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The Be Lives!

An anonymous reader submits: "As reported on the OS News: BeOS 5 PE Max Edition is based on the original BeOS 5 PE with an additional number of drivers, add-ons, AthlonXP/Pentium4 patches and more software. It includes new development tools from the OpenBeOS team but you will also be able to select the old tools. This is an ideal way to install BeOS 5 off a bootable CD image, for all those who wanted to try out BeOS but they were unable to do so because of the bugs/drivers and patches BeOS 5 PE needs to have applied into it before it successfully run on or support most modern PCs. BeBits has an overview of the files included in the package, and downloads for the Be Max in parts or as a whole (all 213MB). Enjoy!"

52 comments

  1. Um by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Why the fuck is this in the BSD section? BSD is only dying, it's not totally dead like BeOS is.

    1. Re:Um by Chexsum · · Score: 0

      I second this antagonism.

      --
      Pixels keep you awake!
    2. Re:Um by longbottle · · Score: 1

      Because they both start with B you moron. :P

      --
      I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it!
  2. Awesome! by I+Am+The+Owl · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now, if I'm lucky, I can get half the hardware on my machine working under BeOS and enjoy the dozens of applications available for it! I cannot express the sheer joy of being able to use something considerably less functional than even Linux.

    --

    --sdem
    1. Re:Awesome! by neuronauty · · Score: 1

      BeOS is a much more polished product than Linux in many ways - you could say BeOS is to Linux what MacOS is to Windows. It has different design goals, and it achieves them well. Its very sad that it has been scuttled by corporate vandalism.

  3. Corrections: by theridersofrohan · · Score: 1

    a) Why is this on the BSD section? Is it some joke on the "BSD is dying?" troll?

    b) Where was it reported on OSNews? Can't find the article anywhere

    1. Re:Corrections: by subuni · · Score: 3, Informative

      b) Where was it reported on OSNews? Can't find the article anywhere

      http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=2212

  4. asside from the sarcasm by JamesCronus · · Score: 1

    i'm actually quite interested by this release, though the speed i'm experiancing in getting it downloaded seems to imply it'd be faster to get a plane ticket and fly to the sourceforge server as a faster means. oh well so much for a 155Mbitpersecond mega link. i never got to use BeOS, and now maybe i have a chance to experiance a well and truely object oriented OS. and it's free!!

    --
    dybia felly dwi a hampster (i think therefore i am a hampster)
    1. Re:asside from the sarcasm by DrZaius · · Score: 2

      Try a mirror.. Click on the first link and scroll down a bit.

      I'm not too sure why a link to a single mirror was posted.

      --
      -- DrZaius - Minister of Sciences and Protector of the Faith
    2. Re:asside from the sarcasm by JamesCronus · · Score: 1

      thanks, getting it off the german mirror, much faster

      --
      dybia felly dwi a hampster (i think therefore i am a hampster)
  5. I can't figure out by CableModemSniper · · Score: 5, Funny

    who should be more offended, BeOS zealots, or BSD zealots?

    --
    Why not fork?
  6. To Be, or not to Be... by Tuxinatorium · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous bloatware or to use an obsolete OS that won't run any new games...

  7. learn something new every day by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · · Score: 4, Funny

    God, I feel like a complete idiot. All this time I thought this was the "BSD" section, not the "BeSD" section.

    (-1, redundant, offtopic, whatever, whatever)

    --

    I write in my journal
    1. Re:learn something new every day by pknoll · · Score: 1

      Be is the B in BSD. Er... B is the Be... wait... no... never mind.

  8. Is it still crippleware? by Hythlodaeus · · Score: 2, Informative

    The "personal edition" of BeOS was essentially crippleware designed to encourage you to buy the "professional edition." It had to be installed under Windows and booted from a disk image limited to 512 MB. If there were a free version of Be without such limitations, THAT would be news. It's too late for my money to help Be, Inc.

