BeOS -- My new favorite Operating System
To be a computer guru, you need to know more operating systems than is needed, correct? Perhaps not, but in my case, I'd like to learn as many as possible.
So as soon as I heard that Be was going to make a free version of their next OS, it got my attention.
I can't remember exactly when I first heard about it, but it was several month's before it's release (March 31, 2000). At the time, the only way to get the free version was to download it. You'd think that an OS download would be several hundred Mega-Bytes, but this download is smaller than the whole Internet Explorer 5 package, which is around 60MB's. BeOS 5 is about 45MB, I believe.
I wasn't expecting too much from it... "It can't get any better than Linux" I thought. So I waited all night for it to download on my poor 56K connection. While downloading, I was trying to get myself ready for all the problems I'll encounter, trying to get all my hardware to work in it. It was around this time that I finally had got my win/softmodem to work in Linux, and I didn't feel like going through all that again.
So it's finally done downloading, I extract it and everything. I read through the readme's and such... Time to install.
Be could not have made the install any easier... What it does is it creates a "virtual partition" of sorts on your Windows partition, which is exactly 500MB, no more and no less. But if you prefer, you can later reinstall it on it's own "real" partition. And this is where Be'll install itself and where any files are kept... "Only 500MB of storage?" You may ask. Nope, you can mount any other partition you have. Woosh! I now have 8GB of storage, just like all my other OS's.
It asks me to create a boot disk, I stick a disk in and it does it's thing. Now I've got a BeOS icon on my desktop... All I need to do is click on this and it'll kick Windows out of memory and all. I double-click it, and it jumps into DOS, a few commands go by and I get the BeOS start screen... It's acting as though it's loading, but only for a few seconds. It's frozen.
I figure it's a problem with my PC, so I reset and try again. Still freezes. There's still one more option... The boot disk.
You use the boot disk to start BeOS directly. You don't go through Windows or anything.
After BeOS loads, I'm greeted with a nice little start-up sound and a familier desktop with icons and such. Then a window pops up -- it's the BeOS documentation.
So right now I'm stuck with a resolution of 640x480 @ 16bit. After getting my resolution and everything set up, I pull up the MP3 player. I load one of my favorite MP3's (Ozar Midrashim v1.1 by Information Society), It starts playing and it sounds excellent. The only problem, and this is a problem I still haven't figured out, is that it's only coming out of my two front speakers, when the other two speakers behind me are just taking up space. But it still sounded great, two speakers or not.
So my sound woks fine, now it's time to see if I can connect to the Internet... But wait! I've got a lousy win/softmodem! This isn't gonna work... But I bring up the dialer anyway, type in all my ISP's settings, and click on the dreaded "modem" button. I search through the list of modems that it supports, and to my surprise, they support Lucent win/softmodems! I select it and try connecting to the Internet... I hear it communicating with my modem, always a good sign... It's dialing... And I'm online, baby!
I see if I can actually get to a website.... It pops up just like it would on Windows... I'm all set now!
So I go to BeBits, which is a site that has a bunch of freeware, shareware and such to download. I look through it and find a few things i may need.
The first thing I wanted was a better MP3 player. The default MP3 player doesn't support playlist's as far as I know. I search around and find CL-Amp which is an MP3 player that works exactly like Winamp. It even supports Winamp skins.
Now that I've got a nice MP3 player, I need a few other things. I pick up an FTP client, ICQ clone, AIM clone, a shareware version of Doom, a Napster clone and a beta of the Opera web browser.
The only thing I didn't download, which I'm still looking into, is a graphics program.
Oh, and how about a web browser that gives you Haiku error messages!? How cool is that? Huh?! Yes, the web browser BeOS comes with, Netpositive, gives you that option.
So I've had BeOS 5 Personal Edition for 3 or so months now. I have not had one problem with it, either. I got a video capture card from my brother a while back, and I didn't even notice it, but BeOS automatically installed drivers and such without me even knowing it! It wasn't until I was bored one day that I noticed, I tried it out and it worked!
Another thing I feel worth mentioning is that when you click on a button in an inactive window, it won't register. This is the type of thing I like. Most likely, everyone who multi-task's has, one time or another, accidentally closed the wrong window, opened the wrong dialog or something annoying because either the top window was in the way or just clumsy movements of the mouse... BeOS gives you a sort of "barrier" to prevent this from happening. Sure, it's a small detail, but anything that helps prevent a major blow to the head is a plus to me.
But there's more! BeOS supports "Virtual Desktops"! You can have up to 32 of these. Each with their own background, resolution/color depth and so on. At the time I only need two, but it's nice to have the option
BeOS also comes with some nice screen savers, too.
I'm not going to bother mentioning anything about the Terminal because I haven't got that far into the OS, but once I do, I'll either add to this or make a whole new rave.
Just by playing around with BeOS 5 for the past 3 months, I have found that it has extreme potential to being very powerful if used correctly. Although this is from a consumer stand point and not a developer's. I have yet to mess around with the development tools.
As you may have suspected, BeOS is one of the operating systems that supports multiple processors, up to eight I believe. But I think the free (personal edition) only supports two, and that's when you boot from the boot disk. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think most, if not all, of BeOS's applications are multithreaded. This means that if you do happen to have more than one processor, they'll basically take turns doing the next instruction the application(s) give, thus increasing performance. So if you have four 400mhz Celerons running in your machine, everything would be four times faster than mine... And mine seems fairly fast already... Woow.
And as far as 3D graphics go, there isn't a whole lot, yet. It has OpenGL support, but right now it's all software. Be is working on 3D accelerator support, though. But from the looks of it all, once they implament 3D acceleration, it'll be just as fast as it is in Windows... I just can't wait for it!!
And that's what I have to say about that!
If you're interested, head on over to http://free.be.com/ and check it out. I highly recommend it.
-Jonathan Ward
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