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BeOS Max Edition v3.0 Released
JigSaw writes "After Be went down, 2-3 "distros" of BeOS 5 PE (the free version of BeOS) were created and continued making releases by literally tweaking the internals, patching the kernel etc. in order to bring BeOS up to speed with new hardware. Additionally, these distros include lots of third party software. BeOS Max Edition is the most popular of the bunch, and version v3.0 came out today. The BFS ISO installs in its own BFS partition, however it requires a bit of attention in the way you have to burn it."
Obviously, SOMEONE cares about BeOS, if they're making something as large scale as THIS. It's like Amiga. It's dead (in the incarnation that we all know - NOT like AOS4/AmigaONE, which is an entirely different platform from the classic Amiga).
Woo hoo. If only they hadn't discontinued the PPC edition, we could have run this on our AmigaONE boards.
Which may sound like a troll, but actually I'd love that. BeOS is everything I used to love about AmigaOS, and loads more besides. Seriously, if anyone out there hasn't tried it, I really do urge you to give it a whirl. It's (IMO) what MacOS X should have been.
(No apps, of course. Ho hum.)
Has anybody ever gotten CDRTools to work for Win2k or WinXP? I remember trying it out a few weeks ago and getting an instant bluescreen when I started it up. I was really hoping for a CD burner without all of the cruft found in the commercial packages (Nero is nice, but burns coasters on my machine, and Roxio suxio. Cdrtools and gcombust work perfectly under FreeBSD however)
I read the internet for the articles.
Perhaps if they only tweaked the kernel figuratively they could have stayed in business.
Good Lord! There should seriously be a disclaimer attatched to the link to BeOS Max Edition website.
BeOS used to be so much fun, but two things really held it back when I used it. One, NetPositive was the best browser. That sucked. It was like Netscape 3.0 compatible. I know that's not really valid anymore. There is a Mozilla port now. The second thing, which is probably still an issue, is the fact that BeOS wasn't totally POSIXified. All kinds of hacky stuff had to be done to get stuff to port. Compare this with OS X, which for all intents and purposes, is FreeBSD. Stuff compiles so good on there. I think the next time I will give BeOS a second try is when one of the free BeOS projects starts to come along. I kind of think of BeOS as OS X for i386.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Hows the Clone open-source BEOS going?
We havent heard much about it..
If you can get a copy of BeOS 5 (the one you pay for, not the X86-only free beer version) on eBay, there is a PPC version on there. No idea if it would work on an AmigaONE board, but worth a try.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
There's a typo in the MaxV3.cue file.
On the line where it refers to the iso image, it reads:
FILE "BeOS5PEMaxEditionV3b3.iso" BINARY
It should say:
FILE "BeOS5PEMaxEdiionV3.iso" BINARY
It's easy to change this in an editor, and so you don't have to wait for the re-release and download it all over again.
I understand that BeOS is well done and some say that it advances the state-of-the-art is OS design and usability and its great that it has been open sourced to allow code and apps to the public. That said, why would anyone want to start using an effectively end of life OS, is there that much that can be done with the OS? I see all these people putting effort into reviving BeOS or AmigaOS or C64 OS's with TCP/IP and ethernet is this at all useful. If the best features of BeOS live on in Linux I do see that as a benifit but what gain is there in spending the time and effort in reviving a dead horse?
Oh, I must have missed the big Amiga product line announcements. I'll have to ask my systems guy when we'll be able to play around with the Amiga file and database server and web server beta boxes, I'm sure this is going to just be a revolution in our shop. But I wonder if BeOS can be ported to the Amiga boxes, man our server cage will be the envy of all the visitors to the farm...
It has a single, consistent GUI? Counts for a lot if you want to make it on the desktop. Not, of course, that BeOS is going to do that any time soon. Which is a DAMN SHAME if you ask me, because it's the only OS I've ever used that actually made my Athlon 2400+ feel significantly faster than my old 14MHz A1200.
With this release as well as the several OpenBeOS (openbeos.org) Milestones reached recently and Zeta (yellowtab.com) coming out soon, BeOS is probably not as deas as some trolls claim.
I don't mean to troll, but exactly does one do with a dead OS like this? Is it just hobby value? Is there an app that works really well on BeOS, or only on BeOS?
