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BeOS 5.0 Available for Free - But Not Yet
A huge number of people have submitted over the last few days/weeks that BeOS5.0 will be free. You can grab it from free.be.com - although I hope you've got a fast connection.Update: 03/28 01:22 by H :It doesn't appear to be ready yet - and we have an anonymous source at Be, who claims that there were some show-stopping bugs in the code, even up until last night. Could be hoax though, as it appears to be rolling now. They also announced that they are open sourcing (No license that I can see) the User Interface components Tracker and Deskbar, which have their own web sites. I've heard word that the free.be.com isn't working - check out http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/ for a more secure connection.
I managed to d/l freebe5 today from a german mirror, though I had to use gozilla to retry a few times. Once connected I got 60k/s. It's a 43mb file. It's compressed with winzip and barely compressed - kind of a waste. When you install it puts a few files at letter:/BeOs. One is a 512mb file called image.be. So prepare to have lots of room to unzip the installer and for the installer to run, then 500mb+ to install it. Once installed you just click it, it reboots to dos mode and loads - except it hung on me, so I had to make the boot floppy. Using that, it loaded in under one minute. Now let me tell you what amazed me right away. It came up in 640x480x8 and a welcome message telling you to set your time, video, and network. I set my network to hdcp and it came up right away, I tried netpositive and was able to browse, and boy it's FAST! With my cable modem, it was faster than linux/netscape or ie/netscape on win98 or win95, and even faster than opera/win95. I'm talking loading news.com about as fast as I can blink, under 1 second. And this wasn't even using a web proxy or increasing the # connections, which I suggest you do under preferences. The other thing you need to know is click the BEOS logo to get access to your apps and preferences (where network etc is). It doesn't tell you this in the welcome screen. Also right click and select mount and you can easily access your other hard drives. Next I tried playing mp3, avis, mpgs and was impressed, they all played even compressed avi's. But I found mpg's used 100% cpu on a celeron 300 ;( Try running the pulse application to see. Another thing I noticed - no disk activity. Everything loads lightening fast compared to win98, pretty well instant. Now I have to expand on the boot process being fast, because it installed and used all my drivers automatically, I didn't have to do a thing and it *worked* right away, unlike windows which takes forever to find and install drivers and asks you dumb questions along the way, and has to reboot 3 or 4 times. There basically was no installation for this OS! Just load and run. Everything worked, let me tell you what I have: ATI all in wonder pro, 4mb, I got this running in 1024x768x32 now. I tried the tv application but it didn't work, so I guess that's out. No video in devices were listed either. Diamond MX300 sound card based on vortex 2. I can hear sounds faintly, something weird going on here cause the mixer sliders work and have effect. Maybe it mixed up the out jacks and I have to use line out 1 (this card has 4 speakers). Yes! I just tested it and that's the problem. For the record use out 1, the far right connector. I have an adaptec 2902e scsi, a weird oem model based on aic-7850 chipset, which works fine. The scsi probe showed my teac 4x CDR. I was able to mount audio cd in my toshiba dvd. I can see my fat32 partitions in my win98 disks. My network card is a d-link 528ct which is ne2000 compatible I think. All my devices are pci. But my radio card and winmodem and hollywood plus don't work, which I didn't expect anyhow. There's not a whole lot of applications to play with, so you'll be downloading more. Overall I am very impressed with it, if I had all the applications I generally use for it (icq, web browsing, mp3, video, wordprocessing, some games and programming) I would use it all the time - given that it's incredibly fast, easy to use and stable. And I have 6 cards in my machine and no conflicts! It's a bx board, celeron 300a, 96mb ram, acer ax6bc brand board. 3 hard drives, scsi cd-r, ide dvd-rom. Haven't tried burning a disk yet but it's supposed to work. One more thing - not all websites work, I tried a secure site and it just failed, also had some complaints about javascript not enabled, but the failure could also be related to java as the secure site immediately loads a java applet. Obviously slashdot is working fine and I could post this message. Try www.tomshardware.com - it looks messed up at first but wait for it to download and it will correct itself.
Their OS with the database journaling filesystem, fast bootups and good multimedia support is a valid alternative OS especially for the desktop space that alot of Linux evangelists lust after right now.
It is not the fact that the OS is inferior. The company is finally slowly but surely waking up to the fact that making people pay for the OS is fool's way of making money.
If you had said that they did not go far enough I would sincerely agreed. However, you don't move mountains all at once. Corporations like mountains move slowly sometimes. One day soon I predict that you will see them open up the code of their product.
There have been some very good reviews of this OS in more than a few Alternative/Free OS type websites. I don't carry URLs like weapons around but do the searches. Once this thing is open sourced and the community can improve the code we will be the better for it. However, you do not insult a child for running after they made their first steps. That sort of zealotry marks our community and makes us all luck bad.
