“My shift in focus was further solidified by my first user experiences with BeOS following my installation of R5 PE on a Windows box. What I had read was true! I was captivated, completely enamored. But I was also suddenly deeply remorseful.” What kind of person falls in love with BeOS for the first time in these “late” BeOS days? Read the editorial at BeOSJournal.
Confessions of a Latter-Day BeOS Convert
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Completely summed up well by the opening question that nobody could care less about the answer to:
“What kind of person falls in love with BeOS for the first time in these “late” BeOS days?”
I’m sure this love story will play better as a musical.
“What kind of person falls in love with BeOS for the first time in these “late” BeOS days?”
Someone lucky enough to have the right hardware and no ambition to upgrade it!
Bit sarcastic I know – but from experiance its true, and I’m sure others will agree.
Wonderfully well written, and welcome aboard!
I first tried, and subsequently fell in love with, BeOS just a few months before Be, Inc. closed its doors and sold everything to Palm. It’s a great OS I use to this day. Even though it’s no longer an active platform, when the company died it was still a nice piece of software. Now I just run it on legacy hardware and I never have to worry about downloading updated drivers.BeOS is ideal for those old workstations that can’t take a Windows 2000 install and would probably choke on Windows 98SE or NT 4. It’s a small niche, but it’s there.
BeOS has a habit of creating zealots, and as long as the software is still out there, somebody new will discover it for the very first time and remark “Hey, this is good.” I was one of those people. I don’t see why there wouldn’t be more.
Still waiting on the elusive SP3 for Zeta that was announced in January.
A propos modern hardware support… I am a R5 user myself and though I am well aware I can’t simply buy any piece of hardware and use it with my preferred OS, I find the support for hardware I own now quite adequate. The only real problem I had is my AMD 1800 CPU – the original Be Inc. could not be installed without a trick (a pathched kernel boot floppy and then safe mode), but even that is no problem with unofficial Max or Developer editions of PE. Other than that my sound, network and video and video capture card worked right out of the box! I now run OS side by side with Windows 2000 (the only MS OS I really like, actually) and I really enjoy the experience. Fast boot up time, fast everything. What I like most is the fact that BeOS is really simple and thought out. There is no “misteries” and bullshit “services” and “technologies”. Despite it almost minimalistic design BeOS actually feels as complete and powerful as any other modern OS. As a matter of fact it even feels _more_ modern than most popular OS’s! It is far from being a perfect OS, of course, but the point is that most of the things are just done the Right Way. Furthermore it is also one of the rare _true_ home desktop systems. In past 10 yrs or so we’ve got all a bit brainwashed into thinking that the best thing for us is to use the sam, albeit a bit parametrized piece of software that sits in our server rooms. Well it’s best for MS and other software companies and comunities, but BeOS showed the true desktop OS is better when streamlined for its use. Well done Be and RIP!
I am a BeOS zealot. Proud and true.
I’ve tried off and on to describe what (seemingly) intangible quality that made/makes the “BeOS community” different. I never had much luck (well, aside from noticing that BeOS users were more likely to be digital media geeks, rather than programming geeks), but the author of that article summed it up nicely:
everyone who had chosen to cultivate an elective affinity with BeOS had, for me, a certain special quality by virtue of their ability to *recognize* the unusual beauty of this technology.
I’m all for giving it a try but before I do, what makes it better than Linux or Windows? I remember seeing some TV coverage of it a while ago and it seemed to be good at A/V tasks.
You’ll find a variety of answers for this, depending on who you ask. For me, and most people I’d imagine, BeOS was so fantastic because for the first time I didn’t have to worry about what was going on in the background
The system was responsive at all times under any load you threw at it … if your hardware was supported then “it just worked” … applications were easy to find and the community was friendly … the GUI was beautiful … programming for the thing was actually enjoyable. Some of the available applications were the most well done and creative bits of software I had ever seen.
I found Release 4.5 to be the best release BeInc made. R5 was actually a MEH compared to 4.5.
