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I adored BeOS back in the day. Although I've long since taken refuge with Mac OS X, I'd love to build a box specifically to run Haiku on native hardware. While Haiku is usable in a VM, it loses the snappiness that only bare metal can bring.

I'd love to relegate my Mac for work-only, and build a Haiku box for fun/the rest of life/as a hobby/to hack on/to help the Haiku Project. There's more than enough software out there to get by on, and new stuff hits all the time. I'm just sick of being stuck in a VM!

I wish I could confidently go and buy a motherboard, a CPU and RAM, a graphics card, put it together, and know Haiku will work with them. I don't mind what, I'm happy to build from scratch, but the Haiku Project is totally vague about what hardware works. It's taken a third-party - Haikuware - to put together a hardware database, but it's an out-of-date mess and wildly inaccurate (so many video cards are listed as supported, until you dive a little deeper and see they're all just VESA. That's not really 'support').

So, yes, I wish I could build a Haiku box and know it would work. Otherwise, I love the project and how far it's come!

BeOS was designed as a replacement for AmigaOS, really. A-OS->B-OS, hahaha.

Design-wise, it has a lot in common with AmigaOS (only cleaner, without compatibility constraints), and back in the early BeBox days Be aggressively pursued the Amiga market and particularly Amiga developers as Commodore floundered. Among other things, it's why the cygwin-like layer for AmigaOS and BeOS is the same project, GeekGadgets and bebits was obviously modelled on the Aminet

The Apple thing was a much later thing. As the USA is like a black hole of non-Amiga-ness, it's understandable the Amiga link might be missed in this area as so many others (fed up of americans mistaking inferior PC ports of Amiga heyday software for the canonical version, gah...).

Tada! BeBits!

Enjoy the BeBits archive, get a knife and fork so you can eat your words dinkypoo.

I had once to ask a question on the Handbrake irc channel. I was impressed by the intolerance of the developers to somebody asking an honest question. Handbrake counts its origin from BeOS, which I did not know at the time. http://www.bebits.com/app/3478 If this is the culture they had in BeOS developer community, no wonder Palm could not integrate them. Probably nobody could.

Handbrake has attracted my attention by being a complete tool from a user perspective. However I have ended up using the old good mencoder for my tasks. It does not crash, there are tons of documentation and howtos and it is much faster. My guess is that mencoder developers just listened to their end-users better.

Yup, no ones does any dev for BeOS at all.

http://www.bebits.com/

http://www.filetransit.com/category.php?id=289

http://www.maybe.de/software/

http://www.pidcock.co.uk/beos/index.html

Firefox manages to run on Mac, Linux, Windows, and BSD.

...and (from a quick google search) AIX, OS/2, Solaris, HP-UX, BeOS, and something called RISCOS that I haven't even heard of before now... and probably more!

pretty sure Handbrake began on BeOS way back http://www.bebits.com/app/3478 But I take your point, I think it's been pretty much recoded to be as OSX native as it can be.

First, Be never really solved the "fragile base class" problem, they just worked around it, with a set of library guidelines designed to minimize the impact. I assume that the paper you were referring to was this:
http://www.2f.ru/holy-wars/fbc.html

It's true that the intent was that application developers wouldn't have to recompile for future OS releases (though even that's not guaranteed, in the above statement). I was thinking more about the pre-1.0 timeframe, where by DR8 or so, people were already getting pretty sick of the whole process. Yeah, I know - "pre-1.0, you'd expect compatibility problems". But still, the lack of compatibility release-to-release was much worse than on OSs with a more robust interface to the OS and system libraries.

Those workarounds for the FBC problem don't really address the other ABI issues, either. The layout of the vtable, and various other aspects of C++ object layout, have a distressing tendency to change with newer releases of the compiler. This would break compatibility in weird and wonderful ways, as well as making it *really* difficult to use any other compiler to build BeOS apps.

When I asked engineers at Be about why they were using a then relatively-old version of Metrowerks C++ (on PowerPC), the response I was given was that they couldn't upgrade, because of ABI issues. They were certainly aware of the issues, and were actively working on addressing some of them, but there were (and are) substantial problems with using C++ classes as a library interface.

