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BeOS Max Edition v3.0 Released 268

Posted by timothy from the eternal-flame dept.
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."
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BeOS Max Edition v3.0 Released More

BeOS Max Edition v3.0 Released

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  • Perhaps if they only tweaked the kernel figuratively they could have stayed in business.

  • Aaah! My Eyes!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by tweder ( 22759 ) <stwede@gmai l . c om> on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @03:16PM (#7047376) Homepage
    Good Lord! There should seriously be a disclaimer attatched to the link to BeOS Max Edition website.

  • BeOS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by VAXGeek ( 3443 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @03:16PM (#7047389) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:BeOS (Score:4, Informative)

      by B3ryllium ( 571199 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @03:37PM (#7047631) Homepage
      As I understood it, the POSIX implementation was full - except for one very important area. The network stack. It was fine-tuning the "new" network stack that put the company out of business; they took so long that their market evaporated ... and they had to find a new market.

      It was sad. :(
      • Nah, it was Microsoft strong-arming all the OEMs into not bundling BeOS with their hardware that put Be out of business, combined with Be's disastrous "focus shift" into making Internet Appliances that never worked right anyway. BONE (the new networking stack) was just collateral damage (along with the new OpenGL implementation and lots of other neat stuff that never saw the light of day... sniff)

    • Re:BeOS (Score:4, Informative)

      by ConsumedByTV ( 243497 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @04:24PM (#7048141) Homepage
      It's not FreeBSD.

      Read this http://www.nblug.org/pipermail/talk/2002-June/0013 07.html [nblug.org]
    • when I still worked on the release engineering team at netscape, I'd have to reboot the BeOS build machine on a semi-daily basis. Stability was *NOT* one of BeOS's strongpoints. The compiler and the VNC server would kill the box VERY often.

      • I noticed a big differance between 4.5 and 5.03 in terms of stability. BeOS 4.5 was quite stable, but I've had my share of problems in 5.03.
    • NetPositive may suck as a general purpose web browser, but it reads Slashdot and other not-too-fancy-schmancy sites just fine, it's very fast and responsive, and it launches in about a third of a second. Because of that, I still use it instead of Mozilla whenever it can handle the content.


      So there :^)

    • Re:BeOS and POSIX (Score:2, Informative)

      by berenddeboer ( 305245 )
      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.

      • That's painting a rather rosy picture. Let's see, off the top of my head, in addition to lacking socket descriptors, BeOS also lacked:
        • 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 littl

  • Soo... (Score:3)

    by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @03:16PM (#7047391)
    Hows the Clone open-source BEOS going?

    We havent heard much about it..

    • Re:Soo... (Score:3, Informative)

      by darien ( 180561 )
      Dude, the answer's right here [openbeos.org]!

      Anyway, to answer your question: it's still coming along, slowly but surely. They're releasing updated components (most recently new versions of the tracker and the audio mixer). There was a newsletter [sourceforge.net] a fortnight ago.

      I don't know how usable OBOS is though. They don't seem to say on their site, and I really can't be bothered with installing it until it runs Photoshop. ;)
      • I don't know how usable OBOS is though. They don't seem to say on their site, and I really can't be bothered with installing it until it runs Photoshop. ;)

        Right now it is not usable at all, if you don't count using their released replacement code/apps inside for example, BeOS MAX v3.

        As far as I can tell from reading the mailing list and newsletters, there is a lot that has been done, but there is also still a lot of more things to do, before we can download a bootable ISO of OpenBeOS r1.
      • I don't know how usable OBOS is though. They don't seem to say on their site, and I really can't be bothered with installing it until it runs Photoshop. ;)

        Their primary goal is an OS that is binary and source compatible with BeOS 5 (there might have been some exceptions for network code), so it's going to be a while. But since that is their goal they can use actual BeOS modules in place of the unfinished parts.

  • Attention: There is a typo in the burning file (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

  • BeOS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pagercam2 ( 533686 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @03:18PM (#7047408)
    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?

    • Re:BeOS (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Adelvillar ( 96720 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @03:30PM (#7047551)
      BeOS has never been and will never be open sourced. There are several open sourced projects to try reproduce its functionality and some go as far as to try to achieve binary compatibility. However those projects are far from complete.

      Regarding your question why would anyone...? Hell 'cause they want to, 'cause they fell like doing it, 'cause they like the OS.

      Don't dismiss people's efforts and projects because in your narrow mind you don't find a use for whatever they are doing?

      Linux would not exist if everyone would think in such a near sighted terms.