BeOS is/was a really nice operating system. Once again it’s evident how no-one can get a foothold in MS’ market. If BeOS couldn’t and OS X can’t (other than the niche market however large it is) none can.
BeOS was the best thing since AmigaOS. It even felt like AmigaOS in some respects. Even more than MorphOS which is a clone of AmigaOS ironically.
Oh well. I do hope to see BeOS back in force some day. Miracles happen sometimes.
Very well written article. Kudos to Czeslaw Czapla. Good luck to him in his efforts to compile Python on BeOS. I tried to get subversion server running on BeOS a while ago, but got stuck trying to compile the latest Berkeley DB. BeOS is only partially posix-compliant, and that can make porting unix software problematic.
I agree with Androo’s response wholeheartedly. However, I don’t want to let you be set up for a disappointment. While many of the basic applications are there, the selection is small and you may have trouble finding what you’re looking for. Of course, your mileage may vary (YMMV).
“All this pain is good for me”, hmm, well yes if you think so… The meaning of many of the English words he uses slightly eludes him, but it only makes the article more fun to read. Recommended!
Savage Sailor wrote:
I’m all for giving it a try but before I do, what makes it better than Linux or Windows?
———————————–
That’s a difficult question to answer, as it depends on so many subjective things. Rather like the question “what makes a 1970 Datsun 240Z better than a 2004 Ford Excursion SUV?”.
Anyway, I’ll give it at try. When I first tried BeOS R5 somewhere in late 1999 or early 2000, I had been recently using Windows 95a, 95b, and 98 SE. On my PC, Win 95a would reliably crash if I simultaneously had a print job running and tried to connect to the internet with my dial-up modem. (This was about the only reliable thing that Win95a did.) Blue screens of death were a daily occurrence with all three versions of Windows. Win98 SE integrated Internet Explorer, so that now an Explorer crash would bring down the whole OS, not just the browser. I also discovered the joys of Windows viruses, by getting infected twice before I realized the rules had changed and anti-virus software was no longer optional, but mandatory.
I hated Windows with a passion by this point. So I tried Linux. The first Linux distro I tried (TurboLinux 4) crashed when I tried to change the desktop background colour. I tried Caldera, then the “easiest” Linux for newbies. I had to bribe a Linux Guru to get me on the network. The fonts were so hideous I couldn’t read Web pages. I could click on hyperlinks in email messages, but I could not copy and paste them to something else. I crashed Netscape, I crashed KDE, I crashed the mouse server, sending the PC into a paroxysism of opening random new windows as fast as it could till I did a hard-reboot, which scrambled the ext2 (non-journalling) file system. At least when Windows crashed, it didn’t usually kill the entire file system! I switched to Red Hat Linux. Harder to configure, same inexplicable crashes, same hideous fonts, same ugly destop (this was probably KDE 1.x??). Gnome was prettier, but crashed more. I tried Corel Linux. It was the same story, with a few more problems: it froze unless I inserted a Zip disk into my IDE zip drive. If I did insert a Zip disk, the data on it was corrupted at each boot. Happy, happy, joy, joy.
Then I found BeOS. I paid something like $69 for the Pro version of R5, the BeOS bible, and Gobe Productive, sold as a bundle. I installed it, and: everything just worked. No manual tweaking needed, no crashes, no freezes. It was evident that hours of thought had gone into every design decision. It combined some of the best features of Mac OS and Windows, and added more of its own. It booted in 15 seconds, and could run 8 simultaneous quicktime videos on a 100 MHz Pentium with 32 MB of memory – *without* dropping any frames I could detect! BeOS was always responsive, the mouse and keyboard always worked instantly, even when the CPU was pegged. I discovered new terminology, like “pervasively multithreaded” and “anti-aliased fonts” and “database-like filesystem”. BeOS had much in common with that ’70 Datsun 240Z – lightweight, elegant, reliable, fast, responsive.