    --
    For great justice.
    1. Re:Is it still crippleware? by n.wegner · · Score: 2, Informative

      The differences between PE and pro are about the same as the differences between Windows XP home and Windows XP Pro - basically PE is "good enough", and pro is just a little better.

      If you want to install PE on a partition, you just load your windows-based PE installation, format the partition, run the installer, intall the bootmanager, then reboot. Full details can be found using google. If you want to install it under linux -
      http://www.bebits.com/app/2680
      has the disk image and the image for the floppy bootloader.

      If you want to make a bootable cd, search for bootable be cd at bebits.com (which contains an el-torito cd track image of the above floppy bootloader) and follow the instructions found there.

    2. Re:Is it still crippleware? by yason · · Score: 1

      FYI: It never was crippleware in how you described it. You could format a partition on your harddisk for BeFS, install the OS there (there was an installer binary in the 512MB HD image partition). Even the HD image booted nicely without Windows or Linux, you just had to put the image file to some ext2/fat partition where the bootdisk could find it. The only things missing from the personal edition was the lack of licensed MP3 codec and SSL-support for NetPositive.

    3. Re:Is it still crippleware? by aphor · · Score: 2

      I used the HDImage-mounted-on-FAT32 to set up a Be partition, and ran the installer to install the OS there. Then I used the cool BeOS boot menu to go between BeOS, FreeBSD, and Windeews.

      I never had any problem getting MP3s to play. They just worked... very Mac like... moreso than OS-X even.

      I never held out for SSL in NetPositive. I thought the Mozilla people would blow it away eventually.

      I still find that I wish MacOSX could do some BeOS things... like the fluid abstraction of any audio type in the Finder.. and burning CDs more like BeOS...

      All BeOS would have needed was good hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers and it would have become a preferred gaming platform. I would have rebooted into BeOS just to play games. The game IDE would have followed very quickly...

      --
      --- Nothing clever here: move along now...
  9. OSNews by mapinguari · · Score: 1

    Eh, for what it's worth, here's the OSNews link.

  10. RADEON by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 0, Troll
    And the ATI support is...

    Where?

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
    1. Re:RADEON by questionlp · · Score: 5, Informative
      According to http://www.bebits.com/app/3148, in the first half of the "Graphics" section:
      Graphics Driver for ATI Radeon (updated in Max Edition V2.1)
    2. Re:RADEON by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      SO PISS off jeremiah cornelius

      there is no need to bash if u cant even substanciate ur bashing
      Bastard

  11. Is this Legal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I thought Be were bought by Palm, and now Palm owns all the Be stuff. How can people not Palm be making releases of Be stuff? Do they have hacked versions of XP too?

  12. Tying two stories together... by mcelrath · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I wonder what it would take to ransom the source for BeOS. I can think of no single thing I would rather have the source for. Palm owns it now, right? Do they have any plans for it? What happened to BeIA? I haven't heard a peep from the BeOS community in...years...

    Who is making releases anyway? Who has their paws on the source? Surely not Palm?

    -- Bob

    --
    1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
    1. Re:Tying two stories together... by wing.app · · Score: 1

      After aquiring Be, Palmsource now owns the BeOS source, but says "noone has made a sufficient offer" to buy it

    2. Re:Tying two stories together... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
      Palm has their paws on the source. But they didn't make the changes. The changes were made either by editing the binaries (adding support for Athlons), producing new code (development tools), or editing what little source was released by Be, Inc. (the GUI file manager).

      Palm is planning on using Be-style technology in an upcoming update to PalmOS, according to The Register. I believe a lot of Be's old workers work for Palm now.

    3. Re:Tying two stories together... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's up with your sig?

      1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.

      When you take the square root of something, the solution is actually +/-N, so you are arbitrarily choosing the positive for one side, and the negative of the other. It is not an equality.

      Plus if you add 1 to the right side, you have to add it to the left as well, so 1=-1 would become 2=0, or 0=-2, but your proof was already wrong by then.

