In the new OpenBeOS newsletter Michael Phipps is giving a good status report, explaining the status of each kit. However, what we don’t learn yet is how far we are from an alpha public release. In the meantime, the Beunited Java team announced that they now have a complete coomand line version (1.4.2.) running, while 3Sat TV channel will present Yellowtab Zeta on TV today. Additionally, the people at BeOS Max said that the last version of their distribution will be 3.1, because they don’t want to be an obstacle on Zeta’s commercial success.
OpenBeOS Status Report; More BeOS/Zeta News
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
It’s greatto see this project coming along with speed.
Keep up the great work !
<wishing for edit button>
they say they need people to port the command line apps? But I thought you already had the sources for that, Be inc. distributed these sources to anyone that asked for them…. I just checked the BeOS r. 5 install CD, and the sources are in the GNU folder! No need to port these from BSD.
thanks osnews – it’s actually weird that i get remindet to watch german tv on an international it-news site
nice, can’t wait to see the zeta on tv, and i’m even in time, still one hour left – nuff time to install freebsd
Many people have counted OBOS out. As it seems right now both from status report and a lot of more abstract stuff, things have never looked as good as now.
OBOS has gained PPC support for instance and increased portability. I bet a lot of anti-x86 people will love to hear that!
BeUnited bringing Java to the light, after new year SUN start testing…
Zeta reporting more ported applications…
May it be so that 2004 will be the year of BeOS? I hope so for the sake of OS options on the market =)
Now if only Themis could get a “push” so that we’ll see a decent native browser for BeOS =).
Also great kudos to all those not mentioned above who’s doing tremendous work such as Nathan -> Mail Daemon, Rudolf -> Nvidia driver (finally HW works)….
All you devs in the Be community, keep up the brilliant work, I look forward to use your products!
i figured they’d need a good five to eight years to get a usable OS out the door. Maybe i was wrong. Any rough estimates on how long it will be before they put something out?
I am waiting for the day that I can choose OBOS as an option. the interface will most certainly be cohesive and it should operate fairly well.
lets just hope that stability will be easy to reporduce.
if that is the case, we might see an OS that can take the Home Desktop market, in X86, head on.
No one has an answer to that question and giving estimates would be putting OBOS into the same place as where Yellowtab is today.
But something prealpha that would actually install and let you do something might be around the corner, but as with all these projects everything is about the developers and how much time they can spare. For instance Axel’s efforts is indoubtedly amazing.
Of all involved, even though I’m not one of them, I’d say 5-8 years from now is not what they expect… They’re not developing from scratch, they have a functional system they’re replicating so let’s say something that is actually usable (though not stable) within 2 years??? But that assumes they keep up current speed…
At the mo’ I believe networking expert is what is most critical…
“so let’s say something that is actually usable (though not stable) within 2 years??? But that assumes they keep up current speed…”
OpenBeOS just turned 2 (years old) in August. By reading Michael Phipps (until today I always read is name as Phillips.. creepy…) a lot of kits are getting near 95% done before entering alpha and some, like BFS and Translation are almost done, leaving the network and kernel as the stuff that needs more atention.
So, evaluating what has been done, it the amount of time it has been done, I would say (and hope) that 2 years to finish it in a unstable mode is too much time.
Lets just hope that one year from now, OSNews et all will be reviewing distros basead on OpenBeOS
One last note. Congratulations to all the devs! And thanks!
Gein
Looks good! I can’t wait.
Java support is cool, but any word on possible Mono c# support? 😀
The ad was way too short, and almost everything they showed in that ad you could in R4.5 and R5.0 days.
The ad was way too short, and almost everything they showed in that ad you could in R4.5 and R5.0 days.
Figures.
way too short – i’d just opened the popcorn;
but instead they showed a -way too long- boring divx clip
if the audio was synced that’s a first for ANY BeOS or derivative..
Check here: http://www.yellowtab.com/news/article.php?id=65
OpenBeOS just turned 2 (years old) in August. By reading Michael Phipps (until today I always read is name as Phillips.. creepy…) a lot of kits are getting near 95% done before entering alpha and some, like BFS and Translation are almost done, leaving the network and kernel as the stuff that needs more atention.
Sure many of the kits that are done are indeed qualified work, but making the kernel mature and stable takes A LOT of time and A LOT of testing and A LOT of debugging.
Take OBFS as a reference. First Beta was released about a year ago or so and there are obviously still bugs in it, even though very tricky to reproduce. That’s “only” the filesystem, then imagine the kernel?
On the other hand… it’s the leading desktop OS, stability during it’s early stages can be compromised to satisfy the current userbase…
Is it going to end up as another hobby OS? I presume YellowTab doesn’t think so, but I would be curious as to how someone can get by on their computer with just BeOS and nothing else.
I migrated to FreeBSD from Windows two years ago, and I can safely say that I never have to boot into Windows to do anything.
I’ve installed BeOS PE5 and BeOS Max v.2 and managed to use the Max edition as my regular desktop for about 2 weeks until I felt compelled to go back to FreeBSD.
X said:
“Sure many of the kits that are done are indeed qualified work, but making the kernel mature and stable takes A LOT of time and A LOT of testing and A LOT of debugging.”
I agree with you, but I also believe that once OBOS is complete, in alpha state, completly bootable, there will be a lot more feedback from the community regarding bugs.
Bugs will be found faster, and squashed faster too (after all the devs will be working on bugs mainly by then..right?).
Gein
Is it going to end up as another hobby OS? I presume YellowTab doesn’t think so, but I would be curious as to how someone can get by on their computer with just BeOS and nothing else.