But all was not sweetness and light. Be was dying, and I’d discovered this wonderful OS in time to attend its lingering death. Be had already stopped desktop OS development, and focussed all their efforts on BeIA, and OS for web appliances, supposed to be the Next Big Thing. They weren’t, and Be’s jig was up. Meantime R5 desperately needed a modern web browser – the included NetPositive was fast and lean, but didn’t support CSS, javascript, flash, frames, or anything else beyond bare HTML. No new hardware support was
forthcoming, and hardware that worked with BeOS was starting to become antique, no longer available in stores due to the dizzy pace of PC-compatible hardware evolution.
I mourned the passing of BeOS. Then I dried my tears, and went back to the next best thing, Linux. (The ugliness of Microsoft policies, repressive and restrictive software end user license agreements, and increased Microsoft invasiveness into end-users lives with mandatory registration and Windows XP’s built-in “phone-home” features ruled out all Microsoft products from consideration for my personal use).
Fast-forward to 2004: Linux now gives me almost everything I want in a useable desktop computer. KDE 3.2 is prettier than BeOS GUI ever was, and Gentoo 1.4 runs pretty snappily on an Athlon XP 2400+. But…even on this far faster hardware, Linux is still far less responsive to the mouse, keyboard, and other user events. I still have to wait for Mozilla or Open Office to launch – I never waited for anything in BeOS.
And I have to tweak a lot of things by hand to get my Linux desktop to do what I want, work with my peripherals, and look as I like it to.
Linux in 2004 is good, and getting better (KDE 3.2 is so much faster than KDE 3.1.4 that it’s startling). But it’s still not as good in some ways as BeOS was back in 1999. Linux doesn’t squeeze the same performance out of your hardware (try running 8 quicktime movies on a 100 MHz Pentium with 32 MB under Linux); it doesn’t have the database-like filesystem and the incredibly ability BeOS had to construct queries on all your data.
Linux in 2004 may be a hotted-up Ford Mustang, heavy, brawny, fast in the right conditions, and with decent looks, but underneath is a primitive live rear axle and cart-spring rear suspension. Linux in 2004 is still not the light, elegant, fast, beautiful sports car that the ’70 Datsun 240 Z was…
-Gnobuddy
I’m more or less a regular user with very high demands. I’ve tried several OSs for Desktop use and what really surprise me is that none has been an OS of choice, but rather OS of necessity.
BeOS is what I’d like to use but the apps available today simply don’t do the trick…
We’re plenty of people in stand by I’d say who just hope that we get rid of both MS and Linux and get to use something like BeOS or OSX (too expensive). That’s actually the very reason I read this site to see if something has popped up which can possibly counter these 2 horrible OS things we have to live with…
On the other hand, I’m happy for many others who seem content with what is available just that I’m waiting for OBOS or something else made with design decisions from this part of the century…
Someone lucky enough to have the right hardware and no ambition to upgrade it!
If you’re lucky, you have a recent computer that works with BeOS. I got me a new cheap-as-cheap-can computer in November, and to my suprise this 2GHz Celeron (not everyone can afford a P4HT) with his FX5200 graphics card booted BeOS without any problem. After installing the latest nVidia driver, even video wasn’t a problem. R5 won’t recognize the USB controller, but more recent BeOS versions do. Haven’t tried the Ac97 driver yet, though.
Very fast, always responsive, not necessarily pretty, and it was just starting to mature until the “focus change” to internet appliances or whatever that was.
I also bought R5 package from GoBe that came with Productive (an office suite) and ran it on my AMD K6-3 450 which ran about as fast as a P3 800.
The cool thing was how well it did graphics. I could literally play a dozen instances of a .MOV file (movie) and all of them would play without missing a frame. The audio would be on the active window. Change to a different window and the audio would _instantly_ pop on from that window. MS can barely do that with one movie let alone 12.
Most of the programs made for BeOS were polished but simplied (less options/features) than other OSs (I’ve use to have 8 different ones I played with). I really like Word Perfect and there were some writing tools that Productive didn’t have that I really missed. Other than that. It did most basic OfficeSuite stuff and it did them MUCH faster than anything on MS Windows.