    4. Re:Tying two stories together... by mcelrath · · Score: 1
      Congratulations, you get the joke.

      And I can do 2 math operations in one step if I want to. (hint: divide by 2) There's only one math error there.

      And fuckin' a that thing gets a lot of comments.

      --
      1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
  13. BeOS is dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny
    It is official; Netcraft now confirms: BeOS is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered BeOS community when IDC confirmed that BeOS market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that BeOS has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. BeOS is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskinto predict BeOS' future. The hand writing is on the wall: BeOS faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for BeOS because BeOS is dying. Things are looking very bad for BeOS. As many of us are already aware, BeOS continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    FreeBeOS is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBeOS developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBeOS is dying.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    OpenBeOS leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBeOS. How many users of NetBeOS are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBeOS versus NetBeOS posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBeOS users. BeOS/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBeOS posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BeOS/OS. A recent article put FreeBeOS at about 80 percent of the BeOS market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBeOS users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBeOS Usenet posts.



    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBeOS went out of business and was taken over by BeOSI who sell another troubled OS. Now BeOSI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that BeOS has steadily declined in market share. BeOS is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If BeOS is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. BeOS continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save BeOS from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, BeOS is dead.


    Fact: BeOS is dying

    1. Re:BeOS is dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is actually extremely funny, considering the bad placement of this story.

  14. More than 1GB of RAM? by SixArmedJesus · · Score: 1

    I'd love to try this out, but I have more than 1GB of RAM in my system, so the old BeOS won't even boot completely. Does anyone know if this has been fixed in this version?

    Jeremy

    --

    *slight crashing sound*
    1. Re:More than 1GB of RAM? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      IIRC BeOS could address several Petabytes or RAM ... 1 Gb should be piffle :P

  15. BONE by kyhwana · · Score: 1

    Anyone know if this includes BONE, the more BSD-like network sockets update?

    --
    My email addy? should be easy enough.
  16. the answer is by sethadam1 · · Score: 1

    The answer is $2 million.

    Palm has apparently said they will sell the BeOS source code for 2 million dollars. Anyone know a generous benefactor?

    1. Re:the answer is by Maniakes · · Score: 2

      Palm has apparently said they will sell the BeOS source code for 2 million dollars.

      Got links?

      --
      A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
    2. Re:the answer is by Z4rd0Z · · Score: 2

      Surely there is someone out there with a mere 2 million to start an Amiga-style resurrection project to take over the world. If they get going soon, they might even be able to catch up with current technology. But I guess if Be couldn't profit from it, no one else could either. A shame.

      --
      You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
  17. Ok, but only one question... by PinkX · · Score: 2

    And this is not a troll. Why is the article under the BSD section of slashdot?

  18. I Tried This by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 1

    I tried this after I read the article on OSNews. It wasn't much use for me though, as the desktop keptcrashing (Said something about illegal opcode). I blame it on my CPU, but isn't BeOS supposed to run on Pentium MMX? Or did they raise the bar for this edition?

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    1. Re:I Tried This by KiwiSurfer · · Score: 1

      The orginal BeOS Personal Edition runs fine on a Pentium MMX. If you need a mirror, it was on ftp.planetmirror.com last time I checked.

  19. Et tu, Slashdot? by edhall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If someone posted this in the Slashdot Linux section (if it had one -- it doesn't need one, for reasons that are pretty obvious to all), we'd be virtually buried under a blizzard of "Be isn't Free Software/Be isn't Linux/How dare you compare Be with Linux" postings. Think about it& -- you know it's true. Of course, I'm going to get hammered with negative moderations for suggesting that Slashdot itself has joined with the BSD Is Dying troll in wanton BSD-bashing, but how else can we interpret this?

    I try to be impartial; hell, I've run Linux since Yggsadril, and the computer nearest my left foot is running RedHat 7.2 (plus a customized kernel and security patches) while the one nearest my right foot runs FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE. I read the LKML and a few freebsd-* mailing lists. My Alpha runs Linux, since Linux supports it better than any flavor of BSD. And I firmly believe that Linux is the best shot the free software community has against Microsoft. And, of course, Linux != Slashdot, so I'll continue to use and support it as much as I always have.

