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OpenBeOS's clone of the Be File System has been selected recently by the folks creating the SkyOS.

The BFS replacement has been one of the fastest progressing parts of the OpenBeOS project. Dominic Giampaolo has actually commented to the team lead of OpenBFS, and complemented the team on the good work they accomplished.

I know it's hard to accept, but the end is nigh :(

There's a reason SCO's stock keeps going up and up, and it's because the business community expects SCO to win hands-down.

I'm sure all of you, like me, can feel the thin, cold fingers of Darl McBride wrap around your throat. I'm coming to the realisation that Linux will not be around this time next year.

It's about time we all focused on one operating system now and helped to make it the best it can be.

Yellow Tab has a version of BeOS called "Zeta".

I think the story is that they could licence everything but the name. There's an awesome preview up on Zeta Journal.

And there are also the two open clones in the works: Blue-Eyed OS (by building BeOS-workalike bits on top of Linux) and OpenBeOS (a from-the-ground-up reimplementation of BeOS)..

Rumors have it that OpenBeOS is somewhere near. Maybe thiscould help.

I'm guessing that they are going to be prominently featured since they will be in most shots of the 'teacher' (Jack Black).

What does that say to me? (as a fan and student of the evils of advertising)

The school is up-to-date, the kids are well educated and probably have fun learning. The school is clean, the kids are well-to-do, and are creative.

I can't say if the movie's going to be any good though.

Apple doen't need to come off as cool - ever since I've seen my first Apple II, I've thought they were cool, unique, swell and very usable. They are extra-swift now because they *look* the part, and appeal to compu-idiots for ease of use, and uber-geeks for OS X and sweet-ass hardware.

OS X is THE reason I just spent several grand on a new 15" Powerbook.

I've used some variant of Windows for the last 10 years, tried Linux a few times. Found BeOS as it went under and fell in love. Long live OpenBeos! OS X came to me at work and didn't have the things that I hated about Windows in it. It was smooth, clean, and didn't look like anything I had ever used before. That said, it was also very user friendly - and wow! a unix terminal!

I've learned more (by choice) in 1 year using a Mac than the previous 10 with Windows. The Mac is cool, yes - but it also lessens the uncoolness of things you must do on it, i.e. work.

Microsoft can't be cool. They can make cool things, they can do cool stuff, and have cool features, but MS can't be cool. They are a giant corp, run by uncool people (Bill and Steve? c'mon), make Windows and Office that bring viruses and DRM to everyone and sit on every decidedly not cool desktop in the world.

Can you do stuff with Windows? Sure. Can you enjoy it? Maybe.

No doubt Bill and Co. are poring over this post right now saying, "But Teamhasnoi! What DO we DOOOOooo??".

Bill, you need to think about some things. Like how Windows is viewed as a 'computer'. You've done real well in getting Windows on PCs, but your mindshare stinks. People associate computers with Windows, and the whole thing as 'appliance', and that spells boring. You don't see anyone trying to install Windows CE on a Zaurus, do you?

Second, why would I want to use Windows at home? Most use Windows at work, then come home and it's more of the same. Change it up. Media Center is a good start, but you really need to drop the DRM deal. You're just going to annoy people and make them think of work and PCLOADLETTER when some song they want to hear won't play. They will blame you. And plot your death.

Third. Hardware. The biggest (and I mean biggest) hardware thing you have is the X-Box. Take a look at the PS2 - those guys know how to design sexy hardware. The X-box looked dated when it came out. Stop designing by commitee. Get one person to do it. And not you. Hitler may have designed the VW Beetle, but you're no Hitler. Yet.

Fourth. Bill, lets face facts. You're dead inside. IANAPPOP (I Am Not A Preacher, Pastor, Or Pope), but you've got pay some serious attention to the soul. Ya got no soul, brother. Stop. Give the company to Steve for a year (watch him, have you seen those eyes?), go to Tibet, live in a cave and eat mountain air and drink icy runoff. Bring a Newton.

