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Review of BeOS Developer Edition 1.1 222

Posted by Hemos from the reviving-the-dead dept.
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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Review of BeOS Developer Edition 1.1 More

Review of BeOS Developer Edition 1.1

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  • I thought BeOS died... (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I thought it was over and done with, like OS/2 or DOS. I guess I'm wrong?

  • Be... (Score:3)

    by NivenHuH ( 579871 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @02:57PM (#5225457) Homepage
    *sigh* If only somebody at Palm "accidently" released the source.. >=)

    • Re:Be... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dcuny ( 613699 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:13PM (#5225617)
      That wouldn't be helpful.

      For one thing, developers wouldn't be able to look at the source, because it would taint anything they would put out.

      More importantly, the BeOS relied on a lot of proprietary, third party components. The BeOS developers pretty much said that it would be virtually impossible to disentagle the proprietary stuff from the Be stuff. Even if that were possible, you wouldn't have anything useful.

      Besides, the Open BeOS [sourceforge.net] is making good progress without the source code.

      • Wait a second..... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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?

      • Be was great design (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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!
    • I'll agree with you on that.. however, it would still be nice to see the way they handled certain tasks/problems and incorporate those ideas into Open BeOS's source..

  • tinkerers will probably love it to death (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:01PM (#5225495)
    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.

    • Re:I never consider trying it (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You may want to look into Mac OS X then... it has GNU software, terminals and the company that owns it is not dead in the water.
      • You may want to look into Mac OS X then... it has GNU software, terminals and the company that owns it is not
        dead in the water


        I love OS/X as much as anyone, but I just haven't had any luck getting it to run well on my P2/400...

    • I'm curious about trying this again. I used BeOS a few years. I was not impressed at all. But I'm seriously going to consider trying it again!

  • Be (Score:4, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:05PM (#5225531) Homepage Journal

    Shouldn't "Be" be called "HasBeen"?

  • Why would I bother? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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?

  • Egads (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 ) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:11PM (#5225594) Homepage
    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.
    • Heh.. he also mentioned that he doesn't know what a .cue and .bin file was.. *rolleyes* >=)

    • Re:Egads (Score:3, Funny)

      by Ironix ( 165274 )
      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.

      I think that would be:

      The review is interesting, but it's been a while since I've seen such a glaring example of bad spelling and grammar in a live article on a high-traffic website dedicated to technical stuff.

      But that's just par for the course on /.

    • Re:Egads (Score:5, Funny)

      by Troll_Kamikaze ( 646926 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:29PM (#5225778)

      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.

      Really? Maybe you should give this site [slashdot.org] a try.

    • I guess we now know that OSNews will post anything submitted to them that has to do with an OS. Who's going to be the first to submit "A Look Back: Installing Windows 3.1"?
    • it's been a while

      ten minutes?

  • 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!

    • 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.

  • Sigh... I remember when BeOS was made for PowerPC 601 Processors, but it has sadly now left the domain of PowerPC chips all together.

    I was hoping to install BeOS onto my G4 so that I could tinker around with it, but now if I want it on my Mac I will need to use VirtualPC.

    I say BRING BeOS BACK TO ITS ROOTS! PowerPC NOW! =)

    • Re:PowerPC? (Score:3, Informative)

      by guile*fr ( 515485 )
      beos never ran on PPC601... entry ticket was 603 (the bebox) or 604.
    • I ran an early version of Be on my Power Computing Mac clone (180MHz 604e) and was quite astounded at the performance it offered when compared to MacOS 7.6. True multi-tasking and -threading, it was pretty fab.

      But again, I couldn't DO anything with it. So away it went.
    • BeOS can't be installed on VPC. Won't work.
    • Sigh... I remember when BeOS was made for PowerPC 601 Processors, but it has sadly now left the domain of PowerPC chips all together.

      BeOS for PowerPC died when Apple stopped providing them with the ROM information, IIRC. I had BeOSDR8.3 (4?) running on my 8500/180MP awhile back. It ran very, very nicely in the dual CPU setup. The funny thing was the CPU meter application could actually be used to 'turn off' a CPU and you could turn off both CPU's, which of course crashed the machine. I think you could even run it on those Daystar machines that had four 200Mhz 604e's. Yikes.
    • I say BRING BeOS BACK TO ITS ROOTS! PowerPC NOW! =)


      Why stop there? Port it back to the AT&T Hobbit chip [bebox.nu]!!

