[LUG] BeOS 5 Personal Edition

[Jon Still <jstill at cisco.com>]

OK, I know this isn't Linux, but it's an interesting aside.

I downloaded BeOS 5 Personal Edition yesterday and tried it out on my laptop on the way home.

It's err interesting.  I *love* the GUI - it feels a bit like a mac, which is good because I generally like the MacOS GUI. 
 However, it is DAMN quick.  It really does feel responsive on a machine where Windows can become fairly sluggish 
and even Linux waits around at times. (This is a PII 360odd MHz, 128MB RAM Toshiba Tecra 8000).  BeOS is damn 
quick and looks very nice running at 1024x768 in lots of colours. (the maximum you can get on the LCD display).

Underneath is a Unix-like kernel, but (I presume) with some of the API missing.  It works well enough that the 
default shell is a tweaked version of GNU bash and it comes with some utilites from the GNU sh-utils 
collection (e.g. ls, ln, etc etc).  Obviously stuff like mount and ps have had to be changed to support bfs 
(BeOS File System) and ps obviously had to change as BeOS has nothing like procfs.

Biiiiiig problem at the moment is lack of drivers.  I didn't even bother looking for drivers for my Xircom 
PCMCIA network card and it didn't pick up the internal V.90 modem.  OTOH, it did find the NeoBook display 
adaptor and the Yamaha sound "card".

Unfortunately I find the fact that it's Unix-like, but not Unix-complete a bit limiting.  You keep looking around 
for files and don't find them where you expect, or not at all.  Also, there is a real dearth of software 
available at the moment, and porting to BeOS isn't as simple as say, porting to BSD or Linux.

On the whole, worth a look though.  The Personal Edition is quite nice though.  You download a 50MB 
self-extracting EXE (http://free.be.com/), run it, make sure you've 
got 512MB of disk space for it to use for a pseudo-disk and go.  To start it up, just double-click the 
"Start BeOS 5" icon.  It quite Windows and replaces it with BeOS.  Not long later, and it's loaded 
and ready to play with.

/me is off to find BeOS enlightenment and GTK themes :)

Jon.

-- 
Jon Still                                 E-mail:       jstill at cisco.com
Network Management and IP Services        Telephone:    +44 (0)20 8756 9268
EMEA Professional Services                Switchboard:  +44 (0)20 8756 8000
Cisco Systems Ltd.                        Mobile:       +44 (0)7977 066 087

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