, you can incorporate in less than 24 hours. So, what is the hold up?
I’ve been following the mailing list. It seems that the State of NY has kept refusing Phipps on grounds of not enough reason to be a nonprofit.
So you’re wrong there.
> Which should take all of about 5 minutes.
Well, I’ll bet setting up a non-profit involves a sight more red tape than an LLC or something similar.
Personally, I think they should just form an LLC and drop the whole idea of non-profit. Be a real company for goodness’ sake. WalterOS Inc. Leave the non-profit stuff to organizations like BeUnited.
I mean, the dream is to get paid to work on this stuff, right? And, since it’s all MIT-licensed, it’s not like if WalterOS Inc. goes belly-up they can take the whole community down with them.
So you operate at a loss for the first few lean years. Big deal.
C’mon OBOS: grab the bull by the horns, become a regular small business — and to start off, start selling “R5 upgrade” CD’s containing an install program along with everything you have so far that can be dropped in to replace official R5 pieces.
It’s not like you’ll have a shortage of customers around here, if the comment-count is any indication.
You’ve already proven your good will by MIT-licensing it — why do the non-profit thing? So we can make donations? Heck, I’d rather “donate” by purchasing a CD.
[re: OpenBeOS as a business instead of a non-profit org.]
It’s not like you’ll have a shortage of customers around here, if the comment-count is any indication.
Talk is cheap.
That is right! Why not get that Media Kit Alpha running in one of these:
http://64.246.37.205/images/shows/2002/woa/woa_cd.jpg
That is a microwave with a Pegasos inside! Sound better than a Toaster?! Check http://www.pegasosppc.com!
😀
OpenBeOS is being ported to the Pegasos now and we can think of nothing better than to bring Be back to the PPC for a special VideoMicrowave (MediaKit) Release!!!
Best regards,
Raquel and Bill
Genesi
See concept site at http://www.videomicrowave.com (only French works…wonder why so far?)
read the ‘readme’??
Don’t expect too much when playing around with this release. It will probably crash your system in all kinds of different varieties, but won’t even support the wide-spread SB-Live.
Another problem is the fact that Be Inc. never published the API to their CODECs and therefor support is missing for all of the media encoder/decoder add-ons.
… ‘The media_server crashes when you quit it’
This is actually a known problem in an alpha release and still you publish it? At least be honest and rename this to ‘an open debug session’.
Trying to rebuild an OS… you guys just have to much free time on your hands.
The DEFINITION of an alpha release is “open debug session.” It’s expected. What is good is that it’s a start.
>Trying to rebuild an OS… you guys just have to much free time on your hands.
Tell that to Linus Torvalds.
>The DEFINITION of an alpha release is “open debug session.”
You’re right, sorry. I thought it was the actual Release V1, alpha. Well, it will just take a few additional years…
>Tell that to Linus Torvalds.
Anytime!
Hello Anonymous coward,
you don’t seem to understand the purpose of an alpha release. It is published to show the people interested in OpenBeOS that we are indeed making progress, and allows them to see what we are doing. It also allows them to give us feedback about problems, so we can fix them.
There are only to options:
a) release what is working, learn about new bugs and fix them
b) don’t release anything. Nobody will know what’s going on.
> It will probably crash your system in all kinds of different varieties,
No, it will not crash the system. The only thing that is known to crash during quitting is the media_server application, but this doesn’t harm anything, you can just click on the close button. This bug will be fixed in the next release.
>but won’t even support the wide-spread SB-Live.
Yes, this is a problem that has been identified in a prerelease test of alpha 1 with a few persons. It will be fixed in the next release. Without doing this alpha release it wouldn’t be known at all. I don’t have that card.
> Another problem is the fact that Be Inc. never published the API to their CODECs
This is no problem, there are enough good (and better than the R5 codecs) open source codes available that can and will be used.
> At least be honest and rename this to ‘an open debug session’.
It already is called alpha 1 and preview release, that’s enough.
Congrats on this very important first step! A media kit is such an important part that many OS’s still don’t have.
As far as the PR goes, I think a lot of the developers realized that too much PR too early only slows development and feeds the pesimists. When something is ready, it is announced like this ( and even still- there’s criticism for an APLHA release)
Great job Marcus.
>>It seems that the State of NY has kept refusing Phipps on grounds of not enough reason to be a nonprofit.<<
As a former citizen of the Peoples Democratic Socialist Republic of New York, I would suggest incorporation in Delaware or Nevada.
