Haiku Archive

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).

Be Inc, the well known OS company that produced the multimedia-oriented OS BeOS, was acquired by Palm Inc. a year ago. The further development of BeOS was stopped, since Palm doesn't seem to care about it. Will the BeOS spirit survive with the BeOS clones currently flourishing?

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.

First of all, I am very flattered that our recent editorials over at OpenBeOS have received so many responses in the OSNews commenting section.I would like to address some of the issues brought up in the many thought provoking comments, in the order that I read them:

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.

Axel, Bruno and the rest of the company in the OpenBFS team, have completed the development of OpenBFS, the open source equivelant of Be's popular 64-bit journaling file system. OpenBFS currently runs on BeOS 5, awaiting the further evolution of the OpenBeOS/NewOS kernel in order to start a back port. The team reports that while the filesystem clone is not very well tested yet, it is already seems pretty stable and it beats in performance the original BFS.

"Ok, the time has come. We must begin the process of coming up with a new name for the nascent operating system we now call OpenBeOS. Why? Well, as has been pointed out so many times by various people, the name BeOS is a registered trademark and is now the intellectual property of Palm Inc. Using a name that includes that moniker is asking for trouble down the road... particularly if OpenBeOS becomes successful." Read and suggest a name over at openbeos.org (not on our forums please :). In related BeOS news, the BlueEyedOS project (formerly BlueOS), published a status report.

The OpenBeOS project leader, Michael Phipps, sent us a status report and he even makes a guess as to when a packaged OpenBeOS alpha release might be ready: "The status is very good. The networking and FS groups are coming along really well. To the point where they are testing functional (albeit occasionally going to kernel debugger land) pieces. The other kits are mostly moving along quite nicely. Printing, Input and ScreenSaver are nearly done. Storage and Midi are moving very rapidly. You know all about prototype 5 of the app_server, and work is in progress on #6. Media is moving under the heroic efforts of Marcus, and there should be some exciting Kernel news shortly. As far as an alpha, it would all depend on what people are looking for. Anyone can download and build today. We encourage (and warn, since nothing is super well tested yet) that. As far as a completed, packaged alpha, I would not expect one for **AT LEAST** a few months. Probably more."

The Open-BeOS (OBOS) networking team managed to re-create the BeOS networking stack, net_server, and even achieve binary compatibility. TCP support has now been added, and now NetPositive can retrieve web pages. You can see a screenshot of NetPositive, the BeOS native web browser, at David Reid's web site (David is the developer who ported Apache 1.x/2.x to BeOS). Still, the infant stack is pretty unstable, but it's a huge step forward.

BeGeistert is a biannual meeting of BeOS users and developers held in Germany. BeOS developer and frequent OSNews writer Nicholas Blachford, wrote a review of the meeting and also reveals some news having to do with a possible come back from YellowTab and some working code presented by OpenBeOS members. Nicholas also includes a small mpeg video and many pictures of the meeting.

Be, Inc disolved the company and stopped public trading on Friday. They now sell the www.be.com domain name as well. The company will still live on for at least 3 more years (without employees, but with a Board of Directors in charge), therefore their trademarks are still active. However, this did not stop a team of BeOS German enthusiasts, BeOSOnline.com, to release a 230 MB bootable ISO distribution of BeOS and name it "BeOS 5.0.4". Users should not confuse this release with any official means, as it is a plain BeOS 5.0.3 with additional developer tools and applications as found freely at BeBits.com.

Be, Inc. announced today it has filed suit against Microsoft for the destruction of Be's business resulting from the anticompetitive business practices of Microsoft. The lawsuit alleges, among other claims, that Microsoft harmed Be through a series of illegal exclusionary and anticompetitive acts designed to maintain its monopoly in the Intel-compatible PC operating system market and created exclusive dealing arrangements with PC OEMs prohibiting the sale of PCs with multiple preinstalled operating systems. Our Take: This suit should have been initiated 3 years ago. Furthermore, notice the black mourning stripe on the Be logo at the Be web site. Dan Johnston, Be's legal counsel, is the only person left working at Be's new tiny office in Mountain View these days. Update: News.com has more info found in the filing itself and a mini-statement from Microsoft's spokesman.

'Stubear' is a graphics artist who in his free time helps the OpenBeOS folks in constructing the User Interface for a future version of this new operating system. Particularly, this shot looks pretty clean, but the widgets still need some work to look sharper. These are just concept screens, but sometimes, especially if you have lots of time in your hands, it is nice staring at nice shapes and colors. Moreover, OSNews received an email (which contained a real screenshot) from a BeOS user who wished to remain anonymous. The screenshot shows a hidden feature ("easter egg") of the "Dano" version of BeOS which is called ZSnake! To enable this feature press and hold CNTRL+ALT+SHFT and then click on the "Menu" application under "Preferences". While this feature seems unfinished (zooming to the screenshot shows some pixels out of order) this is a neat little UI gimmick that it not supported by any other operating system or Toolkit so far and it looks at least interesting UI-wise.

The BeOS version 5.1d0 seems to have been extensively leaked on the web the last few days (please respect the OSNews policy and do not post direct download URLs of the illegal beta on our forums). Dianne Hackborn, ex-Be engineer, now at PalmSource, gives more information on what is included in this version of BeOS. There is hardware OpenGL (update: GL is 'broken' on Dano), new networking stack, window decors, XML kit, new USB stack, brand new Printing Kit (and lots of printer drivers for it), new font engine, column list view, tooltip support, updated Media Kit, Interface Kit and app_server, and more. And of course, brand new drivers, like support for the Adaptec U160 SCSI controllers, better SB128 support etc. Reportedly, this BeOS version has some issues with many existing BeOS applications, mostly because of the changes in the app_server. The only peculliar thing is that, as far as we know, Palm's legal department did not take any action against the owners of the servers that carry the leaked beta.