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Review of BeOS Developer Edition 1.1
TweetZilla writes "Good review if you are a fan of BeOS. Not ready for regular users but tinkerers will probably love it to death.
OSNews is carrying the story."
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*sigh* If only somebody at Palm "accidently" released the source.. >=)
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
Be, to me, brought a Mac-like interface to the PC with *nix capabilities.. (I guess you could think of it as os X on pc?) The only real pitfall was the lack-o-software and poor hardware support.. but.. the OS was almost worth building a box with supported hardware for it.. (well.. at least it was for me.. >=) )
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
too bad nobody can love it back to life
I read this review, and it sounds pretty neat. The only thing was that it sounds like some GUI only OS, which is not something I am found of, but then i read some more.
It came with lots of GNU software, which i found great since they are free (as in free speech), then i read even more.
It has terminals, which i did not knew it had.
This will definitely be something i will try in the future.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Shouldn't "Be" be called "HasBeen"?
Trolling is a art,
You're absolutely right, but to this day, I haven't found an OS that was as fun as BeOS. It just had a certain quality about it made it really fun to use.
The specs look interesting, but what can BeOS do that I can't make Linux do after a weekend spent reading manuals and tweaking config files?
The review is interesting but it's been a while since I've seen such a glaring example of bad spelling and grammar actually make it as a live article in a high-traffic website dedicated to technical stuff.
from the section entitled "BeOS in all it's glory":
I have an adsl connection here at home and this is where I ran into my first problem. There is a package for BeOS called PPPoE which lets you connect to any adsl provider that uses the PPPoE protocol. Of course, I installed it, configured it and dialed up my ISP. I get a connection, but only for about 3 seconds. Major pain in the ass! So I looked through the readme file, changed all the appropriate settings and still no cigar. "Well", says I, "It's time for the old tech support forum!" I rebooted into an OS with a decent PPPoE implementation, logged onto BeOSOnline and found an interesting thread in their forum suggesting I use BONE 7a. BONE stands for BeOS Networking Environment and is of fairly dubious legality. It was supposed to be part of the last release of BeOS, just before it got sold to palm but was supposedly never officially released. As Be was selling BeOS, some developer(s) on the project decided to leek BONE onto the net. Good old hacker disregard for authority! Finding BONE is not easy, but once I downloaded it I was supposedly ready to go. How wrong I was! I downloaded BONE to my windows partition as I already knew BeOS can mount, read and right to Fat32 partitions. I unpacked the Zip file, opened a terminal and ran the install script. Time to reboot. This is when the shit hit the proverbial fan. Instead of looking at my nice new desktop I was faced with the textual garble that is the kernel debugger!
Whew... so as long as you don't wanna use it for anything, BeOS is GLORIOUS!
This is a sad day for reviews. 75% percent of the article was spent on how the author did not understand BIN/CUE and the other 25% sounded like a techTV commercial. He talks about it being a great multimedia dev OS, because its fast.. well.. (Sarcasm) MSDOS runs fast on my 486, maybe that would be a great multimedia dev env(/Sarcasm)
I am a fan of the BeOS of yore. I liked it more than I liked linux, though things have changed. But just where does the author get off calling himself 'I was deputy Linux champion'. The guy can't spell, has worse grammar than me and doesn't understand why his winblows cd burning app cant fit two disks of binary data onto one cd! So does this make me 'Certified Linux Champion'? No, but this guy's fud never should have made it to OSNews let alone slashdot.
Fnord.sig
Instead of burning the personal edition rom that can only sit on Linux or Windows you can by the BeOS Pro 5.1 edition one ebay for around 20 bucks.
beos never ran on PPC601... entry ticket was 603 (the bebox) or 604.
I keep seeing stuff about new BeOS variants on the street, but the most "official" thing I have heard is that Palm owns it.
What gives. Are these rouge distros or what?
Are they legal? Is there any reason to belive that Palm won't pull the plug on any variants out there at any given time?
I'm sincerly trying to understand the situation. Links are appricated.