There was some software that they didn’t have that I wanted. But not too much. I mainly stopped using it because it was a pain to get all the drivers that I needed. Then I found Mac OS X and have pretty much dumped the other 8 OSs I used to play with.
Oh. Most people don’t realize this. But BioWare was actually waiting impatiently for Be to get OpenGL on their OS so that they could release an BeOS version of NeverWinter Nights. When Be Inc went down that went down too. (huge tears). I can ONLY imagine how well NWN would have run on BeOS.
I _may_ buy a PC when OpenBeOS gets a full version equialent to R5 or better working. Especially if they get OpenGL working and we see a few 3D games ported. But I’d still buy it to play BeOS versions of DOOM and Quake as well as buying the newest version of Productive if there is still one around. Or use the old one if it still works.
Excellent article. The best thing about BeOS is the community, the strength comes from the community.
I remember seeing some applications Steinberg did for BeOS in a magazine, and thinking corr I gotta get this, then I picked it up for free in a magazine CD. Even the editor after a few months said be has lost focus with BeIA. Why did they throw it away like that?
I read that they only had 60 programmers?? You think Linux thousands, think M$ hundreds of thousands, I still think XP is awesome though, plug and play, networking just amazes me. I’m glad about the progress of linux, so long as it keeps moving up and gaining momentum, Microsoft will keep on having to produce the goods.
If I could I would write one wicked Audio Sequencer application, something with the appeal of Ejay but the power of Sonic Foundary Acid Pro, for BeOS then that would be enough to cause interest. Simply cos you don’t need a powerful processor just loads of RAM, HDD.
Hey what was the maximum amount of RAM, CPU’s BeOS could handle?
Jusynt
I used to use OS/2, then I switched to Win95/Slackware dual boot. Then I tried win98 solo – then I went back to dual booting Win98 and RH 4.x/5.x
Thats when I bought BeOS 4.0 or 4.5 (i can’t recall).
I had ALWAYS hated the OS’s I was using. None of them were perfect! There was always a problem or something missing.
1 day after using BeOS, I wiped Windows and used BeOS full time. I kept a Linux partition just in case a distro ever lived up to my expectations . . . (hasn’t yet)
After Be Inc. went belly up I decided to go Mac with OS X 10.1.
I’m a poor schlop, so I can’t afford a speedy mac. I bought a used one on eBay and overclocked the @#@@ out of it, fed it a high speed ATA card, HD, and plenty of RAM and flashed my PC video card.
OS X is no BeOS; its not as fast and Macs are more $$$. But it is like BeOS in certain ways; it works, no crashes, easy to use but UNIX is there when you want to go a tweakin’.
My old mac should last me a little longer, and I fully plan on building a Zeta/OBOS compatable PC eventually.
I would stick with Mac a lot longer if:
Some price drops occured
OS X upgrades didn’t run $129 every few months
So anyways, my point is if you think every OS you ever used is crappy – try BeOS. I loved it, you might too?
You should have written the article on BeOS. What a beautiful description 😉
I had an old diehard Mac fan (back in OS 9 days) who said the only time he’d switch to a PC is if he could run BeOS on it. And he was considering doing it for awhile, but then Be died and Apple got all hyped on OS X, and now that’s where he’s at.
Nonetheless, I know what everyone means by “responsiveness.” Linux really lacks that. Even newer versions of Windows have a real “responsive” feel (except if you install too much software on them). It’s weird… Linux feels “faster” but also feels “less responsive.” I don’t know how to distinguish the two feelings, but I bet a lot of Linux users would agree.
The main reason is probably the slowness of X (Yet Another X Whiner?) and the lack of optimizations in the main toolkits, but both of these pieces will fall into place eventually, at least I hope so.
I discovered it about a month before the buyout. Bought the Bible/BeOS R5/Productive, bundle from Gobe and the hardware to run it.