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
What? You can only burn it in the night of February 29/March 1 when it's a full moon, the CD is plated with mithril, the burner in sanctified with the blood of a virgin and Duke Nukem Forever is released? When you burn it, might it cause a rip in time or a quantum instability?
Man, BeOS is some scary stuff. I can imagine reading about it in the newspaper already... "Kid installs BeOS, blows up universe. God sues for damages."
Hate me!
BeOS is its own operating system. It literally almost became the basis for OS X, but they asked for too much $$$ from Apple and were turned down.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
So I can install BeOS on my computer instead of Windows ME? Can I run Half-Life: Counterstrike, Winamp Internet Explorer? Those are the only programs I use. Thanks
i'm curious as to when operating systems like this will go mainstream. i woved to stop using windows as soon as microsoft interferes with my media usage. many will follow when their current operating systems go from buggy to buggy and restrictive. i didnt really expect to see another release of BeOS. i'm interested in seeing how useful it would perform as a business, internet and gaming OS.
What's so tricky about offering a bootable ISO?
Why should you have to jump through hoops to burn anything for the PC these days?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Last time I was in my kick to use as many different OSes as possible, I found the hardware support for BeOS terribly lacking. Does it support modern graphics cards now? What hardware *won't* work with BeOS?
Is BeOS still stuck in the gcc 2.95 world due to c++ libraries?
At one time, I cared. BeOS could have beaten OSX to the punch. It could have been a kick-a$$ multimedia box.
Now, though, aside from the coolness factor of it being yet another OS that runs on Intel hardware, what exactly does BeOS have that makes it a desirable platform for users? Or put more succintly, Is there anything in BeOS that is not available in Linux?
Nothing that ONLY works on BeOS, but applications always seemed a lot more responsive and stable under BeOS than anything else I'd used (except the Amiga). This gave me very good feelings about it, and made me want it to be my platform for multimedia applications.
hmm, see i was thinking +5 for funny considering the big screenshot with oprahs face on it but,,, hey whatever you say boss!
What is slashdot?
BeBits will reveal everything and more. :)
BeOS is spectacular for your old boxes laying around if you want to try something new. It books on my AMD/300 with 64 MB of RAM in under 15 seconds.
YellowTAB is creating the next incarnation of BeOS code named Zeta, which essentially R6. It should upgrade driver support for the newest hardware releases. Unfortunately a free edition looks doubtful.
I purchased BeOS back in the day and still have the boxed set. I am interested in installing it on PPC. I have some great Power Macs that it would be super on. Will this install on them?
A Good Intro to NetBS
The trouble with the BeOS was always hardware support. It was a thing of beauty (fast and pretty) when you got everything going, and it could do really cool stuff. Without the kind of heavy duty developer support that other operating systems have it couldn't run on all the latest and greatest hardware though.
That didn't stop me from using it in a dual boot system until after the company went out of business though. Damn shame.
Quoth he
"It's all academic anyway..."
It looks to me like a guy with a headache or a cartoon 'swirl of confusion' above his head.
It makes me think that using Be would be a frustrating experience.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Slashdot didn't pick up the story when it happened a couple of weeks ago, but Be, Inc. has settled its antitrust suit against Microsoft for $23 million. Microsoft, as usual, admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement.
Readers may recall that Be brought their suit against the Microsoft back in February 2002. At the time this suit was brought, it was becoming obvious that the US government's antitrust suit against Microsoft was not going to result in any significant punishment for the convicted monopolist, and in fact time has borne this out -- Microsoft is arguably more powerful today than ever before.
Some observers felt Be's claims that Microsoft's vendor contracts excluded competitors from the market was a stronger case than the browser bundling aspect that the US department of justice pursued, but in the end it seems that Be no longer had the resources to complete the trial.
With the Be lawsuit abandoned, the best hopes for a remedy to the Microsoft monopoly now seem to be in the European courts, or with a possible regime change in the USA in 2005.
Microsoft may have gotten away with murder, but at least we've got people nursing the corpse along, as stories like the current one illustrate. *sigh*
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
The Spongebob Squarepants theme kinda works.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I am really happy to hear about yet another release of a very well designed OS. Because BeOS has it's history tied to where NeXT did, in Apple, it is a very simple, yet like NeXT, elegant OS. I hope to see people do for BeOS what Apple did for NeXT.
