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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.)
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?
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!
You need to get an ASPI layer for your system.
Click HERE for the tool forceASPI.
Click HERE to see where Roxio's software should go.**
**Dont click if you value your sight. It nasty.
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.
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.
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
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).
EXCUSE ME, but thats on topic. The first link is a legit link to fix/install ASPI on his system. The second's an opinion to how bad Roxio software is.
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
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.
They did pick up the story :P
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.
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...
it was the webmaster's stupidity. it's not a matter of someone hacking or defacing the web page by any means other than posting html code in the "your message" area on the page.
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.
- 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