ACK
BeOSCentral is kinda only half-there these days.
BeGroovy has more-or-less taken over the niche of funky, chatty news site.
BeNews has a full review of R5 Pro and Free up now.
Yabel (Yet Another BeOS Link) has a nice RDF index of the top news from most of the major BeOS sites.
Huh? Linux is not a micro-kernel based OS. MacOS X, the Hurd, and NeXTOS are, but not Linux.
The question should be, how can they compete against a free as in source OS like Linux. Their answer is to make Be free as in beer. Time will tell if it works, but I'm really not sure that Be and Linux are competitors in the first place. Not many people would use Be as a server OS and, on the flip side, not many people would use Linux on a desktop. This may change, but I think Be needs to grab some market share on the desktop first before trying to attack Linux.
Therefore, I see this really as an attempt by Be to compete with Windows and MacOS. What better way to get people to try it than to give away a mostly functional version for free? If customers like it, they will come back for the professional version.
Scot Hacker, author of The BeOS Bible, had an article over at BeNews about a possible way around this. Worth investigating once the free version is actually available.
Right here...
o r.ftp.be.com/
/pub/beos/
ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/
ftp://ftp.beeurope.com/pub/
ftp://ftp.archive.de.uu.net/pub/systems/BeOS/mirr
ftp://ftp.gbnet.net/pub/be/
ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/systems/be/
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/beos/
ftp://ftp.lab.kdd.co.jp/Be/
ftp://mirror.nucba.ac.jp/mirror/BeOS/
ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/BeOS/
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/beos/
BeOS5 Free edition can be found under
A particular cool file is named:
BeOS4Linux.tar.gz
Or we could look @ it figure out what it does well, and then improve our own product (Linux).
Just bycotting something because it does not agree with our poltical views, is pointless.
There is always something to learn.
My 2 cents anyways.
Yes I can not spell...Wait....for a second there I almost cared.
Ok. I normally defend the writers, of the stories, but this time I cannot. Why did you not read the freaking page at free.be.com. It will be available today, but they are on the West Coast of the US and probably wont have it up until this afternoon. Now their site will be down for most of the day as people try to get in to download.
Read the freaking links that you post!!!!!!!!!!
The site is at http://opentracker.org.
;)
The license is the Open Tracker license, but it looks to be almost a version of the BSD license (not familiar with the intimates of the latter, I can't say for sure).
DAMN! Maybe we'll finally get a decent GUI for Linux!
BeOS's got a new logo and the list of the new features is here. Still more detail in here (complete list actually).
God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ --1Thes5:9
Stuck my foot in my mouth, it does require windows to install, at least according to the readme, and is also limited to 512 meg partition for it's "root" though can mount other partitions to use.. The free version is much more crippled then Be had led everyone to believe. But I guess the wording of the FAQ could have gone either way. I'm still curious about the BeOS4Linux.tar.gz file, anyone tried it, I can't get in to download off of any mirror... In any case I wish they had/will release an ISO with fewer limitations.. I can understand leaving out the royalty-laden stuff and leaving out a few features, but if they want to claim a free, fully-functional O/S it should in no way depend on any other O/S for anything and should not be limited to 512 megs, such a restriction truly makes freebe "crippleware". In any case, BeOS itself is great, I still have 4.5.2, and looks like I'll have to stick with it for now.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
From ftp.be.com/pub/MIRRORS:
t p.be.com/
m irror.ftp.be.com/
ftp.beeurope.com/pub/
ftp.archive.de.uu.net/pub/systems/BeOS/mirror.f
ftp.gbnet.net/pub/be/
uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/systems/be/
ftp.cdrom.com/pub/beos/
ftp.lab.kdd.co.jp/Be/
mirror.nucba.ac.jp/mirror/BeOS/
gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/BeOS/
mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/beos/
The above FTP sites are mirrors of ftp.be.com/pub/. They are
synchronized with ftp.be.com at least once per day, sometimes more
often. We encourage you to use these mirrors if your connection to
ftp.be.com is slow.If you have a fast connection to the Internet and
would be interested in maintaining a mirror of the Be FTP site, please contact us at
webmaster@be.com. Locations of the above servers:
Australia:mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/beos/
Austria:gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/BeOS/
France:ftp.beeurope.com/pub/
Germany:ftp.archive.de.uu.net/pub/systems/BeOS/
Japan:ftp.lab.kdd.co.jp/Be/
mirror.nucba.ac.jp/mirror/BeOS/
United Kingdom:ftp.gbnet.net/pub/be/
United States:ftp.be.com/pub/ (San Jose)
uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/systems/be/ (Champaign, Illinois)
ftp.cdrom.com/pub/beos/ (San Francisco)
- You aren't limited to 500 megs! Yes, the Be-in-a-file can only be that big, but if you set aside a partition (say, 1.5 megs) and format it as BeFS using the Partition Magic version that came with R4, you can install onto that directly using the "Installer" program that comes with FreeBe 5. I'll bet you could format partitions as BeFS using the DriveSetup utility that comes with FreeBe5 too... Check BeNews for details
- You're not limited to one processor! This is a problem only if you launch BeOS 5 directly from Windows, as the second processor is disabled in hardware during the Windows boot sequence. Make a boot floppy and start from there, or install the BeOS Boot manager by running "bootman" in the BeOS shell (Be Menu -> Applications -> Terminal
... Bash, whee)
In fact, you can install BeOS 5 overtop of your existing 4.5.2 partition and it will boot without any problems... Or at least none that I've found yet while typing this post in the new NetPositive!Wah!
