There are a few BeOS 5 PE “spin-offs” available (three or four), created by BeOS enthusiasts who want to see more of BeOS in the future. Usually, these distros are loaded with lots of patches, additional drivers and third party applications. Vassilis “Vasper” Perantzakis sent us some information on his BeOS 5 PE distro, named “BeOS 5 PE Max Edition“, explaining how it got it all started, where it is today and where it is heading to in the future.A little history first:
BeOS 5 PE Max Edition was created when I first tried to make a backup copy of my BeOS system. At the time it was the professional edition (bought and payed for through amazon.com). When I told this to a few
friends on the Internet, they asked if it was possible to do the same with the Personal edition and perhaps put in some packages that are installed at the users request. I didn’t have the PE installed in my
system at the time, so I downloaded beosonline Developers edition. V1 of Max is based on it, with a few (about 120mb) added packages, drivers and patches. To my surprise it was a great success, and my site that had a 300kbps bandwitdh limit – but unlimited monthly limit – was overrun by download requests. I think what made it popular in the start was the addition of the Athlon XP patch that made it possible to install and run on AMDs newest hardware. After that it was all uphill. I anounced work on the second edition and now we come to the present state.
Present:
BeOS 5 PE Max Edition V2 is based on PE and not on beosonline Developers edition. I rebuild it from scratch, downloading and installing all the drivers, patches and freeware/demos myself. That helped me to create a
clean system without any old stuff from the start. I had most packages added as user selectable. However as with any .0 edition there were several problems. Some stuff were broken due to the luck of testing
time. Booting was not always working from the CD, because of my luck of knowledge on el-torito boot images. Those problems are now solved and I am moving towards the release of V2.1 (November 23rd). One major addition will be the ability to select which patched kernel to use after installation (AthlonXP or Pentium4). Also the CD creation process will be documented for BeOS(cdrecord), Windows (Nero and Easy CD Creator) and Linux (cdrecord) with boot images for both AthlonXP and P4.
Future plans:
a) I am thinking of creating a striped down version of Max, with no additional software, but with all the additional drivers and patches. The additional software will be provided on a separate download with
installation scripts.
b) V2.1 will probably include freeware releases for bone (NOT BONE itself) for those that “beta test” it. 🙂
BeOS is a fast, reliable and modern OS. True the company that created it has closed, but BeOS is so good, that the community is giving it more life than ever. Join this community, by helping the open source versions, bying the Zeta edition and software created for BeOS. This is a true alternative for Windows Desktop. Faster, more reliable and easily configured.
Hi,
a fast mirror is available here:
http://bezip.de/app/1328
There are also about 1.300 apps for BeOS listed on BeZip.de!
Ciao,
Sebastian
Are these better than the Pro version?
What about DANO?
ciao
yc
Dano is dano, a completely different kettle of fish. It has new stuff in there and it was destined to be version 6, before Be decided to not do anything with it.
This is a distribution of BeOS 5 PE, it has none of the features of Dano (except maybe some drivers?).
Is there a version that will run with Windows XP? I tried to install PE a while ago, you know, for nostalgia and stuff, but ran, not only into the Pentium4 problems, but also some wierd issues with Windows XP. Does anyone know of a release/patch that addresses some of these problems?
Sounds like what I was looking for, since I couldn’t get BeOS 5 PE to run on my Athlon XP / VIA system – granted, I didn’t really try (patches, etc.). Starting the download now.
No, you are better off trying installing PE on a FAT32, not on an NTFS 5 filesystem. There were reports that BeOS would work on SOME XP systems, but for the vast majority this proved a problem. BeOS was never tested for NTFS 5 you see, it was only tested against EXT2, FAT16/32 and NTFS of NT and Win2k back in 1999/2000.
Just create a 600 MB FAT32 partition and install BeOS 5 PE there. If you got trouble with AthlonXP or Pentium4s, just download one of these 3-4 BeOS distros that include the patches for these CPUs by default.
From YelloTab Site (http://www.yellowtab.com/article.php?id=12)
“A lot of people ask us everyday about Zeta. Questions like: Does it support Athlon XP and Pentium 4, what is with new drivers, what is the base of Zeta, etc…
You may ask your self why we do not answer these questions to you. There is a simple reason, we are in negotiations with diffrent companies which could bring us in bad positions.
