This beta of BeOS LiveCD(XBEOX) contains the BeOS 5 Personal Edition with some drivers. It is the first BeOS live CD since the 4.5 days in 1999. The LiveCD includes the “Installer” application so users can install the full BeOS PE on its own hard drive partition if needed. To get to the internet you will need a normal floppy drive (no external USB ones). Apparently, the upcoming BeOSMax Edition 3.1 will be a LiveCD too in addition to being a normal installer bootable CD.
BeOS LiveCD(XBEOX) Beta Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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the 4.5 livecd is what started me on BeOS in the first place.
about time one reappeared
Well, basically every BeOS install is a live-cd as far as I can recall.. Just ctrl+alt+del and “restart desktop”….
Still a good idea this, though.
It would be nice to have a Zeta version available, without the installer, then people could give it a try and test if their hardware work.
I thought it was BeOS Live CD for the XBOX!!!
lol
someone correct me if i’m wrong, but i believe this livecd has been available for quite some time on bebits…nevertheless, nice to see some activity going on in the beos world.
Activity ain’t productivity :}
A BeOS “Live”CD? No Pun Intended!
Hey! Don’t be cynical about the Be! That’s not nice! Say that in front of all the 3.2 BeOS users!
(And before I ignite a flame-war: this is just a joke, I’m actually one of those 3.2 BeOS users
)
Count me among them
Just kill the installer and restart the desktop.
Prog.
To get to the internet you will need a normal floppy drive (no external USB ones).
I didn’t floppy drives could give my PC Internet access. Oh wait that is internet access, you must mean local network.
:B Sorry I couldn’t resist.
I had wanted to make a Demo CD based on the R5 for a while. The non-english author did a good job trying to express what was on the CD. It seems to contain a patched system for AMD’s. Sure most things work on a forced live cd based on the installable versions but if this is made well it should perform better for more people.
Good job!
the 4.5 livecd is what started me on BeOS in the first place.
I started with the 4.0 liveCD! Boy was that an impressive experience. I just couldn’t believe that I was playing all those videos simultaneously, wihtout losing a frame, from a CD!
started with the 4.0 liveCD! Boy was that an impressive experience. I just couldn’t believe that I was playing all
those videos simultaneously, wihtout losing a frame, from a CD!
Did you ever try to do that in Windows? I did, it worked well on both Windows and BeOS, just a bit different.
I never got that argument really, it’s just a tired old demo trick.
3Dmix on the other hand was impressive.
yes windows will play multiple movies at the same time, but i found beos to be able to play more without issue than under windows. as with anything YMMV.
Did you ever try to do that in Windows?
Of course I tried that with Windows, even though I didn’t have a Windows liveCD. On the same computer where I booted the BeOS 4.0 liveCD, Windows (98) was doing fine while playing one video, but it was terrible for anything more thant than, and that includes normal interaction with the OS.
But there is no reason for you to get all militant on me: I use Windows (98 and 2000) all the time, as it has the software I need. I do a lot of embedded development, use the various office applications, play games, compose and edit scores etc. With BeOS, I could do only a fraction of these things, so I use it very seldom.
I could only view 640×480 in 8bit (no colour)
A bit annoying, I thought this was a bit more up to date. Well, at least it booted on my Athlon, the last version I tried didn’t.
even on cutting edge hardware, if you have a video playign in windows & load up a heavy app like mozilla, you get stuttering & lost frames. a be machine with a low spec (p3 500) wouldn’t skip a beat
therein lies the difference, and the impression of speed beos gives
When BeOS can’t find a driver that specifically supports your graphics card, it will default to greyscale 640×480.
You can force it to use a different mode (1024×768 in colour) by pressing the spacebar, when it’s showing the boot icons, and going through the menu. I don’t remember the exact text of the boot option.
You can actually use Yellowtab Zeta as live CD. Simply start the installation and when you get to select packages interface press CTRL+ALT+DEL and press restart the desktop. This will starts Zeta as if it were installed on an HD with the default install options.
To be pedantic with regards to ‘restart desktop’, this option only appeared from R5 onwards. Hence no R5 live CD (because you didn’t need one anymore…)
“even on cutting edge hardware, if you have a video playign in windows & load up a heavy app like mozilla, you get stuttering & lost frames. a be machine with a low spec (p3 500) wouldn’t skip a beat
therein lies the difference, and the impression of speed beos gives”
Oh gimme a freaking break. Sorry but that’s simply not true. A 3.0GHz P4 will NOT stutter and drop frames just because you launch Mozilla. My PIII 700 laptop doesn’t stutter if I do that either. Honestly some of you Be fans have a serious problem of seeing Beos through rose tinted glasses. Even at it peak Be OS still left a LOT to be desired. Feel free to relive your glory days but lets try to keep the lying to a minimum.
Of course I tried that with Windows, even though I didn’t have a Windows liveCD. On the same computer where I booted the BeOS 4.0 liveCD, Windows (98) was doing fine while playing one video, but it was terrible for anything more thant than, and that includes normal interaction with the OS.
True. But you have to agree that it’s an odd thing to show at demos and more or less say that it can’t be done in Windows.
When was I militant?