Hmm..
Seems to me if they continue using the name OpenBeOS and whomever owns that name does not complain within 2 years of the time it was first used, we would be free to use it (statute of limitations). I am pretty sure that is why the lack of a rush for a name.
That, and did Be, INC sell the rights to the name OpenBeOS to PalmSource, or did they ever have a real right to it?
Thinks to ponder…
–The loon
First of all, hats off to Marcus Overhagen and all that helped so far! It’s very exciting to see the Media Kit picking up speed again!
Now my take on various comments.
> the fact that they DO NOT update their status page.
One reason is that it is difficult to exactly pinpoint the time when s.th. moves from e.g. 1st Alpha to 2nd Alpha in the status diagram. This is something the new web design will probably solve as it eases the administration of updating the status. That’s what I read anyway (and no, I don’t think this kind of information deserves a news entry).
> however they are shooting themselves in the foot by excluding
> anybody who doesn’t have access to the CVS and cannot see what’s
> actually happening.
Well, fact is, everybody _has_ access to the CVS. Everybody who’s interested enough in this project to read through the website also finds out about the various mailinglists, among them the cvs-digest, and the links to their archives. All major improvements and milestones are announced on the website. Many administrative issues are addressed in the funtastic newsletters.
Is the information management perfect? No way! But it certainly isn’t as abyssmal as it is portrayed in that comment.
> we can accept the fact that some of the teams aren’t doing jackshit…
Pheew, I bet the OBOS developers are relieved that you are so forgiving…
> Personally, I think they should just form an LLC and drop the whole
> idea of non-profit. Be a real company for goodness’ sake. WalterOS Inc.
> Leave the non-profit stuff to organizations like BeUnited.
I guess one reason is that you’ll have a lot more legal and fiscal troubles as a “real” company. Not being a commercial company is also much more in the spirit of this open, fun, no-strings-attached developer community.
> I mean, the dream is to get paid to work on this stuff, right?
I doubt any dev would be upset if he was to be paid
But being non-profit doesn’t mean that developers can’t be paid. You are allowed to have revenues as long as you spend them again (on developers, licensed technology, whatever… you can also hire people for administration, taxing, law-suits…:)
> we can accept the fact that some of the teams aren’t doing jackshit…
Pheew, I bet the OBOS developers are relieved that you are so forgiving…
Well, from what I understand, there are certain teams that are not doing anything. For example, I remembering hearing a while ago that nobody had done anything to the CVS in quite a while on that project. I never said that none of the teams were doing anything, and I never said that MOST of the teams weren’t doing anything. All I said is that the public isn’t going to be incested when a block isn’t added to x team in three months…it’s just nice to see the things that are progressing progress.
> the fact that they DO NOT update their status page.
One reason is that it is difficult to exactly pinpoint the time when s.th. moves from e.g. 1st Alpha to 2nd Alpha in the status diagram. This is something the new web design will probably solve as it eases the administration of updating the status. That’s what I read anyway (and no, I don’t think this kind of information deserves a news entry).
I can appreciate the complexity of rating something on a point-based scale, and if they don’t want to do that, then fine…don’t. But don’t leave the status page up if it’s so meaningless. If a random person six months ago checked that and then came again and checked it, they’d think that nothing was done. Don’t let that happen. Let the teams make short remarks on what’s being done. Whatever…just don’t leave the status page up.
> however they are shooting themselves in the foot by excluding
> anybody who doesn’t have access to the CVS and cannot see what’s
> actually happening.
Well, fact is, everybody _has_ access to the CVS. Everybody who’s interested enough in this project to read through the website also finds out about the various mailinglists, among them the cvs-digest, and the links to their archives. All major improvements and milestones are announced on the website. Many administrative issues are addressed in the funtastic newsletters.
Is the information management perfect? No way! But it certainly isn’t as abyssmal as it is portrayed in that comment.
Yes, but not everybody wants to go to the CVS and see what’s going on. Why not make it easier for people and just post small bits on a very accessible webpage? Why make people download the CVS program and get a username/password just to see the progress? Too much work.
Whoops, in that paragraph that starts out “Well, from what I understand…” I’m referring to the game team who hasn’t done anything.
any screenshots?