According to what I could find online, the Haiku project intends to solve the FBC by implementing a new, incompatible ABI for a future release. I also note from other comments on this story that Haiku only has binary compatibility with BeOS apps if it's compiled with a specific version of GCC. That doesn't sound like the ABI compatibility problem has been "solved", in any useful sense.

See also:
http://www.bebits.com/app/4011
A page for GCC on BeOS, which states that gcc-3.x for BeOS can't be used to build applications that link to the Be libraries.

Any application that ran under R5 will run, eventually if not already, on Haiku R1. So right off the bat you have a significant pool of programs. This included things like PHP, Abiword, GIMP, GTK+, Qemu, Firefox, Quake, VLC, etc. A good place to search for programs available for BeOS R5 is BeBits.

As far as taking a Linux/BSD application and porting it to BeOS/Haiku: it mainly depends on the application at hand.

Some programs will recompile with no modifications needed, or with only trivial modifications needed. Other programs will use 3rd party libraries which haven't yet been ported, so those would have to be done before the application that depended on them can be ported. Haiku, like BeOS, implements much of POSIX, so there are quite a few Linux/BSD programs out there that can ported with minimal effort.

That said, Haiku is pre-alpha quality software. Not only that but it's the reimplementation of a nearly-decade old OS (R5 was released in early 2000), so many programs that used to support BeOS no longer do. We're in much better shape now in the atmosphere of widely popular open source and cross-platform software, but don't expect to get your Linux experience out of Haiku quite at this point.

This sounds like an application for BeOS called SpicyKeys, which is one of the greatest apps ever. It becomes so transparent that whenever I setup a new box I'm usually quite frustrated until I remember that I need to install Spicy again.

Haiku is coming along, slowly but surely. Well, I say slowly, but i really don't know anything about time-tables for developing a modern OS. It's recently passed it's 5th birthday and is almost feature complete, which is to say, replicates all of the functionality of BeOS R5. almost all pieces of it are still considered "alpha" quality, though. Some of it is actually an improvement, actually. the networking in BeOS was entirely in user-space, which helped for system stability, but sucked for a good number of network tasks. haiku has moved networking into kernel space, but stays binary compatible with R5 (unlike Be Inc.'s never officially released kernel-space networking stack BONE). The file system replacement is in fact FASTER than the original BFS and is written in C++ (BFS was written in C with some assembler, iirc).

one of the neater aspects of the project is that, b/c of the extremely modular nature of BeOS's design (the so called "kits" into which the system was divided) testing any part of haiku is as simple as downloading one piece of it and replacing the old BeOS kit with the new haiku kit.

if anybody out there is really interested, one can still download the free-as-in-beer BeOS R5 from bebits.com. it's, of course, starting to show it's age, so you might have to download one of the hacked versions (the so-called Max or Developer editions) of it to get it to install and boot on some newer machines. A little searching around on bebits and google should provide all the needed info.

i'm really looking forward to the day (hopefully soon) when someone can donwload and burn a fully-installable disk image from the haiku site. i can't imagine that a really nice, user-friendly, FOSS, gui OS would be anything other than a great boon to the FOSS community. until then, i've still have my old R5 machine to play around with on occasion (i actually do some serious work on it still).

Bah, lzip is nothing compared to azip, which has all the infinite-compression goodness of lzip, but also supports lossless decompression. The downside is that it currently only runs under BeOS, but it comes with source so it should be easy enough to port to (whatever).

Hum, finally a good comment on this. You know, you have quite a few alternatives in x86/amd64 operating systems, even from the Great Satan itself!

I thought the active BeOS community were biding their time with BeOS Max Edition before Haiku is ready.

No issues with Haiku and price. :)

Besides, I don't believe that any of the ex Be employees have the legal right to work on Zeta or haiku due to IP constraints.

