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Yellow Tab Hits RC3
*no comment* writes "The Carriers of the BeOS torch YellowTab, has hit RC3 in their latest update to what might have been BeOS 6. This runs at about $99 ($10 upgrade when final version is release), and has a long list of features, such as the included Gobe office suite. Don't forget to check out the recently updated screenshots."
Be was great back in the day, I just don't know whether it will survive, regardless of which incarnation it's presently in. I saw the audio app running, which is one of the things Be was good for, but how much more will it take before we see much commercial Be software?
As it is, you're lucky to find a Mac title or two in some establishments, and occasionally can find a shelf or area devoted to it.
Be, however, seems to be missing from just about any shelf anywhere.
What would it take to make this change? Is it one of those "yeah, we heard about be, but it's 'so yesterday'" sort of things?
I love competition, and want to see as many OS vendors pitting themselves against each other as possible. That's when I think true innovation comes out, those times where you've really got to get the one up on your rivals.
Here's to dreaming.
*toasts*
That's 99 Euros. If I could only get a euro for a dollar.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Pretty nifty.
For all the folks who were chanting for OS X on the PC, this might be the closest thing.
But seriously. I remember about 2 years ago, installing and running the last release of BeOS (the one which happily coexisted with win98).
There's something VERY cool about a modern operating system which boots to the desktop in 5 seconds. This was on an Athlon 750 w/ 128mb RAM.
Of course, there were a few hitches along the way. Namely, the networking support. I was on dial-up at the time, and there was a bug in the CHAP authentication thingy in BeOS. It eventually led me to ditch the OS, but it will always remain in my heart as the coolest OS i'd ever used. The GUI was clean and simple, it had all of the 'good bits' of the Mac UI in it. It beat the heck out of Mac OS and Win9x at the time. Linux wasn't even an option at the time due to the ridiculous complexity (although I did nuke the Be partition* to install Debian which was even more short-lived then Be)
*And the windows partition. And the backup partition. And all of my files. Curse you buggy Debian Fdisk frontend!
Any idea why we haven't seen more software ported to Be? Is it not port-friendly or something?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Yup, that's the BeOS spirit, all right. Some extremely commendable technical accomplishment, and just too damn expensive to give a serious tryout without making a serious upfront investment.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Be was a great idea when it came out and I believe the core of it is still an excellent idea. I used it back in the day as a demo and to do some light video and audio editing. Nothing could beat it for how smoothly the OS dealt with multiple audio and video tracks. Nothing I've seen (well, played with anyway) can beat it today on a x86 platform. One of my demos when I was still teaching was to bring up 16 individual video tracks and have them all playing on the same screen, at the same time (minus audio because, well, the jumble was too much to comprehend and the system wasn't the fastest in the world). With video only it never dropped a frame and chugged away fine for what was relatively decent hardware for the time (256MB RAM, P-III 500, Matrox Millenium II w/8MB, fast Seagate hard drives, etc). I would challenge the students to open the same on their PCs running Win98 and/or Win2k and see what their results were (unfair but they got the picture).
In saying all of that, besides the enthusiast market, how many people are still truly using Be for development? Is there enough of a grassroots effort with solid software floating around to get some real work done on it? I could probably answer all of this if I googled a bit but I've been out of that scene for so long I have seriously lost touch. A great thing for someone to do (to save lazy s.o.bs like myself) would be to list a few good sites for audio, video, graphics, and general Be discussion boards up to let people get a little deeper then seeing that RC3 of BeOS (6) is out. They may even want to shell out the $99 US for it and help development along. Once I have some spare money I'll send my nearly $155 NZ over to support them just to take a good look at how far it has come and get reacquainted with Be.
One of the nice things about Linux as a replacement for Windows (in my case) is the rich suite of applications available. I can do all the development I require (MCU and FPGA, among other things) in such an environment, and the software for which there's no functional replacement generally runs under WINE (with a working windows partition for dlls and such). I'm even generally more productive under Linux to boot - if it weren't for the abysmal user interfaces available, I'd use it exclusively (note: KDE is Getting There, and quickly).
:] ).
What about BeOS/et. al? Can I run all that GNU software? Is there a windows emulator so I can be 100% happy and still get to use Winamp5 and Trillian Pro (without which I CANNOT LIVE
Please, someone, say yes; until OS X is available for x86, BeOS seems like the most useable thing going...
B
Sad, but I can't think of anything 'replacing BeOS' or 'taking up where BeOS left off' without insisting that it run on BeBox hardware.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I never gave much thought to Palm before they bought BeOS and let it languish. Now I hope they disintegrate soon.
I would donate without a second thought to purchase the BeOS for the sake of GPL'ing it. At least then we might see a kernel that's newer than 2001 and a much needed injection of some new features like OpenGL. Once Palm closes its doors, the property will hopefully be cheap enough to do so.
For now, I'd rather use Linux 2.6, Fluxbox, and some accelerated X drivers and think of what might have been.
...which part of "Windows rules!" do they not understand?
It is rather depressing, though, that they've taken BeOS and beat the interface repeatedly with the ugly stick. The yellow doesn't have to be that bright, seriously. I know the NewOS look was there before, and they kept the neat checkboxes and comboboxes... but took the window decorations to a new level of fugly.
Not to mention, the whole thing looks like a mismanaged linux distro now.
Oh well. Long live Be.
- oZ
// i am here.
Its just a little spit and polish away from beign a real windows competitor. Or so it appears. Of course then you have to fight the lack of software available. blah blah adoption ect. but that stuff can wait. right now rc2 still crashes a lot more than any rc should. I ordered rc3 a couple of days ago, but it hasn't arived yet. Oh, and they are going to have to get a newer version of gcc on the thing. You can get some GPL software to work on it, but you have to know what you are doing ( ie editing the source code). So why not run linxu kde? zeta is still tons faster. and more polished gui.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya!
Fuck the American imperialists!
The Americans will pay for what they've done in Iraq! Soon the American cities will burn! They will forget 11 September when they see! Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya! Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya!!