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If you're looking for an OS that is great for desktop use, is incredibly fast, and is really easy to get used to, and has support for NVidia cards, then you want to use BeOS. I've been using BeOS for a while and although it's not as popular as Linux or BSD, its following is pretty devout. I rarely have any problems with BeOS crashing, and on my Pentium II 266 w/ 64 megs RAM it boots in about 10 seconds. BeOS is also almost completely POSIX compliant, so you can compile most linux apps under it with relative ease. And if you don't feel like doing that, BeBits has all the drivers and software you could ever need that's not included in the distribution. If you're looking for a satisfying desktop experience, then BeOS is the way to go.

I'm interested in hearing more about the issued you had porting Streamripper to BeOS. The link to the BeOS binary from BeBits seems to be broken. I'll cvs it and take a look at it tonight. Any major brokes, besides the panics while debugging?

, but the GUI was beyond me. all of the same code i could find wouldn't even compile. Also i got constant kernel panics when debugging threads. real shame...

Well, Be's native gui is unique. In other words: BeAPI != win32API != gtk/qt/motif/whatever. The BeBook is available online, if anyone's interested in the API. Programming for BeOS is a great way to learn C++, IMHO.

I've had several ideas how to make money with the program selling a service (ie, actually doing something that contributes to society), but it would appear that I'm blocked by a patent that has bogus claims. Tell me again how this benefits society.

Patents aren't supposed to benefit society, they are supposed to benefit the patent holder and provide incentive for people/companies to spend money and time inventing things.

I, too, was going to write a similar program to yours after seeing those cool photo-mosaics in the malls. I found out about the patent, and didn't bother. I guess some people aren't afraid to buck the trend, though. Here's a program on BeBits which runs on BeOS. It takes input from your TV card, a source image, and generates a photomosaic. The longer you leave it running, the better the picture will be... quite a cool program (source included, too):

NotMosaic for BeOS

-thomas

P.S. Another option for your project would be to license the patent... that's one of the goals of obtaining a patent, is to license it to others that want to use it. But I agree, that patent is way too obvious.

There's a good example of customizable notifications over at BeBits. IIRC there are options for having a weekly email of the most popular downloads, most recent submissions, and such.

There's also the option of being mailed anytime a specific piece of software gets updated. Each "product" lives in its own space on their site, and provides that option.

There's a good example of customizable notifications over at BeBits. IIRC there are options for having a weekly email of the most popular downloads, most recent submissions, and such.

There's also the option of being mailed anytime a specific piece of software gets updated. Each "product" lives in its own space on their site, and provides that option.

There's a good example of customizable notifications over at BeBits. IIRC there are options for having a weekly email of the most popular downloads, most recent submissions, and such.

There's also the option of being mailed anytime a specific piece of software gets updated. Each "product" lives in its own space on their site, and provides that option.

The developers were out their shipping many fine, supported commercial products that worked very well - Gobe, Steinberg was onboard developing audio applications, Thomas Dolby spoke at the developer conference about supporting Be with his audio software (he was wildly enthusiastic).

No, the incompetence was not the developers. It was Be's press relations and marketing (or to be more precise, the lack thereof). Be's technical staff is highly competent, and they produced a fine product, something Linux developers would do well to study because of it's ease of installation, smooth and trouble-free performance, and clean integration. It's also a joy to program.

My wonderfully positive experiences with using the BeOS and my sadness at having to leave the platform behind in order to have currently supported hardware and software is another component of what motivates my effort to improve the quality of Linux and Free Software in general.

But Be's business management was always, and still is, incompetent. There was never any effort made to convince people to make the move to the BeOS - they were always waiting for more applications to appear, even when there were plenty of applications for the average user to do almost all their daily work.

Even though almost anyone who ever laid eyes on the system became an instant convert - and many of those became evangelists, such as I especially after I got it running on my laptop, Gassee never felt it was ready for the mass market and kept holding it back from the people who could have done him the most good - the public who was eager to try something better if only they knew it existed and where to get it.

For example, I never once saw a banner ad on a website that was run on a non-Be related site directing the user to Be's website or BeDepot (Be's now-defunct eCommerce site).

And speaking of BeDepot - Gassee very early on spoke repeatedly about the problem of penetrating software channels for new developers, especially developers for new platforms like the BeOS, and how Be was going to be very advanced in its thinking by offerring software for sale via download at BeDepot.