Commodore died, I started playing an instrument and got back into computers when I could afford a Mac (OS 9 style). After a few crashes, I began looking at other (than MS) OSs. Gave Linux a try… thumbs down. I found BeOS. Unlike Linux (or MacOS, or any BSD variant) it totally lived up to everything the proponents said.
It actually was fast, stable, and attractive. It brought back the joy that left my live when the Amiga went down.
I use R5. I love BeOS and am in it for the duration.
I still use a mac for Video capture, Be for everything I can use it for.
I’m glad I didn’t know of the impending buyout. I like an OS again. Good enough for me.
Great responses folks! I have similar stories to tell but I wont do that right now.
In response to the “modern hardware” complaint about BeOS… This is a tricky thing. Yes, lots of stuff is not supported. BUT, yes, lots of stuff is supported.
I use an ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard with a 2.6 GHz processor. Pretty new. USB 1.1, Firewire and IDE are supported. Do you get USB2 or special IDE stuff like SATA and RAID? No. Sound supported? Nope (but I have an SBLive). NIC supported? Nope. But again, you can get by with PCI devices which are supported.
If you really want to run BeOS, you can do it. If you are only curious, well, it might not work out for you on your system without some changes in hardware.
I don’t run bleeding edge stuff and I am not a gamer. BeOS works great for me for the things I use it for.
“I had used computers for more than ten years, but only now, with BeOS, have I actually begun *computing*. I feel lucky, and grateful.”
Since selling my last Amiga that’s pretty much how I’ve felt, I’ve merely been using computers, not enjoying them ever since. I don’t care to customize my OS to make things easier or prettier anymore, Windows has just been a means to launch applications from the day I switched.
and made BEOS the foundation of Mac OS X rather than NEXT?
and kept the cloning experiment.
I would suggest it would be growing its marketshare due to the ooh-ahhh.
i know “steve jobs saved apple”
well apple could have bought both BE and NEXT!
maybe NEXT for $400million and Be for $12 million, steve jobs could have ported what is best about next, openstep to Be OS.
Pixelmonkey wrote:
Wow Gnobuddy
You should have written the article on BeOS. What a beautiful description 😉
——————————
Thank you! It seems that after all these years the thought of BeOS can still move me to write a love letter to it. I didn’t realize how much I still miss the BeOS until I started writing my post. Sniff!
I have hope for the future, though. As Linux grows in popularity and puts a foot in the door of the Microsoft castle, other free/open-source OS’s may be able to follow in its footsteps. The hackers who created Linux were nurtured on Unix, so they created a clone of Unix. Perhaps a newer, younger generation of hackers will in time mutate Linux to something less Unixy and more BeOS like, or perhaps one of the several free BeOS and BeOS-like projects will gain some momentum. And, in the end, Linux still has one big plus that BeOS never had: it’s Free as in freedom, and free as in beer, and the source code is out there for everyone to use and modify and build upon.
-Gnobuddy
When R5 first came out I was hooked too. It worked on my hardware at the time, it booted up ultra fast, it ran both fast and smoothly, and it’s ease of use combined with functionality was atonishing. It was almost like running MacOS on x86 hardware. At the time I much prefered it to windows which crashed too much and was too bloated, as well as linux which was at the time too difficult to install and configure.
Unfortunatly Be got bought out by Palm and the OS was abandoned. I watched eargerly the first year or so of Open BeOS hoping to soon have a tangible and open source replacement to the OS which all us zealots loved so dearly. However Open BeOS has yet to provide much of anything expect xyz_server updates and the most rudimentary screenshots of the funsamental workings of an OS. After 2-3 years you’d think there’s be a demo available to use, not to bash the efforts of the team dillgiently working on the project, but look at what SkyOS has accomplished in nearly the same time frame.
Zeta I won’t touch with a 10 foot pole, but I did decide to download the BeOS Max edition and give it a spin on my new machine. All I can say is I am underwhelmed. It’s the same OS it was when R5 was first released. Apps at bebits either contain dead links that no longer work, or worse yet the links work but the programs themselves are half-broken. BeOS still runs blazingly fast but the apps have not eveloved with the times, so you have a blazingly fast OS that plays media well and that’s about it.
