Haiku Archive

Blue Eyed OS, one of the premiere open source BeOS replacements, released their first downloads yesterday, a beta version of their kernel_server. It can be downloaded from the Blue Eyed OS website. They've also added a new screenshot as well as an interviews section to their homepage.

Now that there are a number of independent projects seeking to create BeOS compatible systems, BeUnited has launched an effort to share and promote the open standards for these Open Standards BeOS-compatible Operating System (OSBOS). Read about it at BeUnited.org

BeOS 5 PE Max Edition is based on the original BeOS 5 PE with an additional number of drivers, add-ons, AthlonXP/Pentium4 patches and more software. It includes new development tools from the OpenBeOS team but you will also be able to select the old tools. This is an ideal way to install BeOS 5 off a bootable CD image, for all those who wanted to try out BeOS but they were unable to do so because of the bugs/drivers and patches BeOS 5 PE needs to have applied into it before it successfully run on or support most modern PCs.

BlueEyedOS has made some progress in the past few months, and here are two brand new screenshots showing the progress. In the meantime, the DirectFB-based Cosmoe 0.6 is expected to be released around Christmas, but Bill Hayden has already released a developer release. Update: More BeOS-related news today: Unconfirmed rumors want OpenBeOS to have been renamed to "Walter Operating System", while OpenBFS 1.0 Beta3 is posted for testing.

You can now vote for what new name you want OpenBeos to be called.

It is always cool seeing less popular operating systems to be endorsed by the media. Linux has been mentioned or shown in quite a few movies so far, but this is BeOS' turn to be briefly shown on a new, independant movie, titled "Apartment Story". The movie was produced by The General Coffee Company Film Productions, who by the way, also do... software (mostly for BeOS). Check out the trailer and watch the brief BeOS scene.

The BeOSJournal.org spent a solid 2 hours with Simon Gauvin, and finished up the second part of the interview. The first part can be found here.

Daniel Switkin, a long time BeOS developer and former Be Inc. employee, has submitted an editorial on "Writing A BeOS Replacement". It aims to bring together the various efforts out there and define a plan which has the greatest chance of success. Click Read More to see the entire article from Daniel.

BeGroovy reports that David Reid, a very respected BeOS third party developer (ported Apache among others) and ex-OpenBeOS networking developer published a statement explaining his departure from the OpenBeOS project. David cited lack of direction, management in the project and even lack of engineering knowledge among the OpenBeOS developers. Update: Another important BeOS dev and friend of mine (as also in the case of David :), Frans van Nispen cited similar problems with the project. UPDATE 2: The OpenBeOS leader, Michael Phipps, sent us in his response to the issue.

Guillaume Maillard of the BlueEyed OS is talking to TotallyBe. He speaks of the differences between their project and OBOS and Cosmoe. He also claims that when programmed for and/or patched the right way, the Linux kernel and XFree can be very fast and perform pretty adequately to BeOS 5 (UI responsiveness - the main advantage of the BeOS experience), while in most of the "other" cases, Linux is much faster than BeOS 5 (eg. server operations, compilation times, SMP scaling, VM etc).

The OpenBFS team today announced that they finally moved to beta stage. This means that OpenBFS (the free and open source alternative, but fully compatible BeOS File System clone) is completely done feature-wise and only testing is missing now. OSNews (over)heard that "the query engine is way faster than the BFS one _and_ it supports searching on non-indexed attributes. Also it performs at least as good as BFS and in some test cases it is even considerably faster than it.".

A whole year after the Be IP buyout from Palm, BeOS 5 PE still enjoys more than 2,500 downloads per week. However, new hardware creates problems to BeOS, as it does not support new graphics cards, sound cards, new chipsets and worse, doesn't even boot on AthlonXP's or many Pentium4s without the usage of patches/hacks that are floating around. The latest sad incident is the inability of BeOS to boot when you have lots of system memory and lots of virtual graphics memory.

"BeOS is a marvel of software engineering and creativity. We all know it, use it, and love it. We are also re-creating it for the pure fact that we want to see it continue and thrive. But before it can be successful three things need to happen" Editorial from BeUnited's Simon Gauvin about the future of OpenBeOS. Also, yellowTab and BeUnited are to join development and promote the open source BeOS standards.

Be Inc. yesterday formally completed its takeover of PalmSource with the appointment of Jean-Louise Gassee to the Palm board. Former Be executives now hold the crucial positions of influence at the troubled PDA company. The article is at TheRegister.