And we all have seen what has become of eCommerce in general - it's the only way you can get many products for mainstream platforms - but BeDepot was one of the most ineptly run operations I have ever seen.

BeDepot's ineptitude was murder to developers for whom it was the only sales channel - so you've got a newly released product? What do you do when it takes three months to appear on the website because they're either too understaffed to deal with it or too incompetent to just upload the damn file? I've heard lots of complaints from developers who had to wait months to receive their contract from Be that would enable them to sell on BeDepot.

It's not like it's so hard to run a good online Be software site, as demonstrated by the folks who founded BeBits, in part to make up for BeDepot's and BeWare's inadequacies. (BeWare was for free downloads).

If you won't listen to me because of Be's lack of character, listen to me because of Be's demonstrated incompetence, and know that if they couldn't keep an eCommerce site with a few dozen titles running efficiently, how are they going to provide adequate support for a bunch of disparate embedded hardware vendors?

By the way, you should note that many of Be's most prominent engineers left when Be made the decision to drop the desktop and move to Internet Appliances, folks like Dominic who wrote the BFS Journaled Filesystem (with indexed file attributes - there's a read-only version of BFS you can get for Linux, that I'd like to make read-write, and would make a great addition to the system).

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

Of course you can. BeOS has an X server. And then there is VNC and a BeOS-native program as well.

There isn't one aspect of computing that BeOS excels at. You name an aspect, and I'll name five other modern operating systems which do the same thing better, and have and established userbase and software market to boot.

Ahem, NVidia Linux support? Try here.

They even have BeOS support finally, here.

-Julius X

If you want to use your cuecat under BeOS, you can use CueBe.

To DigitalConvergence, or to "whom it may concern",

I run the website kart.dhs.org, which hosts the BeClueCat decoder, listed here:

http://www.bebits.com/app/1537/

DigitalConvergence has been visiting my website since September 15th. Certainly they know I exist.

I have yet to receive a 'cease and decist' letter from your legal consels, Kenyon and Kenyon, and I feel left out. So many other people have received FedEx'ed letters "WITHOUT PREJUDICE [sic]", yet I have not.

Kenyon and Kenyon's neglect to C+D me might be construed as "prejudice", since so many others have gotten scary letters. As a BeOS user I realize that I'm part of a minority. Don't you care enough to send your goons after me too? Do I need to agree to a special cease and decist EULA before you can send me one? Perhaps it's because you don't have any contact info. (name and address sent to Digital Convergence)

To put it in a nutshell:

Here I am. I'm looking for answers. If you have a beef with me, let's get in touch and I'll listen to your side of the story. If you want to play silly games, I and thousands of other individuals will continue to screw with you. Your business model is beyond flawed; it's despicable. Digital Convergence employees: get out now and cut your losses.
--

> No apps.....

Obvious Be doesn't have near the number of apps that Linux has, but please don't spread FUD and say Be has no apps.

You did check Be Bits,, before posting, right? :-)

> No apps.....

Obvious Be doesn't have near the number of apps that Linux has, but please don't spread FUD and say Be has no apps.

You did check Be Bits,, before posting, right? :-)

BeNews has reported that official, Be-maintained GeForce drivers for BeOS are on their way, courtesy of BeBits. They're just 2D*, but that's still a damn sight better than VESA or greyscale modes.

*: Which stands to reason, since accelerated OpenGL is still in the Real Soon Now stage.

Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel/Facing down the future coming fast - Rush

BeOS has perl support, search BeBits.

Best Regards, Ben Abbitt

All you BeOS users: there is a BeOS native filesharing program called BeShare, BeBits entry here - it's got some interesting features (such as live queries) that use BeOS-native features.

The BeOS Napster clone has built in Napigator support.

The port of X11R6.4 is avail here on the bebits.com website. There's also an article about running X services under BeOS over on BeNews.

"BHand (Bastard Hand) is a new type of user authentication software. BHand doesn't use a password, it "learns" to recognize the users' keyboard typing style. Unlike the use of a password, it should be very difficult to forget (or to lose) your typing style... BHand uses one component of the Think Factory : Braininabox."

I haven't used the application, so I can't comment on its accuracy, but the concept has been around for a while.

"BHand (Bastard Hand) is a new type of user authentication software. BHand doesn't use a password, it "learns" to recognize the users' keyboard typing style. Unlike the use of a password, it should be very difficult to forget (or to lose) your typing style... BHand uses one component of the Think Factory : Braininabox."

I haven't used the application, so I can't comment on its accuracy, but the concept has been around for a while.