With the strides linux has made lately with things like live CDs, improved hardware dection and install processes, up to date applications, and a much more powerful command line, I find myself immersed in linux and wondering why I should ever go back to BeOS. I just might if it ever catches up to where linux is now and BeOS is worlds easier and friendlier to use, but as for now BeOS is trapped in the past until a viable installation candidate becomes available for release and some apps for it get some serious updating.
I miss BeOS, wish it kept going. Bought all these books to learn to program for it and then the darn company #$##ed it all up, with the help of Microsh*t. Now I’m eyeing OSX besides the cost it looks really really nice. Much better then windows will ever be in this life. WIndows XP is ok but doesnt have any b$lls.
I tried 2 NICs one was some sort of a Realtek 10MBit card and R5 detected it as NE2000 compatible. The other was 10/100 with RTL8129 and it also works but the driver is not supplied with R5, try
http://www.profik.cz/pub/RealtekDrivers/8139/beos-8139(50).tar
As for USB support, try
http://www.beos.ru/files/BeOS.USB-patches.zip.
It enabled OHCI USB 1.1. support on my R5 (Be only supported UHCI which nobody seem to use nowadys). Unfortunately it is no use without drivers – I can now use utilities like USBCommander to observe how USB my devices appear and disappear when I plug them in and out, but that’s about it. Not much fun really
Sound: My built-in AC’97 or whatever works, but again you must get drivers separately. The same was with some cheap ass C-Media shipset card I tried.
Eh one of the links above is invalid, just browse files at
http://www.profik.cz/pub/RealtekDrivers/8139
or parent dir.
But all in all one thing is clear: BeOS is not any longer an OS that supports much hardware and to be quite honest – never was. Currently it is a nice OS to dual-boot. I do it in tandem with MS W2K and it works fine for me. All the harware I own works with BeOS – the most important for me being sound and CD burner (get Helios for that). You can even get a NTFS and ext2 read-only fs add-ons, so file transfer from Windows and Linux is no pain, but is best to have a FAT partition too, so you can do it both ways.
I started with computers later in life (40s) and if I’d not found BeOS I’m not sure how long or how much I’d have used them. Windows was a nightmare to keep running and I couldn’t afford a Mac to find out if MacOS was any better. Most of the people I knew didn’t use a computer much either, so I didn’t have many places to go for advice or a view of the “real world” and it’s lack of choices.
Being naive can be a blessing though. I didn’t realise at first what a lock M$ had on the market, so I went looking for something that would work like the computers on TV and in the movies.
OS/2 was expensive, Linux (RH5 and Slackware) were a pain in the ass from the word go, and FreeBSD was better, but not enough, than Linux. I even played around with GEOS on DOS to keep out of Windows.
When I heard of BeOS I thought “Yea right, marketing BS agian! Works just like the rest I’ll bet.”
Couldn’t have been more wrong!!! This WAS different and it worked so comfortably for me!
Now I make part of my living working on computer hardware and I can sit down at home and run any of 12 different installed OSes on 8 different harsware platforms. This gives me an advantage that I realise most people don’t have in that I can switch to another machine anytime I want.
But by the same token, I also have a much wider choice immediately availible and I still choose to do a very large part of my personal computing on a system running BeOS.
If Be will do it, fine, if not, I switch to what I need. When BeOS or a variant of it is able to do that task, I’ll most likely do it there unless something completely unexpected shows up on the OS world. It’s also important that while this view is mostly a matter of my personal tastes, at least I had the choice to try until Mr. G used his companies assets as an extention of himself to squash it like so many others because it was a threat to his psyche somehow. I do not fault the Microsoft Corporation per-se, but there has been a pattern of action taken under his direction going back to the earliest days that cannot be fully justified as just “good business decisions”.
