Haiku Archive

Be Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced that the parties have reached a mutually acceptable mediated settlement of an antitrust lawsuit filed by Be Inc. in February 2002. Be claimed that Microsoft maintained its monopoly by having exclusive dealing arrangements with PC OEMs prohibiting the sale of PCs with multiple preinstalled OSes. Be will receive a payment from Microsoft, after attorney's fees, in the amount of $23,250,000 USD to end further litigation, and Microsoft... admits no wrongdoing. UPDATE: BeOSJournal.org has an interview with ex-Be employees Dan Sandler, Baron Arnold, and Dave Brown. Interesting is also Frank Boosman's blog on the issue:

Despite trolls' claims to the contrary, BeOS is still alive and well, and no one shows it more than active BeOS usergroups . The German BeOS User Group, DeBUG, has reformed and reorganized and the next BeGeistert is planned for mid-October. More details within.

The online German magazine Technoids features a long and interesting interview with Axel Dörfler, OpenBFS developer of the OpenBeOS project. The magazine can be downloaded in PDF format and it is in German language as of now (some translations are planned, hopefully english too). Update: In another interview, at BeOSJournal, Nathan discusses his personal life, loves and hates, and getting in shape so as not to end up like some programmers.

The second version of BeFree has been released today. This is the first pre-0.2 version with a new design, which consists of some system calls for the Linux kernel instead of a user-space daemon. It is beta quality and may have bugs.The release notes are here. BeFree recently abandoned its FreeBSD-centric platform for the Linux one.

The new OpenBeOS newsletter is discussing the new VM and file caching implementation for OBOS.

BeOS MaxEdition 3-beta1 is released (260 MB). This distribution of BeOS, based on BeOS 5 PE, has support for more hardware than the normal BeOS 5.0.3, including support for P4s and new AthlonXPs. Burning the booting image is a bit more involved than usual, as it is not a plain ISO image, so please read the readme file before burning the file. Elsewhere, there is a new donation project to help get OpenOffice ported over to the BeOS.

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.

If you were to believe some, BeOS is a dead Operating System. If this was the case you would expect numbers at BeGeistert to be dwindling, but the reality is different, the corpse is moving and this was the biggest BeGeistert yet.

The first version of BeFree is released today. It is a GPL/LGPL graphical system that doesn't rely on X11 and is developed under FreeBSD 5.x (should also work on Linux). It is a BeOS 5 API clone (and not a Be OS clone) but the source compatibility will be probably broken in the future, the developer says. The release notes are here.

This document describes the feature of the BeOS kernel to monitor nodes. First, there is an explanation of what kind of functionality OpenBeOS have to reproduce (along with the higher level API), then the author (Axel Dörfler) presents the implementation in OpenBeOS.

A Belgian developer has ported parts of the OpenBeOS/BeOS toolkit and API to Windows. This is not the first time something like this is being done, but possibly it is the most advanced of the efforts. This is also similar to what the B.E.O.S. team does, trying to port the BeOS API to Linux. Update: Xentronix project leader seems to have stop developing BeOS apps and the Sequel OS, citting personal reasons.

BeGeistert 010, the place for BeOS developers to meet up, is now over and BeOSJournal features a round up of the event, plus an interview with Sequel OS' Frans Van Nispen.

OSNews had the privilege to play with the upcoming B.E.O.S. bootable CD recently. The test/demo CD is based on Knoppix but it runs a BeOS-like app_server and toolkit on top of XFree86 and it is carefully optimized for extra speed.

A handfull of well known --to the BeOS community-- developers have come together to create a new OS, which starts where BeOS left off. Bear in mind that this OS, named Sequel, is not a BeOS clone, but a brand new OS which adds new things in the mix while retains the best features found on BeOS and other OSes. The OS is closed source and it is in early stages: it currently boots off a floppy and has a shell. Editor's note: I am part of the small team, since its first days, a few months ago. I designed part of the UI for this OS, but I am looking forward to get a working GUI system before I dive in and do some "real" work on the UI and usability. Stay tuned for more news about Sequel in the future. UPDATE: Please note that this is NOT "my" project. I merely help out the guys on the UI, and nothing more. UPDATE 2: March 2003: I have resigned of my role on Sequel.