NeXT was really great, but was not quite as user friendly as the consumer would have liked, but Apple was able to take an already well developed architechture, and without too much blood and sweat, create a truly beautiful (in my opinion) interface. I truly think that the same could be done with BeOS, not that it is not already really well designed. I think that between all the other free desktop OSes to gain market share, BeOS is one of the most promising.
Be Advanced Topics
for a group that works with one of the nicest looking operating systems ever, they've really produced a horrible website. my "nice" guess is that they're either colorblind, or a group of teenagers who still lament the loss of the tag (or both).
From the BeOS Max website:
:). I've never seen a counter move so fast!
... I better stop reloading!
...
This page has been accessed 35611 times since July 26th, 2003
90% in the last hour probably
Wait
Sorry BeOS Max guys
I'll get my coat.
Could the BeosMax website be any harder on the eyes?
Remember when BeOS was for Macs, whose users tend to be artistic? Guess that's not the case now that it's an Intel OS, eh?
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, and it didn't help that Steve Jobs used to run NEXT. Not that either one would've been a bad choice.
So what if nobody cares about it right now?
;)). People should be able to choose the OS that fits them, even if nobody else "cares about it". One size does not fit all.
Popularity is not the same as quality.
A few minutes ago, I knew nothing about BeOS except that it was an OS. But the fundemantals of the BeOS sounds very nice indeed.
So, why dont you care about BeOS?
Lack of apps? hm?!
I suppose you are the kind of person that didnt care about Linux 3 years ago.
"FreeBSD is dying, BeOS is dead, MacOS is dying" - please shut up! it only applys if you think the single CPU-arch + single OS model is a great thing. Free Software is not just about replacing Windows with Linux because its c00l3r (witch it is by the way
The main advantage of BeOS over everything else available right now is that it has a complete lack of history and cruft. It was designed from scratch for modern graphical enviroments, yet also has an easily accessable Unix like command line, that works.
It's chief disadvantage?
It has a complete lack of history and cruft.
People want evolution, not revolution, no matter what they say.
KFG
BEEEEoooooooSSSS, back again! I am going to blow the dust off my old 400 and install! I will provide an installation update in three weeks when I successfully configure my hardware!!
Since I saw AbiWord already in the 3rd screenshot, I figured there might be some interest left for an AbiWord 2.x port for BeOS as well. If anyone is interested in such a port, he/she should stand up now and contact the AbiWord Developers Mailing List. If we find no active BeOS developers within the next 2 weeks, we'll drop the currently unmaintained and outdated BeOS port from our tree.
Whats with the PORN on that site.....i am gonna have a hard time getting that image out of my mind!!
There is no patch for stupidity
Visit my blog
They did pick up the story :P
That BeOS Max page has the goatse image on it! Don't go there!
Whoa, how did I miss that? THANK YOU.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I know this article will generate a ton of "BeOS is dead, who cares" and "Who the hell uses BeOS anymore?" or "What is BeOS?" style posts, so as an avid user of BeOS I will attempt to explain some things:
(1) You'd be surprised how much hardware is supported by BeOS, Athlon XP CPUS, P4s, firewire cards, SCSIs, Magneto Optical, scanners, etc. If it's not natively seen, www.bebits.com (as well as bedrivers.com) is the place to go.
(2) BeOS is a refreshing change of pace from the "Big Brother" of Windows, the "Here's a million bits, put them together yourself" of Linux or the "Our way, the only way" of Apple. BeOS relies on the "less is more" viewpoint. Software packages range in the hundereds of k, as opposed to the hundereds of megs in size, yet still do what they need to do.
(3) I have yet to see a GUI is clean, useful and *consistant* as BeOS.
(4) It just works.
(5) The user base is friendly, enthusiastic and you won't get any of the typical *nix attitudes of "lamer" or "rtfm" in the BeOS user forums.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
OMG!
http://www.beosmax.org/main.php
I love BeOS, as would most developers. Great platform, sorry to see that it's been so marginalized.
BUT, why would anyone want to deface the page?
It's really gross too.
Some *ssh*les need to get real lives.
rr
2B OR NOT 2B == FF
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
Partition Magic. Don't leave home without it.
There are free tools to do the job as well, but if you aren't already au fait with the command line and partitioning drives I can't say I'd recommend them.
So the down side is it will cost you some money. The upside is that Partition Magic is a really kick ass piece of software and worth every penny.