    But now I have to say that the anti-BSD bias on Slashdot, which has been strongly hinted at before, has become starkly obvious. The mentality of many Slashdotters -- that Linux and BSD are somehow in competition rather than allies in the battle against Redmond -- seems to be infiltrating Slashdot itself. It's been subtle in the past, evidenced when major BSD events are simply ignored while random fluff gets reported. Now, it comes right out in the open.

    I guess I've been in denial.

    None of this is to be taken as slander against Be, which is about as fine a closed-source, not-really-free product as I've ever seen. It doesn't belong in the BSD section, however, and putting it here should be as much an insult against Be as it is against BSD.

    -Ed
    1. Re:Et tu, Slashdot? by CoolVibe · · Score: 2
      Give 'em a break!

      Surely, this wasn't front-page material, and decided to stuff it in to a section somewhere. But since there's no "Exotic operating systems" or BeOS section in the section list, they decided to stuff it in the BSD section, because they didn't know where else to stuff it.

      I myself would have put it in the Developers section, or the Apple section (Since Mr. Gossee used to work at Apple). I don't blame them.

      Be glad that they compare Be to the mighty fine BSD line of OSes. Heck, Be's in our camp. Yaay.

    2. Re:Et tu, Slashdot? by scrytch · · Score: 2

      I'd have filed it under the Amiga section. dustbin-of-history.slashdot.org or something like that...

      --
      I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
  20. BSD? by dizzy+tunez · · Score: 0

    When did BeOS become BSD?

    --
    "If you loved me, you`d all kill yourselves today"
    Spider Jerusalem
  21. WTF??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why is BeOS in BSD section? Ok, who's smoking the crack so we can know who did this.

  22. Glad to see this by longbottle · · Score: 1

    I'm really glad to see this, as it proves that the BeOS community hasn't given up hope yet.

    I'm one of them, and I don't want to think I'm the only one. Open source is good, but as far as Closed-source OS's go, there was none better than BeOS, and I doubt there ever will be. OS X might be it's sucessor, but fine as it is, it's raw speed is but a pale shadow of what Be Inc. Achieved several years before. I won't bitch about OS X, or praise Be for all it had that was good...

    I'll just say again I'm glad to see the BeOS community alive and well.

    Keep on coding, guys... I'm with ya.

    --
    I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it!
  23. aha... by donutz · · Score: 2

    About BeOS Max Edition:
    BeOS 5 PE Max Edition is Based on BeOS 5 PE with a number of drivers, add-ons, Athlon XP Patch , P4 Boot img , software. It includes new development tools from the OpenBeOS team Web site, but you will also be able to select the old tools. And contains only freeware and shareware demos. All code it contains is legal under the MIT, GPL, or LGPL licenses.


    Not even any mention of BSD licensed code? Well just what is this doing in teh BSD section? Silly editors...

  24. Ugh by Elliotro · · Score: 1

    I am sick and tired of seeing BeOS 5 PE "Max Edition" mentioned so much in geek news sites. All it is is BeOS 5 Personal Edition with a bunch of crappy icons (look at the screenshots page, they totally screwed the folders and the BeOS menu icon) and broken stuff. All it is is some kid trying to make a name for himself by packaging a bunch of software that he's probably never used in his life.

    The default resolution has been moved from 640x480x60hz to 1024x768. WHY?! It was originally that way because not all monitors can do 1024x768! UGH.

    What's more, it probably has a bunch of driver conflicts, since all he's doing is supplying the patches to the drivers, so any PCI IDs that were removed from the original driver won't be in the new drivers and the hardware won't be detected.

    This is not a troll! I'm just stating all that Max Edition really is -- a dumb modification anyone could've made.

    1. Re:Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bitchy!

  25. New mod category please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I think we should be able to say

    (Score: 5, Evil)