Fifth. Has the school bully ever been cool?

Oh, Bill, my Powerbook shipped today, so I won't be able to help you anymore. Zen out on that.

Some people here seem to not know, or be a little confused about how this company named yellowTAB came to be the BeOS people, and what is happening in the BeOS world at the moment. Also, I'm not associated with yellowTAB at all, this is all my observations.

yellowTAB
Bernd Korz first appeared in the BeOS community when he released a magazine named InsideBeOS. Only one or two issues were translated into english from the native German of the magazine (I purchased the first english edition!). This magazine stopped publication sometime around when Be flopped and as far as I saw, Bernd sort of disappeared again. When Be filed for bankruptcy, there were many outcries from the community for the source to BeOS so that it's legacy could continue. There were several formal proposals from people to purchase the source as well. Then came the announcement that Palm had purchased Be's intellectual propert(IP)... and were not going to continue development of BeOS. Luckily (in my opinion), Bernd was smart enough apparently to ask for a license to the source and not to purchase it. So, before Be sold their IP to Palm, they gave some sort of full license to yellowTAB to release new products based on the source code. Presumably that license just transferred to Palm's ownership with everything else.
So, here we are today, yellowTAB is about to release their new OS named Zeta (sort of BeOS R6) which contains unreleased code from Be plus new stuff and bug fixes that they have added. The article does not make it very clear, but yellowTAB is actually selling RC1 (Release Candidate 1) of Zeta now to the world. The R1 (Release 1) will be available to people who purchase RC1 for 10 Euros.

BeOS rewrites
There are a number of projects that are aiming their sights on rewriting the BeOS. Some totally opensource from conception, others planning on releasing their source after they have a public binary release under their belts. The main contenders that are around at the moment are OpenBeOS (soon to have a name change), BlueEyedOS , and Cosmoe .

OpenBeOS is taking the approach of totally rewriting the entire system. New kernel, new appkit, new interface kit, new storage kit... everything. They're not changing the basic structure of the system, in fact, they're attempting to completely duplicate the system even down to binary compatibility. As a basis for their project, they have used Be's old header files, and written API documentation. They are hosted at source forge and are using the MIT license for all their source.

BlueEyedOS is taking the approach that they perceive the Linux kernel and XFree86 as suitable for building less traditional system on top of them. They are using the Linux kernel as their Be kernel, and X windows as their display. They've released a demo CD so far that is quite interesting and appears very promising. Their code is not available to anyone but their developers at the moment because they've chosen to start their project closed. I've believe that I've heard though that they are planning for a source release later on. The demo CD can still be downloaded from their website.

Cosmoe is a primarily one man show that has taken the Syllable (was Atheos) source code and altered it to run on top of Linux and X. It's author's primary goal seems to be to give the Unix, Linux community a new user interface and the Be API. Code for this system is occasionally released under GPL and LGPL.

The current plan at yellowTAB is to transition slowly from the BeOS code to code from the OpenBeOS project, which is currently moving at its own pace, and released under the MIT licence (tagged as Free by gnu.org). Btw, there are already parts of OpenBeOS in Zeta. So it's already a bit free :-)
There are also other projects to "clone" the BeOS: BlueEyedOS (BeAPI on top of Linux), BeFree, a fork of the former, and other AtheOS derivatives, but IMO none are close enough to the spirit of the BeOS. OpenBeOS chose to get its own kernel (forked from NewOS, from an Ex-Be engineer), and aims at source and binary compatibility.

> 1) Didn't Palm buy BeOS?

Yes, don't expect to see Palm-Be For Desktops thou. Palm bought Be for the excellent engineers the code was a by product. Bits might make it into PalmX.

> 2) Was BeOS closed source or was it open sourced?

BeOS is closed source. However a few other versions have no appeared tring to remake BeOS.
At lest two closed source (Max, and YellowTAB)
At lest two open source, OpenBeOS, based on a brand spanky new kernal, and redeveloped from scrach. And BlueEyedOS, based on Linux.