I’ve been using BeOS exclusively for about three years, and mostly BeOS prior to that. BeOS is a complete desktop OS. The port of Mozilla and my GoBe Productive office suite are what make this possible. by the way, I have been using the same install of the OS and am on my third computer. My first was an AST
mhz amd K6, the second was an Abit dual mhz celleron and this one is an Athlon GHZ. Try just moving your hadr disk like this in Windows … note: I had to patch the kernel before BeOS would boot on the Athlon, but that is better than re-installing all my software.
ryan said:
>i figured they’d need a good five to eight years to get a >usable OS out the door. Maybe i was wrong.
I remember you saying that, it was a year ago.
>Any rough estimates on how long it will be before they put >something out?
Oh, about four to seven years lol
Just had a look at the status of the project, whats the situation with the GUI and so forth? It seems that there has been a decent amount of planning done, however, is there a move to expand and overhaul some parts to bring it into line with other operating systems? possibly a x86-64 port at a later date?
I think part of my problem with sticking with BeOS was hardware support and some networking issues.
On my laptop, my wireless, and built in NIC aren’t supported.
A minor complaint is that my Radeon 9000 doesn’t work out of
the box, but I found the drivers on BeBits and managed to get
them going.
On another machine (my desktop at the time), I couldn’t get
NFS to work properly. I could browse folders, but once I tried
to play an MP3 off of the NFS share, the player would hang. Lastly, I couldn’t figure out how to add IP aliases to my NIC. Perhaps I did not search well enough.
I liked the OS enough that I am most definitely going to try it again. I found the BeOS Bible for $10 so that will come in handy to… found an interesting section on how to perform DOS operations in the CLI 🙂
So far my Christmas present to myself this year is going to be Zeta 🙂
So far my Christmas present to myself this year is going to be Zeta 🙂
Me too!
CooCooCaChoo wrote:
“Just had a look at the status of the project, whats the situation with the GUI and so forth?”
If you meant tracker, that’s already done since it was opensourced by Be a long time ago and it was further developed by the comunity.
check: http://opentracker.sourceforge.net/main.html
If you meant the App/Interface Kit, like they said in the newsletter, the hardest part is done thanks to Darkwyrm and Adi, but for more detail, you better check Darks’ website:
http://darkwyrm.beemulated.net/
Gein
Great to here they are adding c# (mono/portable.net). Hopefully if all the OSBOSs support it, I can write one app (using the c# BeOS API) compile it once, and have it run on all the OSBOSs, regardless of hardware and kernel. That’ll be so cool! 🙂
Great to here they are adding c# (mono/portable.net).
I’ve not heard anything which says mono support is on the way. Especially not from OBOS anyway, that might be if BeUnited is working on something. This is since OBOS strictly focus on the OS. It doesn’t work like things do in the Linux world with distros. Not saying whether that is good or bad, but it’s merely a fact.
If Mono would be progressing that would definitely be good news, but there are so many other things which deserves a much higher priority. Especially since BeOS work much differently from other systems on the market, native software is nicer than ported software (even though ported software is definitely a temporary solution)
I can think of a number of things…
– Better network support (such as Samba)
– MORE drivers (There’s still a huge need for drivers)
– Native browser (Firebird is cool, but hardly as snappy as net+)
– Office suite (I think all hope GoBe can patch something together, but if not this is something crucial)
– Instant Messaging client (Sure BeShare owns, but some people might want external communication too)
– Flash (Using the web is not the same without it I’m afraid).
Enough said, there’s a lot to do.
Whether or not this will be another hobby OS, I personally think that the aim is not to be, but it’s forced to become one for quite some time if not commercial support similar to Xentronix will pop up to do the “heavy apps”.
The OSS module is great, but that extra edge offered by apple or Microsoft is not provided in the same way if we lack companies who write 3rd party software. For an example, just watch how Linux has failed and will continue to fail on the desktop market…
So far my Christmas present to myself this year is going to be Zeta 🙂
Regards
-A
I loved BeOS and still have it around; but, I can’t see myself paying (not at that price anyway) for the new yellow tab version. Its barely little more then U can get now, for nothing and , I expect, most present users will think the same. As that leaves trying to sell to new users, in the main, I fear it will fail as it doesn’t offer enough, considering the advances in other more mainstream OS’s, to tempt them.
Tis sad, but the way of the world.
The OBOS team keeps providing me with pleasant surprises. I thank them for that. I really look forward to this and i am willing to wait a decade if need be but every time i read their releases it looks like that will be unecessary. I am happy about that.
OBOS (by the way where is the new name guys) is very cool in that it combines the influences of a multi-media easy to use OS and the open source community. I don’t see how it can get much better than that. There is a place for OBOS or whatever it will be called on my hard drive regardless of the completion date.
Since new BeDoper articles don’t make it onto OSNews, I invite you to browse our new article…
404 Company goes Pubic
http://www.bedoper.com/bedoper
I am very excited to see BeOS’s children not only continuing, but thriving. This is the spirit of adventure that brings warm chuckles to my heart.
Pity I can’t run it atm on any of my hardware. (Come on OBOS’s Pegasos port!)
Just came back this morning. Was awesome.
> wireless
That should be dealt with soon.
> NFS
I recently fixed the NFS client to use BONE directly (ksocketd sux), and it’s a lot more stable. I could watch videos and other stuff off NFS.
> found an interesting section on how to perform DOS operations in the CLI 🙂
Just google for “bash shell” or something.
(and DOS sux btw)
> Mono
Watch for interesting stuff soon