BeOS is my main desktop, and even thought it’s kinda limited app-wise I still prefer it over any other OS. But, I can’t stand when people lie to market things, like that “playing a lot of videos”-thing. Though, on linux I have problems even playing one video 
Even if the lies are to the advantage of “my team” I hate them as much as any lies. Though, Be was a lot more honest than MS was and is, but then again, who’s not?
god knows what crappy low bitrate videos you’re peddling, but this 2.26Ghz p4 system stutters video if any kind of disk access (e.g. loading an app) occurs. i tested it just now to reaffirm matters.
and anything under 1mbit isn’t a video as far as i’m concerned, it’s a slideshow, so i really don’t care if your 20mb 160×120 videos are fine on your system.
This is not a troll, though it may seem like one. I honestly could never try BeOS as it would not work on hardware I owned. That and the fact that to install it requires a windows installation. Also if I remember was limited to 512M of disk space? How can anyone do anything with that? I need some serious enlightenment as I would like to try it out.
That and the fact that to install it requires a windows installation.
No it doesn’t. You can either install it as an image on a windows partition or on its own partition. Though the original PE distribution is a windows install, but it can easily be turned into an install CD. So no, you aren’t limited to 500MB. I have BeOS on a 80GB partition.
There is a RAM limit though, but there’s a patch for it(limits the RAM to 512MB).
Oh gimme a freaking break. Sorry but that’s simply not true. A 3.0GHz P4 will NOT stutter and drop frames just because you launch Mozilla. My PIII 700 laptop doesn’t stutter if I do that either. Honestly some of you Be fans have a serious problem of seeing Beos through rose tinted glasses. Even at it peak Be OS still left a LOT to be desired. Feel free to relive your glory days but lets try to keep the lying to a minimum.
When Be was demonstrating this, they were showing it on a dual 66 MHz 603e machine. The performance of PIII-700’s was years along the road.
Other systems have caught up since then – there’s no use in denying that.
Just kill the installer and restart the desktop.
And with R5 PE you don’t even have to do this step because the installer isn’t autostarted. Oh and btw, if you want to use PE from any other OS than windows, get BeOS4Linux which is simply a tar.gz archive containing a floppy image and the 500MB disk image. It can be found on the bebits PE page (http://bebits.com/app/2680).
that said, can you run beos on colinux? it can’t boot from floppies
god knows what crappy low bitrate videos you’re peddling, but this 2.26Ghz p4 system stutters video if any kind of disk access (e.g. loading an app) occurs. i tested it just now to reaffirm matters.
Something is amiss man. Be it a very poor integrated POS video card to some kind of driver/device conflict. You shouldn’t have a problem like that.
I play video on my lowly P3 1Ghz. box while downloading files from FTP in the background and a few other things happening. No problems at all.
I’m banking on the ‘its your computer’ issue.
ftp in the background is one thing.
starting up a heavyweight app is another.
the degree of caching done by the media player makes all the difference, but the most common player (wmp) is ass in that respect. moz, openoffice, whatever. video playback stutters when a heavyweight app is started whilst high bitrate video is playing.
i’m sure if i defragmented, or stopped using mplayer2 to test & stuck to Media Player Classic then i’d be fine – but the whole bloody POINT of the argument is that it’s a non-issue with BeOS – video playback stays constantly smooth at all times regardless of what you throw at the system.
Say what you will about BeOS (god almighty the SAMBA support is bad), but one thing it cannot be faulted on is video playback.
And I thought it was a BeOS cd for Xbox… oh, well.
as directhex stated, launching larger apps while playing back high quality video can cause it to stutter. i have seen this happen on MANY systems, both amd and intel, on motherboards powered by via, sis, amd, and intel, and with video cards powered by ati, matrox, intel, and nvidia.
yes it can happen and does. it is even more likely to do it if the video file is on the same hard drive as the app you are launching.
are there ways around this? yes, and one way is to set your video player to a higher priority in the task manager. you could also use all scsi on a proper server grade scsi controller. i would be willing to bet that WD raptor sata drives would also help out alot in this respect, but i have never tested to find out.
im not going to lie and say that it always happens, because it doesnt, but on beos it rarely if ever happened. and i have thusfar not had the audio stutter on a movie (on win32) unless i was also doing some EXTREMELY intensive stuff on the system, such as transcoding a video file and even then changing the priority of my video player (i use media player classic) from normal to high took care of it.
can i buy you a beer? o/
Howdy,
I suspect the answer to my first question is no, but I’ll try anyway. Will this run on a BeBox? I just picked one up and I want to know what the latest version of BeOS that will run on it is.
Good day,
I don’t get it. What am I doing wrong. Downlowding the zip-file and extrakting it gives me a 137Mb large file. Fine that sound reasnoble. But when i look inside the imagefile (using magiciso) it givs me this list of files:
-rwx——+ 1 thuswa Domain U 1474560 Dec 2 2001 amd.img
-rwx——+ 1 thuswa Domain U 2048 Mar 31 05:52 boot.catalog
-rwx——+ 1 thuswa Domain U 12288 Jul 13 2001 diskem1x.bin
-rwx——+ 1 thuswa Domain U 1613 Mar 31 05:52 diskemu.cmd
-rwx——+ 1 thuswa Domain U 1474560 Sep 29 2002 intel.img
-rwx——+ 1 thuswa Domain U 2048 Mar 30 23:01 loader.bin
-rwx——+ 1 thuswa Domain U 1837056 Mar 19 09:36 memtest.iso
what’s up? Only 4.6Mb on a 137Mb image. As a said I don’t get it.
Trying t boot with the CD works fine until it tries to find a bootimage on the CD-rom… Then it all ends.