I ran Be on a pentium-300 laptop and I actually had a rather satisfying experience with it. Be ran surprisingly fast for a Windowing OS. It ran much like QNX runs-- responsive, quick loading, fast task switching and multitasking. The article gets into this a little bitBeOS's strength was always in its relatively lightweight frameworks, and its highly responsive GUI, which were the result of a new, relatively uncluttered code base and an emphasis on multithreading everywhere in the OS. But I really don't think that it hits the nail hard enough on the head. On my laptop be can run a web browser, play mp3s, and run an email client at the same time with little noticable slowdown: again, this is on a [slow] pentium 300 mmx machine. In fact, Be performed most graphical tasks better than the same laptop running on a well tuned Gentoo install with fluxbox as the WM (honest!).

Anyways, this review of Zeta is interesting because it again revisits the platform that could potentially make a great niche for itself in lower-powered situations such as mobile and embeded devices and old [s]crappy laptops like mine. The only thing is that the article really doesn't strongly enough emphasize how dramatic Be's strengths and weakneses are: driver support is EXTREMELY limited, the multitasking and other system performance (espescially sound) is REMARKABLE...

Be is a rather fun OS to play with, and there are tons of excellent free applications for it: check out http://www.bebits.com./ The only real drawback of be is its limited hardware support and the lack of support for many applications that people are used to. Let's hope the Zeta guys stick with it and add support for some more hardware (Wireless baby, wireless.)

Haiku OS (Formerly OpenBeos) is (as I understand it) still a long way away from release, and is at the "pile of code" stage.
http://haiku-os.org/learn.php?mode=faq_normal
Beos PE R5 is still available from BeBits and works on older machines
http://www.bebits.com/app/2680
and Beos MAX will work on newer machines, it's a hack of the old closed source with some newer drivers and some extra functionality like being bootable.
http://www.bebits.com/app/3892
The BeosMAX people have expressed that they would release no more versions once Zeta released, so I guess 3.1Beta1 is _it_. I still think it's an OS with a place. I loved it when I was first introduced to it by BeOS PE (FREE!), and was surprised that it hadn't caught on. Snappy, usable, friendly. A surprising number of linux apps release for BeOS as well, including Firefox (but not openoffice), Freesci, Sarien, Dosbox...

Haiku OS (Formerly OpenBeos) is (as I understand it) still a long way away from release, and is at the "pile of code" stage.
http://haiku-os.org/learn.php?mode=faq_normal
Beos PE R5 is still available from BeBits and works on older machines
http://www.bebits.com/app/2680
and Beos MAX will work on newer machines, it's a hack of the old closed source with some newer drivers and some extra functionality like being bootable.
http://www.bebits.com/app/3892
The BeosMAX people have expressed that they would release no more versions once Zeta released, so I guess 3.1Beta1 is _it_. I still think it's an OS with a place. I loved it when I was first introduced to it by BeOS PE (FREE!), and was surprised that it hadn't caught on. Snappy, usable, friendly. A surprising number of linux apps release for BeOS as well, including Firefox (but not openoffice), Freesci, Sarien, Dosbox...

You lie.

That said, Firefox is not looking like the browser I'd recommend on BeOS, as it's just a little out of date. You'd probably be better off grabbing Mozilla, as the browser appears to be closer to the latest version than Firefox is.

That doesn't seem very clear: http://wiki.bebits.com/page/WhatIsBone

I have an Abit KT7A-Raid Motherboard with the latest firmware...

First Problem
If I try to install on a Maxtor 120GB harddrive, it says "Could not determine suitable harddisk drive". This happens whether I'm on the UDMA66 channels or the faster HPT370 ATA-100 Channels. But if I drop in a 5GB Maxtor drive, it works but only on the slower channels. There was a replacement IDE driver for BeOS 5 but I haven't tried to see if it'll work with Zeta. With BeOS you could install this on the slower channels and switch to the faster.
http://www.bebits.com/app/2625
But it doesn't help me with installing on the Maxtor 120GB since I can't get installed on any channels to apply the patch.

Second problem
Network card not detected: SMC 1255TX-PF (Accton EN-1216 Chipset).
I'm keeping an eye open for my old SMC 1244 with a Realtec chipset to see if it works. I know BeOS 5 worked with the SMC 1244. I thought it did with the SMC1255 as well, but perhaps I'm wrong.