> 3) Who owns the rights to BeOS PE?

Palm, but before Palm bought Be, Be did a deal with Max to alow it to redistrube it, and did a deal with YellowTAB to not only redistrubute it, but also modified versions of Dano (the next version of offical Be Inc BeOS).

> 4) Who develops these new drivers and the kernel???

Max, YellowTAB (but only for there distributions) and normal developers for gerneric R5 drivers.
Then Linux devs for BlueEyedOS
and OpenBeOS Developers for OBOS.

> 6) What about openbeos? Where do they fit into the BeOS picture??

It will take some time before OBEOS gets a usable version, so the Max & YellowTAB are here to fill the gap untill OBEOS takes off. I'm sure I've seen posts by both YellowTAB and the MAX people that they would like to be come OBEOS distrubuters when this happens.

Dude, the answer's right here!

Anyway, to answer your question: it's still coming along, slowly but surely. They're releasing updated components (most recently new versions of the tracker and the audio mixer). There was a newsletter a fortnight ago.

I don't know how usable OBOS is though. They don't seem to say on their site, and I really can't be bothered with installing it until it runs Photoshop. ;)

"perhaps in a deade or so we'll all be able to do what Be did back in '91"

perhaps much sooner.

• BeOS5-PersonalEdition.exe (45 MB) - BeOS which installs its filesystem virtual into one file on your Windows partition. No partitioning required, no risk involved! Ideal for trying it out.
• BeOS4Linux.tar.gz (41 MB) - same thing, but installs into a Linux ext2 partition. Needs a bootdisk here, though.
• dano_51d0.zip (68,4 MB) - Never released "next generation" BeOS. If link is buggered, paste this without spaces into emule/lmule/xmule: ed2k://|file|dano_51d0.zip|71802854|30CA778C7F8E1B 5A94557E5CD8923B93|/
• DeveloperEdition-1-1-boot-and-main.zip (188 MB) - Needs own partition. Great distro, about as much fun as a Linux desktop of two years ago.
• BeOS-Zeta-Presentation-CeBIT2003.avi (67 MB)
• OpenBeOS recreates the OS in open source

Maybe we should check out alternate operating systems that may not have this problem?

-dk

Looks like a rerun of the AT&T lawsuit that threatened BSD. Time for the masses to move to the next worthy operating system

-dk

And finially, a fully modular UI. so that when I install libjpeg and libogg on my PC, anything that can provide a bitmap makes use of libjpeg and anything that can provide a RIFF file makes use of ogg.

What, like BeOS? Oh wait, BeOS is dead. How about OpenBeOS?

linux is ready...for servers.

for desktops, we should try to get this ready by 2005.

Personally, I hope that Open BeOS or Syllable become viable end-user operating systems.

Also: It is far easier to add a UNIX compatibility layer to some more-elegant-than-UNIX OS than it is to add a fast x86 compatibility layer to a non-x86 chip.

- Sam (so when are we going to have operations which can do core parts of AES quickly) - Sam

The "Developer Edition" and "Max Edition" are hacked together from the Personal Edition that Be, Inc. released. They are in violation of the EULA that comes with the Personal Edition, but, since they are not making the people distributing them any money, i imagine Palm, or the remnants of Be, Inc. couldn't care less.
For open-source replacements of BeOS check out the following:
OpenBeOS
BlueEyed OS
also look at the following:
beunited
yellowTab's Zeta

The guy writing the review is a horrible representative of BeOS users, i think. it's my main OS at home, and I have had little teouble with it, ever (the only time i went into Kernel Debug land was when I managed to crash snes9x with a corrupted ROM).