Easel, by Human Touch Software includes support for Wacom tablets I think, and there is a driver on BeBits for Wacom USB PenPartner tablets here. There are also several other tablet drivers on BeBits, and as far as I know they all support pressure sensitivity, although I'm not sure if any programs other than Easel do. Oh, and Easel was recently made freeware so you'll probably want to check it out regardless of whether it supports your tablet or not.

Easel, by Human Touch Software includes support for Wacom tablets I think, and there is a driver on BeBits for Wacom USB PenPartner tablets here. There are also several other tablet drivers on BeBits, and as far as I know they all support pressure sensitivity, although I'm not sure if any programs other than Easel do. Oh, and Easel was recently made freeware so you'll probably want to check it out regardless of whether it supports your tablet or not.

There is a nice SB16 driver that you can download from www.bebits.com. It's here

The image files extracted from the tgz and exe files are identical. However, there are some differences noticable.

1. If you want to enable SMP, boot off the disk supplied in the tgz. SMP is disabled after booting Windows.
2. If you boot BeOS from an ext2 partition, BeOS will be unable to use virtual memory. BeOS' VM works on FAT, not on ext2.

People who are experiencing driver problems, try the driver section at BeBits. My Rtl8139 ethernet start working after installing a fresh driver.

Well, I played with it for a few hours. Looks very solid and has a lot of potential. A few remarks, however... I did a few ping tests and they showed a pretty slow response from the BeOS system (3 times as slow as from a Linux system). I tried Quake2 but I probably installed something wrong. It runs almost frozen.

I thought there was a 3c509 driver available but a quick search didn't find it. I suggest you ask on BeUserTalk.

But to find drivers and third-party software for the BeOS, I suggest you try:

• BeWare
• bebits

Also, while technical support is not available from Be, Inc. for the personal edition, the BeUserTalk mailing list is very good; many BeOS engineers and experienced users frequent it and answer questions.

• Be Mailing Lists

Michael D. Crawford

Later this month, BeOS Revision 5 will be released, free for non-commercial use. Details are sketchy, but it does sound like you will need to be running windows in order to use the free version. (Kinda like a UMSDOS Installation of linux.) Wait until later this month to make your decision, download Free Be, and try it out. (Will only be about a 60 meg download.) If you like it, you might consider buying the OS.

--
linuxisgood:~$ man woman

Having used BeOS for over a year now, I'd like to clean up a few things if I may:

1) BeOS R5 will run from a file in Windows. It will NOT run IN Windows. The BFS filesystem will sit on your FAT partition as a normal file. When you click the BeOS icon in Windows the system will re-boot into BeOS, using the 'Windows' file as a normal BFS filesystem.

2) BeOS R5 WILL also be a stand-alone OS. You do NOT need Windows to run it. You will be able to install BeOS into a seperate partition and dual-boot it, etc.

Both of the above are stated in the press release.

3) BeOS IS NOT UNIX!!!, I repeat, BeOS IS NOT UNIX. BeOS has nothing to do with UNIX. You CANNOT use a Linux kernel with BeOS. It's NEVER going to happen. BeOS was written from SCRATCH as a brand new OS. It does use 'bash' as it's default shell, and it's own file-system (BFS) is very 'UNIX-like', but that is as far as it goes. The standard UNIX commands such as 'vi' and 'ls' are also available of course. BeOS does have a POSIX layer to the API. This means it's easy to port existing UNIX applications to BeOS. (Windows NT has a POSIX API layer, I am told...though I've never seen it myself.)

Below this line are personal comments only
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To be honest, I DON'T want BeOS to be open source. If it was all that would happen is that the Linux gurus (yes I dual-boot Linux and BeOS!) would steal all the good bits of BeOS (i.e. the file-system, Media Translators, etc.), put them into Linux and then dump BeOS.

I like having a choice myself. There are some people out there that don't actually like running Linux, you know! (I'm NOT one of them :-) )

--------------------------------------------------
David Powell

Be Everywhere.
www.begroovy.com www.benews.com www.bebits.com
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• List of commercial software
• List of freeware
• Apparently there is more stuff at http://www.be.com/beware but their web server doesn't feel too responsive.

Hey, anyone who has a copy of the Be operating system should check out a program I whipped up which will convert any image (for which a translator is installed on your system) into the png format. You can easily convert an entire folder of many image types to png in one easy move.

available at BeBits under graphics utilites

or here

Source is included and is in the public domain.