    • Re:BeOS (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      BeOS has:

      1. Microkernel architecture
      2. < 20s boot time (compared to nearly 30s for XP on the same computer)
      3. Nearly complete POSIX layer (save pthreads, *sob*)
      4. Fantastic SMP

      For pratctical use, Be is useful as a soft-realtime OS.

      The POSIX layer, combined with a fairly clean user interface API, combined with the decent development tools, make it a nice platform to develop on.

      Really, it's a great OS to play with. Try it. You'll be amazed at how little it takes to run a graphical OS that's excee

    • Re:BeOS (Score:2, Interesting)

      by FrankNputer ( 141316 )
      The gain is resurrecting an "end of life" OS, as you put it, into an open version which would perpetually extend it's life. The Max edition is manily a patched R5 PE edition, so it's appeal in and of itself is limited; however, the OpenBeOS project aims to replicate all that was proprietary in BeOS in an open form, essentially trying to do for BeOS what Linux has done for UNIX.

      And as for the best features of BeOS living on in Linux...I wouldn't hold my breath. It's apples and oranges. BeOS is NOT a UNIX an

    • Re:BeOS (Score:4, Interesting)

      by EverDense ( 575518 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:06PM (#7048594) Homepage
      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?

      BeOS is incredibly well written for all manner of multimeda activities.
      BeOS does shiny graphics and shiny sound, really, really well.

      ...and THAT is why I'm glad people are bothering.

      Microsoft seem to be an admirable job of making minor tweaks to their
      OS user interface, and convincing everyone that its some completely new thing.
      Why can't OpenBeOS do that too?
    • "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?"

      It's their choice. They could be out flying ultralights or customizing cars instead (and in some ways your question is like "Why refurbish that 56 Chevy?"), but they choose to make an Open Source BeOS clone instead, or whatever. (Some folks I know are working on getting TCP/IP going on the Tandy CoCo 3. Why not? If nothing else, I can then ftp my CoCo's
    • AmigaOS always had ethernet support, just put your hydra.device or ariadne.device into devs: and away you go...
      As for TCP/IP support, commodore even made a tcp stack for it, called AS2525 or something... hardly anyone used it, opting instead for third party stacks, but it was there...

  • Burning it... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @03:20PM (#7047426) Journal
    The BFS ISO installs in its own BFS partition, however it requires a bit of attention in the way you have to burn it."

    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."

  • Just curious, but (Score:2, Interesting)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 )
    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?

    • Re:Just curious, but (Score:4, Informative)

      by Sillypuddy ( 553215 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @03:54PM (#7047805)
      in the true slashdot fashion, you didn't read the faq:

      Many of you have asked us to create ISO images for BeOS Installations. This article comes to clear out some misconceptions about BeOS Installations.

      BeOS images are ISO images. But not ISO Images in the sense Windows sees them. Those ISO contain FAT32 or FAT16 compliant filesystems. ISO9660 compliant is a FAT32 system. BeOS uses BeFS which is a 64bit journaling filesystem that stores a lot of the file info in different places such as Attributes. If we where to create an installation of BeOS using a classic ISO image (one that can be read by IsoBuster) it wouldn't Install !!!! If you copied files out of it to BeOS, some of them would be useless.

      Installation of BeOS requires BeFS Images. THAT'S IT.

      And we won't fix it. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

      NOTE: YOU CAN ASK THE COMPANIES THAT CREATE ISOBUSTER AND WINIMAGE TO SUPPORT BeFS.

      -joe

    • Re:Just curious, but (Score:3, Informative)

      by soulsteal ( 104635 )
      They offer a bootable cd-rom but it's formatted with BeFS, the 64-bit journaled filesystem that shipped with BeOS.

      Their explanation is that system files lose meta-data when their install image is converted to an ISO9660 compliant filesystem.

      Seems simple enough.

  • Support for modern hardware yet? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by poopie ( 35416 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @03:30PM (#7047550) Journal
    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?

    • Re:Support for modern hardware yet? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SewersOfRivendell ( 646620 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @04:36PM (#7048254)
      Is there anything in BeOS that is not available in Linux?

      A decent user interface?

      Yes, yes, troll -1 I know. I'm normally a Mac OS X user and developer. I know about GNOME and I know about KDE and I use both of them (GNOME 2.4, even) on my Linux box. They still cannot hold a candle to Mac OS X or BeOS for consistency and overall polish. Also, BeOS is much easier to code for. (Nothing is as good as Cocoa -- and GNUstep isn't quite there yet.)