-Peter
uh? i started using beos just the other day(couple of weeks ago) on my irc/mp3 machine.
i was quite amazed by the amount of opensource/community developed drivers for it(obviously lot of 'em derived from linux driver sources), and the whole community actually being there in general.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
All said and done, I think the developers of BeOS did a really great job. I recent got the chance to go over the Be File System (BeFS) for class and was amazed by what they did in a short amount of time (less than a year). If you want to look at a short presentation on the file system, you can grab it (in ppt) from here.
You might also want to try BeOS Max 2.1x EditionV21.zip?download
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/crux/BeOS5PEMa
Home page
http://crux.sourceforge.net/nuke/index.php
Unfortunately, I have to agree. I used to have a full 8 GB BeOS partition on my machine which I was happily neglecting until news of the BeOS MAX! "Distribution" fell on me, and I had to install it.
Well, right after I installed it was treated to booting into an OS that thought I was in France. Fine, not a big deal, but it would have been nice if the documentation (all in English) had mentioned this and maybe even described the process by which you fix it the language settings.
Then I got to experience the full glee of BeOS resending 16 email messages I had already sent from its mail program... about two years ago! I emailed the developers about this and got no response.
This is usually where the Be apologists will insert some vague praise of it's microkernel architecture. Yeah, it's great I can drag and drop a driver into the system folder and have it start working right then, but so what if it's totally impractical to actually *use.*
So I blew away the partition and said, "Goodbye BeOS, it had been fun." When an OS is new, you can forgive it for having no application support and no hardware drivers. Now, 2003, we're nearing 8 years with BeOS on the PC and almost all of the drivers we have today we had back then (exception: a non-accellerated nvidia driver). Application support continues to hover around the few commercial apps it had three years ago (though I believe Gobe has dropped BeOS support for Productive). When I last ran the OS, most of the software for it suffered from the same Windows delusion that every schmuck who downloads a shareware program is willing to chip in $10 for it. Consequently, actually achieving productivity with BeOS was difficult because you'd wind up paying hundreds in piss ant shareware fees to unlock the full features of whatever it was you wanted to use (see BeXL, all of the good code editors, SoundPlay).
So BeOS lost a fan in me. The only chance for redemption will be when OpenBeOS starts making releases, but even then it will be a long shot. If you doubt me, check my previous posts and you'll see, I used to be one of their supporters around here, but I give up. OS X certainly kicks BeOS in the nads, thanks in no small part to NEXTSTEP. I haven't used WinXP but wouldn't be surprised if much of what made BeOS advanced almost a decade ago had finally been integrated into Windows.
--
Daniel
I'm confused, so then the Kernal, many drivers, etc were all done via third parties? Who has the source? How come they are able to update the Kernal to support SSE, etc?
I too am at a loss to describe any existing problem which BeOS solves.
How about decent file typing? That's one thing BeOS did well, using MIME as the native file typing mechanism. MacOS had pretty good file types, but Apple seems to be discouraging it's use in favor of the lowest common denominator: file extensions. Which are frankly, crap.
Linux is probably at the bottom of the heap here. Both Gnome and KDE are starting to maintain their own databases of this stuff, which is pointless because this should be a common service OS-wide. An application should be able to ask the OS which application should be called to handle text/html for example. But there isn't any standard way to do that on Linux. As a result, different applications do different things when I click on a link. I want a Konq window to open, but there isn't any way for me to tell Evolution that. It insists on opening a Mozilla window.
I'm sure eventually this will get solved on Linux, but BeOS was handling this problem quite well five years ago. It isn't rocket science, in fact it's pretty simple.
Another example is file metadata. BeOS allowed you to add arbitrary name/value attributes to files. What's more, you could have the filesystem index them to allow you to do quick searches on them. Plus the Tracker allowed you to specify what attributes you wanted to have displayed in folder windows. You didn't have to look at the file name and size if you didn't want to. You could view only custom metadata.
This works great for audio files. The developers standarized on a set of attributes which all the major MP3 applications use. So all of my MP3 (well, Ogg actually) files have the artist, album, track, etc saved as metadata. The Tracker can be told to only display those attributes, if you want. Plus the OS can search on them. I've got a ripper thats adds the attributes when I rip a CD. I've got a file viewer, the Tracker, which lets me sift thru my collection looking at the relevant metadata. And I've got a player which lets me add file, folders, and arbitrary metadata queries to playlists.
