Opinions? BeOS

[Martin Scott Goldberg]

>
>I ran one of the last developer releases a little on my PowerMac 
>8500/180, and it was quite impressive.  Latter I used BeOS 4.5 
>briefly on my old dual 400Mhz Celeron, and it was awesome!  The 
>downside is development ground to a halt.  There has been some modern 
>activity, and there is even work being done on an Open Source version.

I still run BeOSR5 (last one) on my PC (multi-boot system with XP,
FreeBSD, and BeOS).  From what I've seen, there's still a lot of open
source development going on for it in the form of drivers and software.
I was finally able to get my Nvidia TI4600 card up much to my delight.

As for the open source version, there's actually a bunch of them:
Open BeOS - http://open-beos.sourceforge.net/news.php

FreeOS (Now Called Mockup, a BeOS/Linux mixture) - 
http://www.mockup.org/faqs/whats/

Athos - http://www.atheos.cx/  Athos is peculiar in that everyone except
the author calls it a BeOS clone. ;)

There's also a new commercial version called Zeta developed by YellowTab
(former European distributor of BeOS), based on directly on BeOS.
According to one site it's based Dano/EXP's codeline (which was supposed
to be BeOS 6 but was never finished as Be sold its IP to Palm).
http://yellowtab.com/products/

Here's a review of an early beta from 3 years ago - 
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3692

>
>It would have been nice to see it continue, but after Apple bought 
>NeXT rather than Be, Inc. they sort of started to run out of steam. 
>I might be typing this on a dual 2Ghz G5 running Mac OS X, but I 
>can't help but thinking how much better the system would be if it had 
>been BeOS based, rather than OPENSTEP based.  The good thing about 
>them buying NeXT was getting Steve Jobs back, but BeOS was a far more 
>efficient OS.  And yes, I've run OPENSTEP and BeOS on the same system.
>
>			Zane

I have to agree, but then that efficiency could be because BeOS isn't
running a kludge verson of FreeBSD/Mac GUI in a MACH environment.  ;)

>| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |


Marty