KFG
You can run CL-Amp, which is a Winamp/XMMS clone or Soundplay. Mozilla is available. You would not be able to run CS. BeOS was typically oriented towards audio-production types of people in its heyday.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Brought to you by, Intel! Best run on Pentium EXXXTREME.
My wife has an old Win98 Internet box at home that suicided just last night (first time ever for that box, oh miracle of miracles). Windows was *completely* smoked. Fried. I've got the steaming hard drive with me right now, because I was hoping to find the old BeOSFree around on the net tonight and put that on for her. This is one better!
:-(
Now I must publicly proclaim that there is a God, he loves me, and furthermore, doesn't want me to run Windows - as we all suspected! Praise the Lord! It's a sign!
Now if only I'd listened to Him when he told me to sell Nortel in early 2000...
So, why dont you care about BeOS?
Lack of apps? hm?!
I suppose you are the kind of person that didnt care about Linux 3 years ago.
With all my sympathy towards your general stance, I can't help but pointing out that BeOS actually started its history a year _before_ Linux (for BeOS it's 1990, for Linux it's 1991). Look what progress Linux has made from the historical first post (damn, the very presence of this character string guarantees me a mod down!) made by Linus in 1991 to comp.os.minix (you know, the one with "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.") . And then compare it to the progress made by BeOS from 1990 to the present day. Frankly, I'm not even sure if the word "progress" applies to this case.
Actually, I remember farther back, when Be made its own hardware, the BeBox (which Be, Inc. president Jean Louis Gassee called the "Amiga for the 90's"). It was a dual processor PowerPC machine which was designed to accept PCI and ISA cards originally made for the x86 PC world. This was back when Be's original slogan was "One processor per person is not enough!"
I started working for Metrowerks right around the time when Be was in the beta release cycle for the x86 version of BeOS. My job was supposed to be porting the BeOS debugger to the x86 architecture, a problem compounded by the fact that the BeOS debugger was actually a port of the Macintosh PowerPC debugger. A lot of Mac toolbox calls were being emulated (inefficiently) by BeOS calls. What we really needed to do was a complete rewrite, but nobody wanted to spend the time or money on that.
Metrowerks stabbed Be in the back and killed all BeOS development, and I was given a choice of leaving Metrowerks or switching to another division. I chose to leave. Be eventually did make the full transition to x86, and PowerPC support became a less compelling concern.
It's interesting to note that BeOS support for Macintosh hardware was begun as a project to work around an asinine restriction placed on Be, Inc., by the folks running Macworld Expo. Apparently, the expo organizers decided that unless BeOS ran on Macintosh hardware, Be wouldn't be allowed to show its product off at Macworld; up to that point, BeOS ran only on the BeBox. An internal team got the OS ported, and soon after, Be's management realized that there was no reason for Be, Inc. to be a hardware vendor. The x86 port pretty much clinched it. I think JLG thought that he'd make Be into a software-only company like NeXT, and indeed, BeOS was one of the OSes being considered by Apple to replace Copland; with Apple's decision to buy NeXT instead, Be's only real avenue of survival was cut off.
The moral of the story is that there's little or no room left in the x86 world for alternative operating systems that you must pay for. Linux survives precisely because it costs nothing, so Microsoft has no leverage against Linux in that arena. I still like BeOS, the same way I liked the Amiga's OS, but I knew the handwriting was on the wall when the efforts to get BeOS pre-bundled on x86 hardware stalled. I noticed that Be was trying to get BeOS ported to MIPS hardware, apparently in a bid to compete against Windows CE (and this seems to be why Palm bought Be's intellectual property), but nothing ever came of that either.
Definitely a candidate for "Websites that Suck"
It's all Hood
Its is true that Linux has a lot of momentum than BeOS. From that point of view youre absolutely right.
My point is that the attitude that: "if few people uses it, then its of no interest" - is not very healthy. If some folks think's BeOS' really nice, they should be able to use it, regardless of how popular it is. Perhaps they know something the rest of us dont. I certainly was a little impressed with some of the features of BeOS.
two words: ass fountain..
WTF? mebbe it no likey me privoxy..
Wow I can now jump up and down with gleed. now that the new Free version Be OS is now out
The BeOS POSIX implementation is very complete. Non-network utilities are usually easy to port. But the big issue is that sockets are not descriptors. That's right. You can't pass a socket descriptor to read() or write(). You need to use send() or recv().
