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Ok, I spent about two months running BeOS on my P200 laptop with 32MB
RAM so I'll try my hand at a quick synopsis. I played with the demo for
quite a while, then picked up the Pro version to get the additional
software. I also picked up Be Productive, the major office suite for
Be. The idea was to have something small and quick that I could take on
the road. Eventually I decided to go with a Psion instead, but that was
cuz the laptop was too big for my purposes, not becuase of Be.
Installing Be is a no-brainer. Boot off the CD, partition, then let it sit
20 minutes while it copies files. The pro version includes GCC as well as
lots of other GNU stuff.
BeOS is based off of one of the BSD's- NetBSD IIRC. You can jump down to a
CLI if you want- it's a bash shell, and while the directory structure kept
me completely lost most of the time, it's perfectly easy to write shell
scripts and such.
The included apps are skimpy, IMO, but there's a lot of stuff available
from www.bebits.com. For instance, a Samba package, FreeCraft, perl, and
BePac, the most lethally addictive clone of PacMan I've ever had the
misfortune of being exposed to.
The GUI sucks, as far as I'm concerned. I don't like having a fixed
"start" menu (like fvwm, instead of wmaker or blackbox), and while it has
some nice features- like a tab instead of a title bar that's the whole
length of the window which you can move to different places on the window,
the theory being that you can organize multiple instances of one program
more easily that way - I found it mostly unappealing. It does let you have
up to 32 workspaces, though, all of which can be different resolutions and
color depths, and you can use different backgrounds, etc.
It's a good OS for a laptop, I think. It boots in just a few seconds, and
it's ready to go in about half a minute after power-up. It's quick and
responsive- none of the lags I got when I had linux on my underpowered
laptop. The multimedia support is good- MP3s, movies, realmedia, all that
good stuff. Don't know about DiVX;-) or DVD, but MPEGs play back very
well. Be recognized and set up my sound card for me, and, while all the
reviews prop Be for being able to play half a dozen MP3s at once,
backwards or forwards, I never tried this. It seems like a decent test of
the system's multimedia abilities, but when am I going to want to play 6
MP3s backwards at the same time?
It's faily easy to get the hang of, too. Sort of a cock-eyed stepson of
the MacOS. My roommate was able to pick it up almost right away.
It's a cool thing to play with- keep mucking around and see what you think
of it.
-Sten
On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, Jason Carter wrote:
> Last night I downloaded a version of BeOS 5
> ftp://www.beforever.com/pub/beforever/freebe/BeOS4Linux.tar.gz that runs
> from a disk image under Linux and found it quite interesting. It seems to
> have a lot of things going for it such as SMP, multithreading and protected
> memory etc, but what it doesn't seem to have is any kind of unbiased
> comparison to Linux or other OS's.
>
> After playing around with it for awhile and doing some searching all i've
> come with is the conclusion that it has very advanced underpinnings and a
> irrationally rabid following, but not much else. The GUI is terrible and
> most of the software I came across appears to be thinly featured
> freeware/shareware quality stuff. All of the material i read could say is
> how advanced everything is and how reponsive everything is because it's all
> so advanced.
>
> Anyway the Linux connection is....does anyone have any real unbiased
> opinions or experience on how the BeOS compares to Linux in terms of speed
> and stability. I'm really curious if it's even half of what it's cracked up
> to Be (pun intended)
>
> Jason
>
>
>
>
> *** In the beginning there was nothing......and it exploded ***
> -=-
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: Tue Mar 06 2001 - 20:21:24 CST