Unfortunately, having my jukebox based on a dead OS is getting to be a drag for other reasons. So, I'll probably try to move the whole thing to Linux, but it'll be painful. I'll have to install my own database to handle the metadata. There's no standard schema so the few MP3 apps which do use databases won't interoperate. Not to mention that having the actual files and metadata completely disconnected is an extremely fragile solution. If you move a file using the normal techniques, then the metadata is out of sync and you have to fix it somehow. So I do what? Write my own interface for providing simple file manipulations so that I can keep the metadata in sync? That's not really practical either. In the end, I'll probably spend a lot of time implementing a solution that will work half as well.
Not that BeOS was perfect, far from it. Shall I discuss the pain of porting network software to an OS where sockets are not file descriptors? But it did have some really nice features which I have yet to find in any other OS.
No shit. As an OS/2 user, the BeOS fans make me look like the popular kid in high school!
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Can anyone briefly tell me what is great about BeOS?
I so want to like this OS, but when I installed it, it didn't strike me as more usable, faster, or anything.
A brief list of what its users really like about it as opposed to the billions of desktops (Windows, all the linux ones, OSX) might be beneficial to more than just me. I guess what I am asking is, where should I be looking for the greatness, or even novelty.
Does BeOS have any Avid application ported to it? No. Does it have anything that comes even remotely close? No. Does it have a major 3D application (3DS Max, Lightwave, AutoCAD, Maya) ported to it? No. For a so-called "media OS", it is sorely lacking in the department it was supposed to favor...
--sdem
I still get excited when I think of BeOS. I start thinking of the partition I have for it, sitting empty, and going home, and firing up my 5.03 release and installing it, setting up the drivers, getting it online, tweaking cl-amp and the apps, and the window graphics, and the background, and pulling from bebits all night long.
Then I realize that I can't get a decent speedy browser, that I can't work on my resume, that I can't play the games I want, that I can't do my bills online either from lack of Java to lack of a quicken type app.
My partition will rott away, I fear. BeOS is the biggest heartache for me as a computer user and professional. So much potential, so little of anything else.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
Perhaps BeOS is over and done with, but not like OS/2. OS/2 is still quite lively in the form of eComStation. Folks over at OSNews just get a little excitable whenever the BeCorpse BeTwitches . . .
This is it! A legacy-free, fast, UNIX-y OS, that could easily be used by casual(ie non-programmer/UNIX Admin types) and novices. If half of the Open-Source proponents out there really wanted to "make a difference" Open BeOS would be the project theyd be contributing to.
I love Linux, love Open Source and all it stands for, but I'm sorry to say, it will never be able to deliver an elegant desktop sulution.
As far as I'm concerned BeOS, could have been the most perfect home-PC solution. Regardless of whether it could ever find mainstream acceptance it not the point.
Sure, no driver support, and nothing but half-assed apps to play around with, but still. The OS achieves a kind of balance, "perfection" if you will...
Any group or company looking to overhaul Linux for _actual_ desktop use should take a very close look at BeOS. The way the OS is structured, the way deviced are handled, the simplicity and flexibility of the GUI, the way the shell coexists with the GUI.
I don't want "full" UNIX, just the stuff that matters to me: A quick, good and consistent user interface, modern applications/drivers/utilities/, a clean directory structure, a refined, legacy-free configuration options to mess around with... and who knows? maybe even some ports of Linux apps
Why isn't there a program called "start" or "open" that takes a url and does whatever would happen if the user double-clicked on it? Then all the desktops could call this program. And the program could be replaced (there is no need even to agree on the implementation, both KDE and Gnome could put out their own "start" program and the user decides).
Even Windows has a "start" program. Why does the supposedly CLI-based Linux NOT have one?
and you're lying if you say that BeOS has a hand-up on OS X
But OS X is fucking slow. So slow, in fact, that I've stuck with Linux and never looked back on fifteen years of Mac usage. I installed BeOS on my old 300Mhz Dell Latitude, which fortunately has one of the rare combinations of hardware that BeOS supports. It is blazingly fast. It blows Win2k right out of the water, and is very competitive with Linux. In fact, the only reason it isn't necessarily faster outright than Linux is that I'm using WindowMaker and not bloated crap like KDE or GNOME. Too bad it isn't actually useful enough to replace Linux.