That's the single biggest issue in porting POSIX applications to BeOS and also the hardest to fix.
If I had a sig, I would put it here.
BeOS's forte is audio mixing, as such it is the choice OS of the Edirol/Roland UA100, the iZ Tech - RADAR 24 & the SX-1 Integrated Audio Production Station.
There maybe Mac drivers for the Edirol/Roland UA100 but I doubt the Radar 24 & the SX-1 are Mac compatible, seeing these intigrated autio editors were built from the ground up to use BeOS as their OS. Getting Mac OSX to work on either of them would be nearly as hard as porting some hospital machine that uses QNX to MacOSX
How's it going, Bery? (if you remember me)....I am shocked...SHOCKED to stumble into you in a BeOS thread ;)
Yes you have to type, but GNU Parted has always worked nicely for me. They even have floppy images you can boot from.
- mmap
- job control (^Z doesn't work, which makes the UNIX shell about as useful as DOS)
- pthreads
- working select or poll
- POSIX priority control
There are also countless other little things that irked me coming from a UNIX background and trying to use BeOS' shell. Their POSIX layer basically implements the bare minimum to get bash and the GNU sh-utils running, and very little else. Calling it "very complete" is like calling a Pinto "very fast".Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
I actually paid for BeOS 5. I'm not terribly interested in the new stuff going on, I've more or less given up on BeOS. Still, it irks me a little that I can't even check it out, since all these new developments seem to be released as modifications to the freeloader version of BeOS, rather than the "pro ediition" that genuine Be enthusiasts paid for.
Is there a way around this?
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Lack of apps? hm?!
Bingo. I know that the official slashdot view is that the _only_ reason to have an OS is to brag about uptime. (Big deal. My old Windows 98 can stay up for months too, if I don't run anything on it.)
But for the rest of us, you see, it's the apps that matter. The _only_ reason to have a computer, and an OS on it, is to run the software I need or just want.
I suppose you are the kind of person that didnt care about Linux 3 years ago.
Yes, in fact, I'm exactly the kind of person who couldn't find much use in Linux 3 years ago. Nor around '93, when I first tried it. And I still can't.
And yes, I've tried. Had several versions of SuSE, RedHat and Mandrake installed so far.
Invariably, same issue: either it does not run the stuff I want to run, or the effort involved is completely disproportionate, compared to just booting up Windows. (No, recompiling half the libraries on the system, plus X and several kernel modules, just to get WineX to run... does _not_ qualify as "ready for the desktop.")
People should be able to choose the OS that fits them, even if nobody else "cares about it".
Fine by me. I'm not going to try to stop you from running anything you wish. For all I care, install GEM. Or Coherent. Or OS/2. (Now that was a good OS.) Or yeah, BeOS.
Still doesn't mean I have to take it seriously, though.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Anyone know what the absolutely latest and greatest BeOS version for us humble BeBox owners is?
I've gotta get my machine back up and running (it was raped for ram and video years ago...) but when I do, I want to run the best OS I can on it. Any suggestions?
(Yes, I know about the BeBox-linux project, but are there other interesting things to do with BeBoxen?)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
beos is quite a fun little OS if you ask me.. i'm one of those kind of people that enjoy trying out as many different possibilities for computing as possible.. which includes experimenting with all sorts of OS's.
i think beos is great for everyday, regular computing.. AIM, E-mail, cd-burning, wordprocessing, IRC, whatever it may be, there's usually a piece of software written for the task you are looking to accomplish.. of course there arent very many "advanced" apps for all you crazy users out there, but i mean think about what the majority of internet users do when they connect? the basics...
and what better for those types of people, than a free OS thats easy as hell to install, and is pretty stable?? i'm glad they are still releasing new versions of the max edition.. when
i like a little change in my computing diet.. i enjoy dual booting linux and BeOS cuz it just gives me the opportunity to have a more dynamic computing experience.. something different.. for basic users..
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
Since there was only one user, there was not a lot of file-level security (they're always all your files). Although having a proprietary kernel was listed as one of BeOS's features, I always considered it to be a detriment. BeFS was cool, and the API being C++-oriented was cool, and ya, low latency was cool. But if the cost was the almost-but-not-quite-POSIX OS, then that's not cool.
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