And Hayabusa, Linux hardware detection still can’t touch BeOS, it just has had more drivers hacked out for it. With BeOS, if you have a driver for itwhen you install, it pretty much just works out-of-the-box. If you don’t and it’s availible, it’s almost always a drag-and-drop install and you’re off and running, usually without rebooting.
BeOSalso come in an live-eval CD back in the 4.5 release.
It’s also possible to find read-only BFS drivers to use in Win98 and NT. Not sure how far up the NT family line that driver works though as the only Windows I had installed for quite a while is a small 98Lite partition. My wife has WinXP she uses for her geneology work but I haven’t tried it on there yet. I may shortly as I’m getting ready to move a lot of her GEDCOM files and other data to Linux, and eventually hope to use Python to help port one of the geneology programs from Linux to BeOS.
You definitely don’t get a platonic view of an OS, as he says, by sleeping around with all the OS! That’s like signing onto the RNC to sample political life, then Greens.
What would be nicer would be a proper recursable virtual machine, in which one never reboots; just reload various environments. You can do that with VMware, its best-supported hardware, and some configging or you can just pick though the VMs and drivers; at least with BeOS it’s pretty obvious where each megabyte’s getting allocated and exceptional when virtual memory is drawn against.
To get OS properly understood though, one needs to sleep around more in the TCP/IP (or RMI, whatever) stack than various OS. The BeOS one just doesn’t offer multiuser facilities yet….
I think it’s quite obvious to see from all this that anyone who tried BeOS back in the day (myself included – I’ve still got my R5 pro cds) still has memories of it being much better than any other option at the time.
The design of BeOS is STILL better than anything around today – the problem is lack of hardware and software support. Software support would undoubtedly come after more hardware is supported as more of the old fans will move back to the BeOS. I’ve got Max and PhOS on my machine as they are usable (whether or not PhOS is illegal is a seperate issue – but until the day the Loon is given a straight forward command to stop working on it I will use it) and only last year started to learn about programming in BeOS. Having only programmed in windows before I was astonished by how much cleaner and better the Be API is than it’s Win32 counterpart.
nVidia have done well with alternate OS support recently (Linux and FreeBSD) – they know how to make friends with the alt OS community. If now they could just set aside one guy to work on BeOS hardware support it would bring about the much needed kiss of life for an old and dying (but nowhere near dead) OS.
The Realtec 8139 cards work out of the box for me under R5 Pro. Maybe the driver is just missed out of the PE distro?! I have both GoBe and Koch versions of R5 and it works for both I’ve tried…
I was a BeOS zealot. I miss the ease and smoothness of the platform. However, I HAD to switch to SuSE…simply because I needed system security (BeOS is rather good at letting people snoop around).
jm
although I don’t have it installed on my current hardware due to memory and hardware conflicts with BeOS )-:
Still the best ever computing experience in my 20 years as a computer user. I keep watching for some signs of life be they from YT or from the OpenBeOS guys. One of them have got to pull through. Occasionally I install Linux to see how far it has progressed and , to an extent my recent Debian Unstable/Gnome install is cute but stil nothing on BeOS and the farting around to get it working and apps. Still noway near as nice. Hey, Maybe Gnome 2.6 and a decent fork of XFree86? Who knows.
I just really need something to run my CubaseSX on and Forgotton Battles, then I can be Microsoft free. Is that really too much to ask? To think, Steinberg’s Nuendo was up and running on BeOS 5.0 and kicking Windows 2000’s but at the time in beta. Now just a passing memory and a longing for something better.
This editorial reminds me of a classic movie where a young screen writer falls in love with an aging, but still graceful, silent movie star. She hasn’t been in any movie since the talkies came out. I wish I could remember the title of the film.
Hi. I too was a late-comer to BeOS (in the last year and a half or so) and love the same things about is as everyone else here… I also know, as do you all, that Be died, and BeOS is in trouble with a dwindling user base and outdated applications. This is why I started working with the OpenBeOS project, to guarantee the survival of this great platform. I have read a few posts on this thread lamenting the lack of progress on our project, and to some extent I agree.