There's a better one out there - jam.
It's used mostly by the OpenBeOS project.

didn't you hear, beos is already saved. no money needed, but feel free to contribute code. in about a year, they'll be where Be was 3 years ago (which was pretty good, for 3 years ago). finally, a descent gui for my p2-266! now if they only had nfs. and a descent web browser. god knows they have enough irc clients.

yes, i'm offtopic. but i'd rather save beos than waste my time watching tv (and trying to save a tv show so i can waste more time watching tv).

To quote a small section of your well-written post:

OS/2 follows BeOS, not to mention half a dozen other upstarts, in disappearing.

It's a fine OS for certain tasks (web serving, render farms), but for certain others (desktop use) it will always be playing catch-up to commercial offerings (Windows, OSX, etc)

What's wrong with that? What was UNIX designed for? What is Linux designed as? Exactly. Linux on the desktop is a kind of weird abberation, driven mostly by people like me. (Ooo! Server OS on my laptop...so cool!) The other Linux on desktop stuff is driven by money, or lack there of. A FOSS OS if it is designed for the desktop, will be able to compete with commercial desktop offerings the same way Linux, a FOSS OS designed for servers is able to compete with the likes of Sun and SGI. Everyone seems to think Linux on the desktop is the silver bullet. It isn't. A FOSS designed for the desktop, maybe. For example: OpenBeOS

Yes, for one the OpenBeOS folks would most likely love to have it. It was the defacto (if there ever was such a thing) Office Suite standard on BeOS.

Regards, Tobias

Even though Microsoft Office is very expensive, I believe it is tougher to launch a good attack against its TCO. I work at a company with 50+ employees which provides mostly web-based services.

Even though I am a big open-source advocate, I can clearly see that Microsoft Office pays for both itself and Windows through increased productivity.

I think the real threat that Linux poses to Windows right now is in the server area. When you compare LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) with Windows, IIS, ASP, and SQL Server, I believe the Linux combination beats Microsoft's products soundly in TCO mainly through security, stability, and cost.

In order to start making a dent in their desktop market, we need a desktop operating system that is easy to install and use! My bets are on the soon-to-be-renamed OpenBeOS project.

you should have linked the text beos to the site openbeos.org.

get more people involved.

OpenBeOS

11 comments, and most of them are people grumbling about how Red Hat is squeezing choice out of the hands of the user. But really, is this true? What RH has done (from what I hear, I don't chase bleeding-edge distros, usually) is just change the way things look. They've provided a different default appearance. How is this worse from the default appearances provided by the GNOME and KDE teams? (RH's arguments for why it's better are in the article, you should read it :3 )

It's not like Red Hat is releasing modified versions of GNOME and KDE that don't let you customize the appearance; then, only then, would the complaints about choice be founded. The people who really care about the difference between GNOME and KDE probably do so on reasons deeper than 'the default theme looks cool'. (Personally, I don't really like either of the default appearances that much ^^; ) So, when nagora asks "If RH doesn't like this, why don't they drop the one they don't want people to use?" the answer is: they don't care what you use, but they want the defaults to look reasonably similar, because they know that people who really don't *want* their default theme either know how to change it or probably have settings that they'll import anyway.

Remember who Red Hat's intended market share is: the corporate environment. A lot of people I've talked to recently agree that RH's biggest 'ins' are (or should be) for office workstations. Lots of places implement a baseline standard that they want to look the same, but that people can customize if they want to (as long as they don't spend hours tweaking it). This is the mentality that RH seems to target. Yes, this isn't for everyone, but that's the point ... there are plenty of good distributions out there, and many more choices out there if you really really don't like it. But no-one said you have to use Red Hat. (Although I could understand concerns about RH-isms creeping into LSB, but nobody's brought that up.)

Remember, RH == vendor for corporate enviroments. Corporate environments like standard desktops, so this move makes sense in Red Hat's perspective.

Right now there are some people developing an open source version of BeOS, under de BSD license, and trying to bring it back to life (support new hardware, etc). GPLing the office suite of BeOS will be of great help for those guys of Openbeos.org.