  • 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)
    • His bin/cue 'info' is all wrong too.. Nero doesn't need a cue file like he claims. They aren't BIN either, the files are ISO. You just go to burn disk image, choose 'show all files', pick your ISO and let it rip..

      I think the fact that he tried to burn two 650 meg ISO files on the same CD shows his level of technical savvy. I didnt even bother to read on. It would be like listening to a mentally challenged 3rd grader explain Shakespeare.

  • Wait a second.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by johny_qst ( 623876 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:21PM (#5225705) Journal
    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.
    • It's pretty funny (in a Nick Burns sort of way) that he planned to boot his PC up from a CD that had two .iso files on it.

      Heck, it took me about 10 seconds to explain to my non-technical grandfather the difference between writing files to a CD and a writing a file that contains a CD image to a CD.
      • And obviously you didn't actually understand what he said.
        There were 2 filesystem images. One was aboot image (usually an image of a 2.88MB floppy) and the other was a BFS image (Install filesystem image). So he did need to burn both to a disc in order to boot it.

        There are other things you can put on a CD-R other than a ISO image.

    • Doesn't FUD get slapped onto the front page of slashdot more than anything? Except dupes, that is...

  • fyi (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jonny Ringo ( 444580 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:21PM (#5225714)
    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.

    • Re:fyi (Score:3, Informative)

      by Junta ( 36770 )
      Complete with outdated drivers and utilities....

      Besides, I burned the image file to CD from PE and installed from it fine. Not documented officially, but it works quite well.

      Paying any money for BeOS Pro is being ripped off. The bonuses it once gave are nullified by the negatives of its age. Max and Developer Edition have done a good job of extendending the life of the OS through third party applications, extensions, and replacements. It is a good hold over until a reimplementation is complete. I'll be the first to say that extending the closed-source release can only go so far, but it is a very good holdover until a complete solution comes along.
  • I was very disappointed when Be decided to discontinue the development of BeOS, selling it to Palm

    I was disapponted ~5 years ago when Be's team has rejected $18M acquisition deal from Apple.

    • I heard they rejected $75M from Apple.

  • What the hell is the status of BeOS? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pete-classic ( 75983 ) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:30PM (#5225791) Homepage Journal
    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

    • Re:What the hell is the status of BeOS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by no reason to be here ( 218628 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:45PM (#5225911) Homepage
      The "Developer Edition" and "Max Edition" are hacked together from the Personal Edition that Be, Inc. released. They are in violation of the EULA that comes with the Personal Edition, but, since they are not making the people distributing them any money, i imagine Palm, or the remnants of Be, Inc. couldn't care less.
      For open-source replacements of BeOS check out the following:
      OpenBeOS [openbeos.org]
      BlueEyed OS [blueeyedos.com]
      also look at the following:
      beunited [beunited.org]
      yellowTab's Zeta [yellowtab.com]

      The guy writing the review is a horrible representative of BeOS users, i think. it's my main OS at home, and I have had little teouble with it, ever (the only time i went into Kernel Debug land was when I managed to crash snes9x with a corrupted ROM).
    • It's Free.

      Not Free as in Beer, nor Free as in Speech.

      But Free as in 'not worth Jack-Shit'

    • Re:What the hell is the status of BeOS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by cgreuter ( 82182 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @04:09PM (#5226120)
      I keep seeing stuff about new BeOS variants on the street, but the most "official" thing I have heard is that Palm owns it.

      As I understand it, we have several different variants:

      1. BeOS Professional Edition is the commercial version of BeOS. It now belongs to Palm but (IIRC) someone still has the right to sell copies through an older agreement with Be.
      2. BeOS Personal Edition is the free-as-in-beer version of BeOS that you could download from Be. There are still mirrors of it and AFAIK, you can still legally put it up for download. It requires a Windows or Linux installation to work.
      3. The BeOS Developer Edition above is apparently a release of BeOS Max Edition. This is basically BeOS Personal Edition with patches applied, new drivers and various open-source contributions. It's maintained by volunteers.
      4. BlueOS is basically a Linux distribution with a BeOS compatibility layer. I'm not sure how complete it is.
      5. OpenBeOS is an open-source re-implementation of BeOS. AIUI, they're basically replacing BeOS components one by one.
      6. Atheos is a completely different open-source OS that sort of resembles BeOS.
      7. Bill Hayden forked it and along with the Linux kernel, made a BeOS-compatible OS.

      And there you go.

      Note that I'm not really a BeOS enthusiast, so I may be wrong about some of these. However, that's what it looks like to me.