Mugsy

François Revol coded up what he called "Google File System" (this was back in dec/2004) and hooked it into BeOS queries that return NetPositive bookmarks.

As for hitting the tilde key, that is also possible with Spicy Keys, which allows one to map any key combination to cli scripts, binaries, etc.

Just some of the neat things one can do with Haiku/BeOS these days.

BeOS was originally designed to run on AT&T chips, because they were cheap. They switched to PowerPC, at some point later (some former Apple employees created Be inc.). BeOS later switched to X86 (not to Intel), because there was a wider user base and Motorola/Apple refused to release specs for the PowerPC G3 Arch. Be would have continued support for BeOS on PowerPC if they were allowed to do so.

Be is one of my all time favorite OSs, it literally boots in 10 seconds. When I say literally, I mean literally. It will boot to a fully usable state in 10 seconds on a Pentium 1 w/ 64MB of RAM.

If you want to try it, go to http://www.bebits.com/app/2680 and scroll down to the personal version... it works like a liveboot linux, except that it installs a virtual partition onto your HD. (This is old, so newer hardware won't be supported, ie created before GeForce3)

BeOS would have been a large success as a secondary OS for checking e-mail and web browsing. Be even had contracts with Fujitsu, Sony, NEC, Compaq, and HP to have it preloaded and dualboot it on all of their systems. However, MS ended up telling the OEMs that it would be a violation of their contract, and Be was dumped:(

Maintaining an OS monopoly? Heh, yes, of course, because we all know there aren't other operating systems available for the Mac...

I'm going to go out on a limb here and hazard a guess that if I said, 'NetBSD,'

Maybe its been updated more recently, but I've never even got it to install properly. I love different OS'es and the first thing I did when I heard about Zeta making a commercial (and polished) release of the BeOS I went immediately to their website.

Aside from the install issues I've had, is it just me or is the idea of playing money for a OS you cant test out first crazy? I mean *if* I had paid good money for the (beta 3 I believe at the time) and it didn't work I'd be pretty pissed.

I think its an interesting idea and some die-hard BeOS fans are happy about it, but their business models sucks. Make a live disk or something...

Personally I'd rather throw my money away on the Internet Urinal or something with tangible benefits. Zeta looks like an overpriced novelty (and I'm NOT saying it is, but from where I'm standing its hard to get a good look at it).

As a side note: how is this news? Zeta's been around for years now hasn't it? I mean if they'd finally released a demo THAT would be news. This is just free advertising for a dodgy products targeted apparently at die-hard BeOS fans (who would probably be using something like BeOS Max anyway).

Go figure. Wake me up when they have a demo copy I can test out on my system.

Not ideal, but there's definetly a solution. http://www.bebits.com/app/3851

You can get BeOS 5 Max free. It's moderately recent, and it's a nice way to take a look at what BeOS is all about if you aren't in the loop. It even boots as a Live CD if you're so inclined, although you can't do much besides click on stuff if you boot it that way.

I do something similar to the maildir approach, converting e-mail (from mbox files from long ago and from collected Usenet messages too!) to individual text files. Each text file contains the raw message text, encoded attachments and all, so nothing is lost.

However, I'm using BeOS's BFS to store these files so they are a more quickly searchable than plain text files (subject, from, to, dates are all indexed by the OS). Plus I file them away in directories by category. I also wrote a conversion utility [MailboxFileToBeMail] for mbox and Usenet messages that automatically attaches attribute tags to the message files, and even does international character set conversion on the subject and other key text.

- Alex

One day not so long ago, people would have said the same thing about Linux.

Have you ever used BeOS? I've known about it since R1, and I downloaded R5 Personal as soon as it came out. Despite the almost total lack of third-party applications, it was by far the most usable operating system I've ever ran. It took 18 seconds (I timed it) from pressing the power button on my Celeron 466 to having a usable desktop - no hourglass or spinning beach ball or anything. Everything was an order of magnitude faster, on that Celeron, than Windows XP on my 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 desktop or Panther on my 1 GHZ G4 iBook.