      I do expect this to change over time. GNOME is almost there; it needs a few more really solid releases and a decent set of supporting tools, and probably a few more major architectural revisions. Right now, however, the prospect of running BeOS instead of Linux on my PC is one that excites me: an environment I actually might enjoy living in on my PC? Bring it on!

  • Great for the old boxes. (Score:3, Informative)

    by ayersrj ( 701333 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @03:40PM (#7047662)
    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 [yellowtab.com] 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'm using an 450mhz k6-2, before i was using a 200mhz mmx pentium for beos..

      i just had to waste my 50d uptime on it to install another gfx card and some more memory. it's main usage is a mp3 player box + irc(with occasional web browsing, my mouse on that computer sucks though so i don't browse too much with it), so it gets used pretty constantly when i'm at home anyways.

      and fyi it's not r6, since they acquired the rights(or some rights, i don't know the catches) to r5 codebase(not the codebase that was su
  • Man, this OS never dies does it?

    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.

    • Like many things favored around this public forum it just never got off the ground. Slashdot should consider registering the name "underdogs.org". That is just how I feel about all of this lately. M$FT won.

  • BeOS logo (Score:4, Funny)

    by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @03:45PM (#7047717) Homepage Journal
    What is that symbol supposed to be?

    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.

  • Slashdot didn't pick up the story [macworld.co.uk] when it happened a couple of weeks ago, but Be, Inc. has settled its antitrust suit against Microsoft for $23 million. [beincorporated.com] Microsoft, as usual, admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement.

    Readers may recall that Be brought their suit against the Microsoft back in February 2002. [slashdot.org] 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*

  • From the BeOS Max website:

    This page has been accessed 35611 times since July 26th, 2003

    90% in the last hour probably :). I've never seen a counter move so fast!

    Wait ... I better stop reloading!

    Sorry BeOS Max guys ...

    I'll get my coat.

  • Could the BeosMax website [beosmax.org] 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?

    • 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?

      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

  • 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!!

  • BeOS AbiWord Port (Score:5, Informative)

    by uwog ( 707498 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @04:06PM (#7047903) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:BeOS AbiWord Port (Score:3, Informative)

      by Joe Tie. ( 567096 )
      You might try checking with the zeta people. I think they had abiword in one of the screenshots they distributed. So they might be willing to contribute to keeping the beos version up-to-date.
      • Zeta people never came to us to give anything. They never told us that they had a build.

        This is almost the 3rd or 4th time we tell we are about to ditch BeOS support. And we have gone thru BeOS "authorized" information source to announce it. The problem with BeOS is that there is almost no developer, and the few that still do some BeOS development don't have a clue about the real interest of Open Source.

  • Mini FAQ on BeOS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @04:11PM (#7047965) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • In your supported hardware examples I note that I don't see video Cards or network cards mentioned. Is this an oversight or is the support for such things as dismal now as it was back when I bought 4.5?

      Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed BeOS and got pretty enthused about it but I found that it didn't network worth beans and the list of good cards supported was wanting. I'd like to think that it's come along since then. Has it?

      Oh and for my money I'll take the "Our way, the only way" Apple approach. I have
    • You missed a few questions: 1) Didn't Palm buy BeOS? 2) Was BeOS closed source or was it open sourced? 3) Who owns the rights to BeOS PE? 4) Who develops these new drivers and the kernel???

      No really I want to know, I tried beos 4 (maybe 5) and liked the UI, but it just didn't have hardware support and Be the company does not exist. 6) What about openbeos? Where do they fit into the BeOS picture??

      • Re:Mini FAQ on BeOS (Score:2, Informative)

        by mlk ( 18543 )
        > 1) Didn't Palm buy BeOS?

        Yes, don't expect to see Palm-Be For Desktops thou. Palm bought Be for the excellent engineers the code was a by product. Bits might make it into PalmX.

        > 2) Was BeOS closed source or was it open sourced?

        BeOS is closed source. However a few other versions have no appeared tring to remake BeOS.
        At lest two closed source (Max, and YellowTAB [yellowtab.com])
        At lest two open source, OpenBeOS [openbeos.org], based on a brand spanky new kernal, and redeveloped from scrach. And BlueEyedOS [blueeyedos.com], based on Linux.

        >

    • You'd be surprised how much hardware is supported by BeOS, Athlon XP CPUS, P4s, ...

      Wow! An x86-oriented operating system supports x86-compatible CPUs? This is revolutionary!

  • Brought to you by, Intel! Best run on Pentium EXXXTREME.

  • Wow. Spooky. (Score:3, Funny)

    by BlackBolt ( 595616 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @04:48PM (#7048364) Homepage Journal
    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... :-(
  • 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?

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