      • It looks like BlueOS (now called BlueEyedOS; I liked the first one (name) better but I guess it's an invitation to be sued by IBM or something, haha) has about 50-75% of the BeOS kits implemented. Unfortunately they don't say anything about how complete the userinterface is.

        B.E.OS does NOT implement BeOS binary compatibility. I see this as a significant flaw. If you are going to use the Linux kernel to recreate BeOS (A completely rational decision in my opinion - like anything else I'd rather see it implemented on top of mach but I'll settle for anything stable with good driver support) then you should really be planning to implement BeOS binaries in the linux kernel; if not immediately, then somewhere down the road. Not supporting BeOS binaries will ultimately hurt you. I wouldn't make it a high priority or anything, but I do think it's worth doing.

        Building a new BeOS on top of the Linux kernel DOES make more sense than any other possible option at the moment, because you get instant driver support for a vast range of hardware. A system of module management should be considered as a means for controlling hardware more closely. (Think being able to unload a module and load it with new arguments, runtime configuration is important. People who build anything not absolutely necessarily internal to their kernel directly into their kernel are missing out on a really fantastic feature. But I digress.)

        The B.E.OS unfortunately has a restrictive license which denies commercial use amongst other things, they deliberately want to keep central control. I disapprove (I would prefer even GPL to that) but the fact that they're doing it all is a possible boon, and at least they're using a linux kernel so it's not like there's going to be spooky magic under the hood or anything.

      • BeOS Personal Edition is the free-as-in-beer version of BeOS that you could download from Be. There are still mirrors of it and AFAIK, you can still legally put it up for download. It requires a Windows or Linux installation to work.

        Wrong, it requires that you are smart enough to burn a boot image and a disk image to a cd to be able to do a full install.


        The BeOS Developer Edition above is apparently a release of BeOS Max Edition. This is basically BeOS Personal Edition with patches applied, new drivers and various open-source contributions. It's maintained by volunteers.

        No BeOS Developer Edition has been out for a long time (basically since palm bought be and be stopped hosting the downloads for pe and making updates), Max Edition is basically the same thing (the free version of BePE plus some updates) done by another group.

  • The BE File System (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doodhwala ( 13342 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:33PM (#5225818) Homepage

    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 [cmu.edu].
    • ...at least that's what I've heard. Windows will have a new filesystem within the next few years that's very similar to the Be filesystem, sort of like a database to speed up searches, and with journaling, etc. I've heard that it was, in fact, Be-inspired.

  • Another Distro (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:34PM (#5225823)
    You might also want to try BeOS Max 2.1
    http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/crux/BeOS5PEMax EditionV21.zip?download [sourceforge.net]

    Home page
    http://crux.sourceforge.net/nuke/index.php [sourceforge.net]

  • Help me out, please (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ACNiel ( 604673 )
    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.

    • Re:Help me out, please (Score:5, Informative)

      by Big Mark ( 575945 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @05:18PM (#5226724)
      I really liked

      Boot-up speed. Turn PC on, wait for HDs to spin up, tap toes for three seconds, start doing things.
      SoundPlay. World's best mp3 player bar none. Shareware yes, but it really IS worth the money for once.
      Ease of use. I have never come across a network setup that was as easy as BeOS's. Enter hostname, enter domain name, check DHCP box, click apply, start the browser.

      Didn't like:

      Hardware compatability. If you can't get drivers (check the Hardware Matrix [frizbe.net] on here) for your hardware change your hardware or don't bother.
      Lack of apps. My needs are basic so it did all I needed it to, but not all I wanted it to.

      Still kicks arse. And I still use it a couple of times a week. Give it a spin, see how you like it. If OpenBeOS gets the Open Source fanatics behind it it will rule.

      -Mark
  • Could this OS B any more outdated?

    I mean -> Could this B OS date out any more.

    Or Maybe, I could B a little Kornier!

  • PERFECT (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ashetos ( 634147 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @05:15PM (#5226698)
    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

    • Re:PERFECT (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Squidgee ( 565373 )
      In case you've not noticed, you've just described Mac OS X. In fact, Mac OS X has software and driver support, and is therefore superiour to BeOS. Don't get me wrong, I love BeOS, but if you want a quick consistant UI, ports of Linux apps, and the ability to run *nix apps/a shell, grab Mac OS X. It's far more robust than what you're looking at with OBeOS.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @06:11PM (#5227125)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Lets just get this out of the way. This is flamebait, pure and simple.

    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.

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