When the BeUnited people asked about this, Palm quoted them a price of two million dollars US. Personally, I think if you want open-source BeOS, you might as well support the OpenBeOS project instead. It is coming along nicely.

There is nothing to market. OpenBeOS is vaporware right now. There's very little done besides a lot of talk.

For instance: The kernel is a fork of the NewOS kernel, which is far from complete itself and there are few if any competant kernel hackers on the OBOS team. Also, fork has been changed so much (mostly superficial changes) by the few developers who are working on it, that changes to the NewOS kernel will not easily port to the OBOS fork.
Also, very little else of the OS has even been seriously started on. Check out the OpenBeOS website and see their progress indicators.

I'm not saying that the project will go nowhere (that's only my personal opinion), only that if it does it will be years before anything of significance is realized.

Depends if you count OBos BeOS or not...

I guess you mean Open versions of BeOS. Well, the only attention-worthy project is OpenBeOS (sometimes referred to as OBOS). It can't handle this software, or any software, yet. However, BeOS 5. PE (personal edition) is free and just as powerful as the Pro edition. You can even download ISO images of PE with additional drivers and/or software. These would be the BeOS "distributions".

Also keep an eye on www.openbeos.org. True, it won't be Linux, but it will be open source.

Bruno G. Albuquerque and Axel Dorfler are working to make a 100% compatiable clone of the file system that shipped with the later versions of BeOS as part of the OpenBeOS project.

They have a fantastic amount of the work done already such as :
o Read-only BFS
o Kernel Interface
o Full Attribute Support
o Indexing
o Symlink Traversal
o Queries, full UTF-8 Support, and support for non-indexed attributes.

I believe they are also fixing some problems that were in the original FS.

I am sure they would be glad for some more file system engineers. Come to think of it, the rest of this open source project is going really well too, but as always it needs more programmers....

BeOS never had a problem BSOD'ing. BeOS also is a great platform for software synthesis due to the low audio latencies, though this hasn't quite been exploited yet (only a few synths exist :( and one commercial no longer is available) BeOS is also is great for MIDI stuff; the MIDI implementation in BeOS is probably the best I've ever encountered (i never really understood MIDI until I used it in BeOS). MIDI apps work nice and seamlessly with one another, too. *sigh*
I hope OpenBeOS reaches a point of usability soon.

Yeah, not like there are any other examples of open source software based on proprietry software.

tlhf

xxx

Also, your linked article talks about a compiler which compiles itself. IE, GCC recognising GCC. Having GCC regocnise BCC, VC++, et al would be insanly difficult. Even more so in this case as Mono is being released after the Microsoft compiler.

I'm really getting tired of the argument that a single OS should be targetted at every imaginable application. That's exactly the kind of thinking that has turned Windows into the painful environment it is for any system administrator or programmer.

For example, the attributes that make a great gaming platform (low latency, lots of multimedia device support, good graphics libraries, easy single-user setup and configuration) are not the same as those that define the server market (high reliability, clustering and RAID, easily automated and administered remotely). Why should Linux (or any single OS) be the "One True Way" for both of these, much less for any and every potential market out there?

Personally, I'd rather boot into something like OpenBeOS (once it's ready, of course) for media work, switch to Linux when I'm doing network code development, and maybe leave a copy of OpenBSD around for the times I'm feeling paranoid.

I'm amazed nobody's gone for the Monty Python parrot sketch reference.

This operating system is no more! It has ceased to Be!

I figured The Register would, if no one else. And we could have someone from the OpenBeOS team playing the shopkeeper. [Taps bottom of cage] "There! It just moved!"

In spite of what the website says, it looks like a Gnome screenshot. Gnome (GTK+ in non-OO C) and BeOS (well designed OO C++) are worlds apart. Making a BeOS theme for Gnome is a far cry from bringing the BeOS to the Linux desktop.

More comprehensive, approach, true to the BeOS may be evolving at OpenBeOS