Slashdot Mirror
Be Liquidation Sale
Anonymous Squonk writes: "Be's homepage has a message stating some of the details of their impending dissolution. One little item of note mentioned was 'Public Liquidation Auction January 16 (details to follow)' Who knows what kind of geek goodies might be available at rock bottom prices? Perhaps this could be our last chance to get our hands on a BeBox!" How about some of those nice LED CPU meters?
How about some of those nice LED CPU meters?
FYI, these come automatically with many high end non-Linux servers including HPs, SGIs and DECs.
Oh yeah, I'm sure you'll be able to get stuff real cheap now that this has made it to slashdot. Should have kept it to yourself. On a side note, if you want real cheap hardware checkout your local university surplus store, they usually have some real nifty things at reasonable prices.
It's possible to make your own CPU-meter with a few simple electronic components available at your favorite electronics retailer. I wouldn't be suprised of a custom LED CPU meter is at least half the price of prebuilt ones.
What do you think of MusicCity now?
It is a nice operating system. You can get a free personal version from www.bebits.com or you can buy a more deluxe version from www.gobe.com -- oddly enough, I don't think you can get it from Palm.
BeOS was/is a commercial OS, based on a microkernel, and POSIX-compliant enough that you could compile and run more than a few UNIX console apps on it. It was one of the first OSes to use a journaling filesystem as the default FS, but could read a pretty wide variety of other filesystems, including FAT/NTFS, ext2fs iirc, Mac drives, and a few others. It was marketed as a multimedia-oriented OS, and that was certainly true: it was rock stable, booted fast, had a solid integrated video system and OpenGL support built into the OS, had good filesystem performance and decent network drivers.
It also was available in a cut-down form for free on the web, but they've now removed that. (I luckily burnt it on one of my backup CDs a year ago.) The main limitation was that it had one 512MB partition that was created as a file on an existing FAT or NTFS fs, but once it was running, you could copy it over to a spacier install.
However, there weren't nearly enough drivers, and not enough freeware developer support, so it stayed a niche operating system until the end. Although I know some composers (live AND tracker) that still do their editing work with a Be-based PC on one side and a Mac on the other.
In answer to your question, Be is an outstanding operating system, with great technical proficiency. Almost every (recent) os multitasks and SMP's, but Be does it with mind-boggling smoothness and low-latency. Even on old hardware, it was possible to, for example, run several quicktime movies without dropping frames on any of them. Also it had a noteworthy filesystem, with a powerful ability to extend any file with arbitrary tags and so on. Also it was a 64-bit journaling filesystem. It was originally designed to handle complex multi-media tasks which might require large files, and extremely fast response times.
It was proprietary and ran on the PowerPC (and eventually both PowerPC and Intel chips).
Erik
"also was available in a cut-down form for free on the web, but they've now removed that"
You can still get it at mirrors and it was recently uploaded to bebits(BeOS's freshmeat). You can get both the windows and linux version here.
You check as well how to install the personal edition in a proper partition or make the original virtual partition bigger