We can all just hope that some of these informational concerns are better addressed with the new website (and that it arrives RSN…). Still, what we have to keep in mind is that OBOS is low on active developers. If those prefer coding over updating the website there’s not very much you can do about it. Who’d risk losing a dev that resents administrative tasks by ordering him around?
Some comments I read elsewhere are almost funny: “Put X people into every team to update the status. Put Y people into a team to have a commitee instead of one leader.” Some just don’t get that there are no people to “put” anywhere. It relies entirely on volunteers. And there have been quite a few non-coders trying to do just that, keeping track of the progress. But for some reason or another these efforts die down after a short while. If anyone feels inspired to comb through the mailinglists for short statusreports I’m sure he won’t be stopped.
So, I stick to my 1st sentence.
It can be a lengthly process to be approved as a non-profit if the nature of the organization is such that it is not obvious what purpose it has (in the context of what is usually thought as what non-profits do – provide services for low income people, for the elderly, for children, etc.). It would be a difficult task to write it up using the traditional concepts and language.
However, I think Stephen Smith’s original comment still has merit – why couldn’t OBOS have updated everyone on their current web site, explaining the situation – that they are waiting for non-profit status approval?
And enjoy the fact that something fantastic has happened in BeOS land once again.
Status update here and there, I’m crazy about them too, but fact remains, we should try to give kudos to Overhagen in this commentary section rather than wasting time blaming stuff on ny State etc..
Stephen Smith wrote:
Yes, but not everybody wants to go to the CVS and see what’s going on. Why not make it easier for people and just post small bits on a very accessible webpage?
It’s not useful at all to post small bits of sourcecode, when everyone can have access to the full and current sourcecode by downloading one small program and executing
it.
Why make people download the CVS program and get a username/password just to see the progress? Too much work.
You are wrong here. You don’t need to get a username and password to access CVS, you don’t need our permission. But the normal method to access a CVS repository is to use the cvs program, and you can find instructions how to get the sourcecode of OpenBeOS on our website. You just need to execute these two commands after installing the cvs program, and you will get the full sourcecode.
cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/open-beos login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/open-beos co current
For those who are too layzie to get the source and compile it, we are sometimes providing easy to use packages, like in this case, the media kit alpha 1.
BTW, it you want to see the CVS in a browser, goto http://cvs.openbeos.org
I think YT’s website says that they are commited to open source. have you guys been in contact with them? Reason I ask is that maybe there is a possibility of collaboration in some of the areas besides the kernel. whats the point in duplicating then improving the media kit if zeta might be successful. If zeta becomes an beos “standart” then if you want to follow with an open version you will have to pursue them concering compatibility, or are you guys simply copying beos 5 and then improving however you feel necessary. Simply put, I hope there is some collaboration with YT and there is no man power wasted (didnt know how else to put that
I also hope that YT is really commited to open source, I think it can possibly drive OpenBeos and Zeta forward.
I wouldn’t put that much faith into Zeta if I were you. Zeta indeed waits for parts from OBOS so they can change part by part from current R5 codebase into OBOS codebase.
However, getting something back is not very likely, the future of OBOS is very likely to become commercially distrolike. Something similar to Mozilla I think.
Zeta is hardly committed to Open Source, be sure about that…
Look, these people all know each other. YellowTAB is 5 people who go on BeShare almost every day and talk to the OpenBeOS devs. Most of them know each other in person from BeGeisterts and the like. Why do you think they won’t give back? Their website says they will. Bernd is EXTREMELY dedicated to BeOS, he will do whatever is necessary. Why the hell should we be sure that they’re not committed? Just because of your prejudice against proprietary software? If they could make it OSS, they would. Unfortunately, the code is not theirs to open.
Stop spreading FUD and lies.
How many times do we have to say it?
# include <R6_not_R5_codebase.h>
# define BEFORE_BE_DIED NotPalm
licenseCode(YellowTAB, BEFORE_BE_DIED);
isLegal(YellowTAB)=TRUE;
Basically what I’m hoping is YT turns into the RedHat of beos. I dont see why it cant be done. Oh and YT does state on their webpage that they are commited to open source, I just wanted actual clarification if those guys were actually working together.
anyhow, cant wait for zeta.
Thanks for the work, Marcus!
>Why not make it easier for people and just post small bits on a very accessible webpage?
Go to BeBits and use my CheckItOut app to get chunks from the OBOS CVS tree or read the instructions on SourceForge’s page.
I am impressed;kudos to you OBOS guys!
-A