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BeOS - Another Alternative

1. My First Steps
2. Resources
3. Ftp, Telnet & NFS
4. Multimedia
5. MacOS
6. Screenshot
7. Installation with VMWare
8. Further Resources

My experience with BeOS: I'm impressed. I downloaded BeOS 5 for Linux (May 2000) It booted, tested hardware and found most (incl. PC-TV card) and on-board sound (YMF740C). Within 5 mins I had things running. Unfortunately my 10/100 NE-2000 compatible ethernet card was mistaken as ISA card, and did not work so far and driver-searching was required (and was successful):

All in all, I'm positively impressed by BeOS.

• easy general setup & installation
• easy to use desktop / GUI
• easy network setup
• fast GUI
• antialiased fonts
• BeOS shell (like tcsh or bash)
• mounts ext2/fat file-systems
• download & install of packages organized

It even boots with VMware, in this case it's BeOS Max Edition V2 booting on VMware V3.2.

BeOS 2. Resources

YellowTAB BeOS successor (they develop BeOS further)	Be.Com (gone) BeOS site	BeBits.Com Vast software-archive
YaBel.Com News site	TheBeSite.Com Another news site

BeOS 3. Ftp, Telnet & NFS

You can enable ftp and telnet service on your BeOS box (Preferences -> Network), and then ftp/telnet to your BeOS machine from outside. The other way arround: there is a BeOS shell (like tcsh) you can use telnet & ftp to access remote sites within your network.

An nfs client is also available (see at BeBits.Com and search for 'nfs'). This makes your BeOS a full functional client in your network!

BeOS 4. Multimedia

Strength of BeOS is multimedia, here an excerpt:

• Media file formats support
  Built-in support for many industry standard media file formats, including:
  • MPEG
  • QuickTime
  • AVI
  • WAV
  • AIFF
  • AU
• Video encoding/decoding support (codecs)
  Built-in support for many industry standard video encoding formats, including:
  • MPEG-1
  • Indeo 5
  • Cinepak
  • PJPEG
  • MSVideo (CRAM)
  • MS-RLE
  • Apple Video (RPZA)
• Audio encoding/decoding support (codecs)
  Built-in support for many industry standard audio encoding formats, including:
  • ulaw
  • IMA4
  • MS-ADPCM
  • MP3

See for more details in BeBook: The Media Kit.

BeOS 5. MacOS

Yes, this is even possible too, running MacOS 0.x-8.x under BeOS5 on Intel:

Basilisk II: MacOS for Unix/BeOs/WinXX Open source MacOS 68k emulator (requires MacOS ROM)	SheepShaver: MacOS running under BeOS Twins meet . . . (requires MacOS ROM)	EmulateMac Lot's of downloads (MacOS 5.x-8.x & ROMs) and div. tools
MacDimension: MacOS MacOS Systems (0.x-8.x)

BeOS 6. Screenshot

1280x1024 JPEG (200K)

It's running:

• TV (Bt848)
• CD player
• shell (local)
• telnet to linux box

Press [PrintScreen]-key and in your home-directory you get screen1.tga screen2.tga ...

BeOS 8. Further Resources

BeOS Max Edition Extended BeOS (more drivers)

OpenBeOS Ambitious undertake to re-write BeOS

Blue Eyes OS (B.E.OS) Another attempt with Linux-kernel and XFree86 as basis

                                                                                                                                   

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