And everything just /worked/. Tracker and Deskbar are beautifully simple and functional. Hardware compatibility is brilliantly transparent. Applications were installed like OS X packages, except they were much more compact. StyledEdit did everything that TextEdit did, except possibly for spelling (I don't notice, I'm a good typist), and there were spelling services you could download (the Cocoa API was based in large part off BeOS' architecture). Keyboard shortcuts even use the Alt key, meaning that you can quit an application with your thumb and ring finger without having to twist your hand. (I guess this is the legacy of having built BeOS for PowerPC first. :D)

BeOS might seem irrelevant now, when there's only a tiny group of hackers working on it. Linux arguably has more marketshare than Mac OS now, though, and BeOS is just way better. Be's marketshare was artificially low only because it cost money, and who was going to pay money for an app whose only third-party applications (except Gobe, which is still the best office suite ever - ask Apple, who hired most of their engineers for Pages) were written by hobbyists? Now that an open-source BeOS will be completed very soon (considering how fast they've been going, I'm hoping a beta version will be released by the beginning of 2006), people will be able to download it and play with it the same way they did with Linux, except that Haiku will be many times more user-friendly and will already have a wide range of GUI applications available.

I'm not one of those people who thinks Haiku will take over all computers someday. But if it got even as much marketshare as Linux, then who would need to spend hundreds of extra dollars for Macs, when you could buy ultra-cheap PCs that, thanks to Haiku, would run faster and have a wider base of third-party software?

(Note1: Obviously, Macs, especially notebooks, have hardware advantages over PCs, like clearer screens and longer battery life. Still, the cheapest 14-inch iBook costs $1300, while you can get 14-inch or 15-inch Dells for significantly less... I'm willing to pay the premium for OS X and the hardware compatibility, but I don't think I would be just for the battery life.)

I feel your pain. I wrote an image metadata generator which ran as a background process, listening for additions of images in particular folders and added stuff like resolution, dimensions, etc etc to their metadata. It was pretty nifty, but I never polished it enough to release it.

I did like BeOS's Translator kit -- I wrote the PSDTranslator addon way back in 99 or so. http://bebits.com/app/1343/

Programming BeOS was nice, though it had its rough edges. When the writing was on the wall about beOS's future I went to linux and didn't look back. Fortunately 99% of my code was pure POSIX, and portable to linux, and later to Mac OS X.

You can just download the BeOS setup file (about 45-50mb) and run it as any other program. The rather normal installation process follows, it creates some files on a (preferably) FAT partition, all you then need to do is double-click the BeOS icon and the computer will reboot into BeOS. Download is availible here.

That pulling the power plug from the wall trick was one of the things the BeOS developers would do at conferences and demos to demonstrate the robustness of the BFS journaled filesystem created by Dominic Giampaolo, who now works at Apple. It was one of the first true journaled filesystems, certainly the first available in a desktop operating system. They would unplug the machine in the middle of heavy read-write activity and show how it came right back up just as fast as when it booted clean. This was around 8 years ago, I believe, so it was a pretty big deal. A few years later Linux finally got ReiserFS, Ext3, XFS and a couple other journaling filesystems. MacOS X got journaling in version 10.2.3, if I remember right. Supposedly NTFS has been journaled for a while now, but I don't know the details on that.

The rest of the computing world has finally almost caught up to long-dead BeOS in terms of robustness and speed. I still haven't seen anything boot nearly as fast as BeOS though. If your needs are simple it's still a bitchin' OS. The original BeOS is dead but you can still find the Free BeOS 5 Personal Edition download if you look around, or you can buy an updated commercial version from these guys who bought the IP from Be, Inc. before they folded up shop. The free version was kind of cool, it was a 45MB download that expanded into a 500MB drive "image" and let you boot up BeOS from Windows. Pretty neat way to test drive a new operating system. Too bad it never stood a chance in the market against uno-hoo.

Here's a link to that free version.
Scroll down a bit for the "Windows" version. Be aware that it probably won't run on newer computers with anything more advanced than a P-III. The patches for newer processors have been integrated into the commercial version, I'm sure.

