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."

Comments

Here's to the future, I hope.

[Apiakun]

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*

Cool

[moosesocks]

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?

Be was a great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Windows replacement?

[k8to]

Wine assumes posix and to a lesser extent X. BeOS is partially posix and totally not X.

Getting wine working on BeOS would likely require some work on both wine and BeOS.

More info:

• issues encountered back when beos was still by be inc. notably lack of things like select(), mmap()
• a list of problems as written by the now defunct (stalled you might say) BeWine project as they existed around 2000 or so.
• apparently some of the problems were insoluble, with incompatable ideas of the how to allocate virtual memory space (BeOS and windows incompatable really, not WINE's doing). Some new linux kernel features are bumping into this same problem but are all optional.. for now.

It's certainly possible that OpenBeOS could change around their idea of virtual address space allocation for a new ABI, but to support BeOS binaries, the original ABI would have to maintain these same problems. Extra work for OpenBeOS, with BeWine unforthcoming I doubt it's top priority.

Re:How's Palm doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

from what i've read, Palm has integrated the BeOS scheduler into cobalt. it seems that cobalt is the first major revision to PalmOS, perhaps since the beginning. They're using the code, its just taking them quite a while to get it integrated.

Re:If only it ran on the BeBox.

[torpor]

Rubbish. The BeBox's are still operational. They still work. Why shouldn't they at least have a target for the BeBox - since they -are- so old, the driver work to support them should've/would've been done years ago.

It really ought to be a simple TARGET=BeBox scenario by now.

This uncaring attitude for hardware that is 'old' or 'antiquated' is really a detriment to constructive computing. My BeBox still has lots of life left in it.

You think the Linux kernel shouldn't target 386's? I can still build a fast, light, sweet and pure 386 kernel, you know ... because of work that has long since been grandfathered.