This is my call to you, BeOS castaways, to come help the OpenBeOS project! We need coders, testers, doc writers, and any other help we can get. Even the simple presence of new, interested people on the mailing lists will help bring needed energy to the project, and might help put us in a state of momentum! Go to http://www.openbeos.org and jump on board!
Thanks,
Brennan
For whatever it may be worth, I’d like to second Brennan’s motion.
OpenBeOS represents our best hope for the future of the platform, in my opinion, and needs our full support. The coders at OpenBeOS are quiet heroes. Join them if you know how to code!
And if you don’t know how to code, write to Michael Phipps with suggestions for how you might be able to contribute in other ways. I know that the Glass Elevator Project — a think-tank forum for “visioneering” the future of the platform beyond OpenBeOS Release 1 — needs researchers, editors, and writers who could take on the (admittedly daunting) task of evaluating and organizing the growing collection of ideas and inspirations recorded in its archives. This would be a remarkable education for anyone interested in operating systems.
Sign yourself up!
Czeslaw
“The killer app? Look in the mirror. You are the killer app.”
For most of us that try to make BeOS a 1st OS, there usually has to be 2nd OS to do other work or even most work.
For me that has to be W2K, not because I like it, (I don’t), but because thats were the power apps are that I use and like.
Now in hindsight, I wonder if it might not have been better to rebuild BeOS over NT kernal or as an app layer instead of new kernal or Linux. In the Apple-BeOS merger talks, Apple supposedly was considering all OSes, even NT4 but NT-MS would have been bad for Apple.
The big advantage would be using win apps but from a BeOS desktop, solves 2 problems in 1 fell swoop. Gives BeOS as many apps as Windows, and gets me off the Windows desktop.
If OpenBeOS or BlueOS make it, it still won’t give me any apps I want or need in a million years, but OpenTracker on Windows would be neato.
I know, it probably impossible, but must be easier than starting all over.
its easy to fall in love with beos.. its easy, fast, simple and charming.. but just like E.T. it can’t stay alive with no support..
an article about BeOS with that lamest Zeta logo? According to Euginia, the -reason- for this is that “Osnews only has icons for ACTIVE supported products.” Something which is patently false regarding BeOS, but anyway so what? What gives Zeta in BeOS R5 PE? Put the OSNews icon instead as you do with -inactive- produts. The Zeta crap???? Perfect for the confession of a nut.
According to the old news, which I recently have revised for my upcoming “BeOS History” article (thank you, Eugenia, for all your benews.com news ;-))), besides “NeverWinter Nights” we could see such “big” games as: “Black & White”, “Shogo: Mobile Armor Division”, “Unreal Tournament”, “Quake 3 Arena” and others (maybe, Eugenia, you’ll add more titles, which I didn’t mention? ;-)). But because of lack of OpenGL they haven’t been released…
BTW, Eugenia, what was the last BeOS-version of 3D-modeler “RealSoft 4D” (Real3D)?
P.S: http://web.archive.org/web/xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/http://www.benews.com/ is VERY slow. Maybe I can somehow download all the news and the articles (pics too) in one archive? It would be very interesting to read them all ;-).
I think there was also supposed to be Duke Nukem Forever. OTOH that may still come…
SCNR
I think that would be a lot more appropriate since that is the natural followup to BeOS, not Zeta.
yT has even said that they are not BeOS but Zeta, and OpenBeOS clearly states they aim to go the Be Way. Therefor it only seems natural from the content of the article that it either be BeOS icon or OpenBeOS icon.
on an old p-266 w/ low ram (12? 16? I forget). It was excellent, and I set my wife up doing audio editing of Christmas music mp3’s & burning cd’s roughly 1 day after installing it. She enjoyed it a great deal. I was impressed at how seamless everything was. Someday I’ll have to put more ram into that old box & let it really shine–when I tried doing some more serious multitasking, it bogged down painfully due to the lack of memory.