Ah, BeOS, we hardly knew ye.

The "other one"?

If you're going to complain about exclusion, you should recognize that OSX has a version as well.

Hell, there's even a version for Be.

Check it out here: BeOS Max Edition. It's freeware now and has a pretty good selection of apps. It has BeFS which is everything WinFS wants to be but never will be, and BeFS has been around since 1996. There are some really great things about the OS, but the lack of supported hardware, and afew other things are reasons why I don't currently run it anymore (although that may change). Linux is great and if tuned right, performs really well. If you want fast boot times, there are a few articles about making linux boot faster, or you can try FreeBSD which has always booted extremely fast for me. There is a whole world of operating systems out there, if I were you I'd try each one because each one seems to excel where no others do. Lots of different interesting ideas implemented. SkyOS is another good example of an interesting OS, its damn near all written in Assembly, and it was all pretty much written by one man. The major flaw with SkyOS is that it is closed source. ReactOS is really cool too. I could go on, but you'd probably be better off just hopping on google and trying out a few.
Regards,
Steve
P.S. If you don't feel like installing each OS on your computer, use qemu, it runs every OS I listed just fine.

Even I have a hard time wrapping my head around what this will look like once it's carried out.

What will it gain us in user experience?

With the cost of upgrades, the continued security holes, the perceived instability, the required activation, and the neutering of XP Home... I really don't see myself or others upgrading from Win98 or Win2K without being forced to.

How's that going to happen? Microsoft is going to have to discontinue support for those operating systems.

And, I suspect that's their longer term plan. By cutting support, when the next window of bit-rot or software bloat forces a user to consider their options, I think Microsoft is banking on intimidating them into a newer version of the OS, no matter the cost.

It was precisely the anticipation of this world wide event that made me switch to using Apple's OS X (based on FreeBSD!) and start finding non-Microsoft solutions via Linux.

I've found a new mouth piece as well. When I went to evangelize alternate solutions to friends and family, I got the standard "but you're a geek" roll of the eyes. I was, however, able to convert my wife of alternatives to Microsoft with the use of applications such as Mozilla's Firefox as a browser replacement to get rid of pop-ups/adware and Thunderbird to stop her from getting infected with viruses.

Upon learning that there are alternative solutions with better features that let her not have to deal with everyday annoyances, she was an easy sell on Linux, and now uses Putty and SSHing -- something I never thought I'd see!

She's the one who gets creditability marks with her friends. They know she's an artist and not a computer geek. If she's raving about it, they want to try it, because obviously it's not above their level.

Linux, however, is going to have to compete hard with Microsoft. It isn't Linux's free price tag or outstanding stabilily that's holding it back. It's complexity.

The learning curve is too great for the non-technical user to setup and immediately start using it. Microsoft scores big when it comes to easy install for a basic system, and they actually do automatic updates quite well from a simplicity standpoint.

What many geeks don't get is simple computer users are willing to give up power and features for ease of use. If someone put out a basic distribution that auto-detected hardware, did an easy install, and set up the basic environment with nothing but the standard Office tools -- much like a dumbed down version of Mandrake or BeOS or the free OpenBeOS version.

Microsoft sees that "we don't get it" and aren't catering a special distribution to "grandma", and with that fact they leverage Windows into homes, knowing that once someone invests in learning something, they usually don't switch without good cause (frustration, cost, or inapplicability to task).

I've been a long time user of BeBits and am real happy to see a similiar site for Gnome. It is a bit spooky to see a site that looks almost exactly like a site you've been using for awhile. It would be like a Bizzaro Slashdot where everything looks familiar, but then you notice that the articles use correct spelling and the Webmaster's name is Samurai Steve.

I think that the links provided could be more relavant.

is here. Late is better than never.

A pretty impessive flash though. Even in mono at 640 X 480 I knew I just had to try it. I lived with it as my main system for a couple of years so I think I can maybe add a few things that did kill it (at least for me).