OS X has been a huge disappointment for me. The lack of customization is painful. The speed is horrendous. The Unix compatability is so broken as to be virtually useless. I'd take it over XP any day, but I'm sick of hearing about how great Apple is for bringing Unix to "the masses". It's markedly inferior to BeOS and IRIX from almost any perspective except application availability. I find little to admire in any user interface released since, say, 1993/4, and of course consumer OSes are just now catching up to features that enterprise OSes had long before then, like not crashing every few hours.
I compromise with Linux and IRIX. I may have to recompile the kernel just to link with my Zaurus; I have to jump through hoops to handle Word documents- I find using Crossover less painful than using StarOFfice. And the SGI, of course, can't even do most of this. But I can always be certain that, once I've spent two weeks setting it up, my computer works the way I want it to, not the way the trained chimps over at Apple and Microsoft dictate, and that it won't creak to a halt when I try to edit a file because 90% of the CPU is stuck rendering antialiased menu bars.
Your comment about metadata is apt. However, it's not Linux that's at fault (nor BSD, nor Windows). The fault lies squarely with the filesystem. In Linux, the filesystem is driven by one of many different drivers, each with their own support (or lack) of metadata.
This is the direction that ReiserFS is moving toward.
However, Linux's inherent view of files (ie. everything is a file) is not necessarily wrong. This allows many very easy solutions to problems. It makes it easy for applications which want to use a device; they simply read or write to a file. It also makes it easy to monitor your system; just read proc files with a text parser.
So in conclusion, Linux's current view of files is not incompatible with metadata, and there are many advantages to viewing files in the way that Linux does.
Tony
You can actually get plenty done with BeOS for very little effort. It is great if you want a portable system, based on an old low-price laptop (at the turn of Pentium I/II) which you don't want to worry about. BeOS Pro can be bought cheaply (usually bundled with a free/shareware CD for Be) and if you invest in GoBE you have a complete office suite, better than OpenOffice.
This will get you a fast and smooth set-up which will allow you to browse the web, read e-mail, get work done, play mp3's and the choice of games are fair enough for recreation. My set-up (ASUS Laptop PII 366, 128MB, 4.2GB) boots in 9 seconds, starts apps in under 5 seconds, is fast (2x mpg, 2x mp3 and OpenGL (teapot) running at once - no loss), stable, cost me less than $200 (with s/w) - and BeOS found all the hardware.
Great for taking out and about, getting things done without fearing damage to the machine and easy for the kids to understand and play with.
But I agree on the remarks for the review - it did not do BeOS a favour.
- Kenzai, Master of the Little Penguin. "Long Live BeOS...ehhh, where is everybody going!?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why are all the AC's ragging on BeOS? Funny, I seem to recall a little software project called Linux that happened to be in a similar situation as Beos.
Yup. No hardware support. Little software. Proto usefulness, if that.
Now what do we have? Linux is THE open source solution. It has come a long way.
How much of that progress are all you ACs responsible for? Not much, I'm sure. Just run your perl scripts and feel superior to windows 98 users. Whoopie.
OpenBeos and all its ilk are right where Linux was several years ago. The difference is that the people working and waiting on OpenBeos want it more than people want YALD (yet another Linux Distro). Another difference is that OBeos can be designed from the ground up to work better with today's hardware, can avoid the dead ends of the past, and have lots of good examples of UI, software, and ways of doing things that can be improved and incorporated.
My suggestion to AC is that you all shut your pie holes and *encourage* OSS of any sort, otherwise you may find developers for your favorite OS (OF CHOICE) going off and doing web pages for Microsoft.
No one needs or wants some faceless pussy ranting about how their labor of love is irrevelent.
Mod away, kids.
Be was designed with very clear modules and an API well documented by BE,inc and fans. This allows the OpenBeOs developers to rewrite one section at a time and drop replace it in the full OS. Repeat, until they have all the pieces on their own in Open source and retire the last of Be,inc ones!