> Be are simply doing this for marketing reasons
> and not from any type of kindess or good-will.
Of course they are. BeOS is a commercial product, still fairly new on the scene. Most people only know of Microsoft. Be would certainly do anything to give them an edge over the crew at Redmond. And, in my opinion, they have done the best thing that they could do. By releasing a fully functional version of their OS as free for personal use, they are gaining a massive audience and potential customer base (that is, everyone in the world whose ears perk up at the prospect of getting something for free).
This, however, is only the beginning. Once people see the basic version in action, things will begin to happen. So-called "power users" will get curious about the bells and whistles available in the for-sale version... those who are really impressed will buy a copy to show their support (and to fund further development)... those steeped in the hyper-commercial eighties/nineties/naughties culture will buy a copy because the freebie "feels wrong to them", or some similar nonsense... and when the CEO, CIO, or CFO sees what h[is/er] kid has downloaded, starts playing with it, and likes it... BeOS might find its way onto quite a few desktops in the business space as well.
> They realise that their OS is regarded as an
> inferior product with little support and a very
> small user base, and as such are trying to
> increase their share of the OS market through
> this publicity stunt.
Who have you been talking to? By all accounts that I've heard, BeOS is a well-designed and well-implemented OS that has made astounding progress in such a short time. Of course its user base is small compared to, say, Microsoft's... but that is why Be is using this marketing tactic (or "publicity stunt", as you misjudge it).
> Until Be show that they are truly commited to
> the community by releasing the source code for
> BeOS then I think we should boycott this as we
> should any other closed-source product. If we
> blindly rush to download BeOS then you are
> tacitly supporting closed-source applications
> and OSes, and thus harming the open-source
> movement.
Be is NOT committed to the [open-source] community. They are committed to developing, producing, and marketing their product, as is any commercial venture. At least Be is choosing to do it by developing a quality product and increasing its visibility to as wide an audience as possible. Certain other companies take much easier ways out (e.g. leveraging monopoly power to push low-quality product).
Everything has its place, ye zealot. Supporting a quality product, even if it is closed-source, is not harming the Open Source movement.
Lighten up.
--LordEq
Americas: /freebe/ - BeForever, Omaha, NE
http://www.zdnet.com/ - Ziff-Davis, North America
http://download.cnet.com/ - CNET/Download.com, California
ftp://.beoscentral.com/pub/ - BeOS CentralJohnson City, TN
http://freebe.nerdygirls.com/ - Oak Ridge, TN
ftp://www.beforever.com/pub/beforever
ftp://mirrors.rochester.rr.com/pub/be/ - RoadRunner.Com, Rochester, NY
ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/beos/ - Be, Inc. San Jose, CA
Europe/Australia: /beos/ - ComputerChannel, Hamburg, Germany
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/beos/ - AARNet, Brisbane, Australia
ftp://ftp.beeurope.com/pub/ - BeEurope, Paris, France
ftp://ftp.worldonline.fr/ - World Online, Paris, France
ftp://ftp.gigabell.net/pub/beos/ - Gigabell.Net, Frankfurt, Germany
ftp://ftp.ph-freiburg.de/pub/m irrors/ftp.be.com/beos - P.H. Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
http://www.computerchannel.de/download
ftp://ftp.xtdnet.com/pub/ - XTDNet, Karlsruhe, Germany
ftp://ftp.zdf.de/pub/ - Neues-3Sat Online, Mainz, Germany
http://pcteor1.mi.infn.it/beos/ - Univ. of Milan, Milan, Italy
ftp://dl.xs4all.nl/pub/ - XS4All, Amsterdam, Netherlands
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/os/BeOS/ - SUNET, Uppsala, Sweden