1. Lack of 'clever' interfaces. Apart from a few basic functions there was little USB etc. These days (and even in the late 90s) this meant little PDA connectivity and no cameras, MP3 etc.
2. The ever-quoted lack of software. While there might be 10^6 applications on BeBits there was never a huge amount of 'big' software. This meant little choice in office suites, photo editors etc. There ones that existed were good but a limited choice.
3. Limited take-up of BeOS. Everyone I showed BeOS to was blown away by it but even IT professionals had never heard of it. The laws of supply and demand really mean that (1) and (2) above will be a problem until there is enough interest for applications to be other than hobby products.

What do I miss? I've moved on to OS X as many e-BeOS people seem to. By and large I am very happy, Windows was always boring and utilitarian, a problem that both BeOS and OS X avoided with some style.

I miss the speed, simplicity and stability of BeOS. It was a unix-like OS without the labyrinthine complexity of GNU/Linux. I really miss the custom attributes that were such a unique feature of BeOS - I don't believe any other OS has implemented such a scheme. Would I go back? Unlikely now. OpenBeOS will have to develop hugely to fill the above gaps. Zeta is just the bastard offspring of BeOS - a dead end that's going nowhere.

First, I would download BeOS Max

You may need to get the latest driver for your video card Nvidia or ATI

After you do that, just go to "start" --> Preferences --> Display to change your graphics settings.

I would also upgrade your sound card driver if you have a AC-97 Intel AMD

BeOS has a built in E-mail system, the e-mail is saved as a attributed file in /boot/home/mail/in To configure, just go to the "start" menu --> Preferences --> e-mail you will notice a new icon next to the clock (looks like a US mailbox) you can access your e-mail from there.

After setting it up download BeShare for all of your support needs (there are lots of files there as well)

I would get the bleeding edge version of Firefox for a web browser

if you are feeling adventureous, try finding and installing Bone7a (look for bone7a_install.zip on google or b7a.zip on beshare). This is a more stable network stack integrated into the BeOS Kernel.

If BeOS isn't your thing, Windows or Linux are always out there.

First, I would download BeOS Max

You may need to get the latest driver for your video card Nvidia or ATI

After you do that, just go to "start" --> Preferences --> Display to change your graphics settings.

I would also upgrade your sound card driver if you have a AC-97 Intel AMD

BeOS has a built in E-mail system, the e-mail is saved as a attributed file in /boot/home/mail/in To configure, just go to the "start" menu --> Preferences --> e-mail you will notice a new icon next to the clock (looks like a US mailbox) you can access your e-mail from there.

After setting it up download BeShare for all of your support needs (there are lots of files there as well)

I would get the bleeding edge version of Firefox for a web browser

if you are feeling adventureous, try finding and installing Bone7a (look for bone7a_install.zip on google or b7a.zip on beshare). This is a more stable network stack integrated into the BeOS Kernel.

If BeOS isn't your thing, Windows or Linux are always out there.

First, I would download BeOS Max

You may need to get the latest driver for your video card Nvidia or ATI

After you do that, just go to "start" --> Preferences --> Display to change your graphics settings.

I would also upgrade your sound card driver if you have a AC-97 Intel AMD

BeOS has a built in E-mail system, the e-mail is saved as a attributed file in /boot/home/mail/in To configure, just go to the "start" menu --> Preferences --> e-mail you will notice a new icon next to the clock (looks like a US mailbox) you can access your e-mail from there.

After setting it up download BeShare for all of your support needs (there are lots of files there as well)

I would get the bleeding edge version of Firefox for a web browser

if you are feeling adventureous, try finding and installing Bone7a (look for bone7a_install.zip on google or b7a.zip on beshare). This is a more stable network stack integrated into the BeOS Kernel.

If BeOS isn't your thing, Windows or Linux are always out there.

First, I would download BeOS Max

You may need to get the latest driver for your video card Nvidia or ATI

After you do that, just go to "start" --> Preferences --> Display to change your graphics settings.

I would also upgrade your sound card driver if you have a AC-97 Intel AMD

BeOS has a built in E-mail system, the e-mail is saved as a attributed file in /boot/home/mail/in To configure, just go to the "start" menu --> Preferences --> e-mail you will notice a new icon next to the clock (looks like a US mailbox) you can access your e-mail from there.

After setting it up download BeShare for all of your support needs (there are lots of files there as well)

I would get the bleeding edge version of Firefox for a web browser

if you are feeling adventureous, try finding and installing Bone7a (look for bone7a_install.zip on google or b7a.zip on beshare). This is a more stable network stack integrated into the BeOS Kernel.

If BeOS isn't your thing, Windows or Linux are always out there.

First, I would download BeOS Max

You may need to get the latest driver for your video card Nvidia or ATI

After you do that, just go to "start" --> Preferences --> Display to change your graphics settings.

I would also upgrade your sound card driver if you have a AC-97 Intel AMD

BeOS has a built in E-mail system, the e-mail is saved as a attributed file in /boot/home/mail/in To configure, just go to the "start" menu --> Preferences --> e-mail you will notice a new icon next to the clock (looks like a US mailbox) you can access your e-mail from there.

After setting it up download BeShare for all of your support needs (there are lots of files there as well)

I would get the bleeding edge version of Firefox for a web browser

if you are feeling adventureous, try finding and installing Bone7a (look for bone7a_install.zip on google or b7a.zip on beshare). This is a more stable network stack integrated into the BeOS Kernel.

If BeOS isn't your thing, Windows or Linux are always out there.

The BeOS had the Media Kit and it was great, allowed for cool stuff easily done on apps. Check Cortex for example: http://www.bebits.com/search?search=cortex and its surrounded plugins.

BeBits will reveal everything and more. :)

Apple did some damage too, by not releasing the specs needed to run on G3 PowerMacs so Be had to leave the PowerMac market and focus on the WINTEL market.

The BeBox was a glorious invention, the Geekport is a great expansion port.

The main problem is where are the apps? Microsoft donimated the market so much that few developers even considered developing for BeOS. Most games are still developed for Windows, so the GameHeads need their box to run Windows.

Another problem was driver support, much like OS/2 driver support, most hardware makers didn't want to support it. So you had to pick your hardware carefully.

Be.com is for sale, and beincorporated.com no longer sells BeOS. Palm bought it.

OpenBeOS is in the works to make an Open Sourced BeOS.

YellowTab has Zeta, based on BeOS which can still be bought.

BeOS 5 Personal Edition is still available as a download from BeBits

Apple did some damage too, by not releasing the specs needed to run on G3 PowerMacs so Be had to leave the PowerMac market and focus on the WINTEL market.

The BeBox was a glorious invention, the Geekport is a great expansion port.

The main problem is where are the apps? Microsoft donimated the market so much that few developers even considered developing for BeOS. Most games are still developed for Windows, so the GameHeads need their box to run Windows.

Another problem was driver support, much like OS/2 driver support, most hardware makers didn't want to support it. So you had to pick your hardware carefully.

Be.com is for sale, and beincorporated.com no longer sells BeOS. Palm bought it.

OpenBeOS is in the works to make an Open Sourced BeOS.

YellowTab has Zeta, based on BeOS which can still be bought.

BeOS 5 Personal Edition is still available as a download from BeBits

• 'spreadsheet'
  
  YellowTab has a screenshot showing they are improving the AbiWord office package here. There is a donation page to help port OpenOffice to BeOS. Last but not least, GoBe at one time announced they would port GP 3.0 to BeOS, providing they had enough sales of the windows side. Sadly, this did not work out as intended. That's another topic for discussion. ;)
• 'instant messaging'
  
  The venerable and solid repository of BeOS applications' BeBits has these entries for instant messaging applications:
  
  • msn
  • icq
  • aol
  
  There are more, but I chose to show three examples of chat protocals.
  
• 'surf the web'
  
  Both Mozilla and FireBird have been ported to BeOS for quite some time now. In fact, just 2 days ago there was a new build directly from the cvs server for BeOS of Mozilla. I believe the current direction is towards FireBird, since it's just the browser, but that's a good thing. ;) I won't mention Opera, as the jury is out until Zeta comes out
• '3D Games'
  
  You've got that one, I will admit. but it's not so hot either on any OS other than Microsoft's, so it's a poor example for debate.