So please bear with us, and give us the needed time to work out these parts. To let you know what hardware is supported, we are currently working on the hardware section, where you soon will be able to see all the needed information about this.”
Windows XP, unlike Windows 9x, prevents applications from talking to the hardware and taking over the machine (like a lot of legacy games do). Be OS needs that to boot. Create a boot diskette and you should be fine. Plus, NTFS is not really recommended. Boot BeOS from a Fat32 partition, please 🙂
Just create a 600 MB FAT32 partition and install BeOS 5 PE there.
Good to know, thanks Eugenia.
25%
and boot from that…
Is there a USB support? Firewire? ATI Mobile driver?
My printer/scanner/cd-rw-writer etc. runs over it.
The last time I tried to run the ‘Last Official PE’ CD on my Sony Vaio FXA32 Laptop it didn’t work.
It was so sad.
There is some USB printer support (depends on the model, check the hardware compatibility list and the third party driver support on http://www.BeBits.com/ )
There is no support for any other USB devices, because the USB stack of BeOS 5 sucks (I mean it). It only supports printers, mice, keyboards, very-very few scanners and these, successfully mostly on Intel chipsets (*some* VIA chipset mobos might see problems because the USB implementation there is different).
As for the ATi Mobility driver, I believe there is a driver on BeBits.
So, you might be lucky on quite some hardware, but you might need to download and install manually some drivers from Bebits on the way. BeOS was released in March 2000. Any hardware released later than that date, it will have to be either unsupported, or supported by third parties on Bebits.
I believe you can get quite some support for very recent machines, but you will need to fight for it.
Great, CRC error. Be doesn’t like me.
does beOS support voodoo3 and sblive! value?, is it still need to d/l additional drivers?
always wanna try it but always not sure about drivers
I’m not sure about VooDoo 3 (but i heard it works great) but i know that SBLive! works (i have one).
for sure i don’t wanna loose my i-net connection as well :>
Yes 8029 works fine (as it is NE2000 compatible), as does Voodoo 3 cards. More supported hardware info can be found @ http://hardware.frizbe.net
BeOS ROX!!!!!!!!!!!!
just to make sure everything works for me… since i couldn’t find any of advansys scsi card in http://hardware.frizbe.net
Yes, Voodoo3 works, except for openGL support, in the PE versions (and other none-Dano types.)
I know that the entire Voodoo line works WITH hardware openGL support in Zeta.
As well as ATI, and NVidia.
-Chris Simmons,
Avid BeOS User.
The BeOSJournal.
How do you know this? And what about Matrox cards?
-Jace
Matrox cards work (My G400 worked flawlessly)
I just installed max recently on my new Sager laptop (P4, ATI 7500, Realtek nic, etc) and Beos ran perfectly for all my hardware. Drivers are on bebits…
my only complaint: beos does not have the best networking, I can connect to my ‘typical’ websites without issue in Debian & XP, but BeOS can reach less than half. Can’t ping many sites (including bebits), slighlty defeating.
Perhaps 2.1 Max (with the beta BONE) would be better?
LOL, I’m leaving myself wide open here, but I have to admit, I don’t understand how this is done with the PE edition. I looked at his site, but I can’t seem to find the basic info. Now, I thought PE was, in essence, one big file. Now, the idea that there could be patches applied to it is not causing my few brain cells to not comprehend, but it sounds like you can install applications and so forth. I thought there was a 500+ limit to the “file” and that it was pretty much static. I’m dying to find out how this works and it’s probalby right under my nose, but I can’t see it. Help! 🙂
Is there any warez site to download it? I feel like being dirty… hehehehe. 🙂
Eugenia, you have used it. How was it like. I mean, comparing with other OS that would be released when Dano was supposed to be released?
>Eugenia, you have used it.
Actually I haven’t directly use it. I saw it installed on a friend’s machine and played with it. I only have 2 installation of BeOS 5 on my machines, nothing more.
>How was it like
Dano is a nice upgrade to the OS. But it was NOT finished. It has many bugs and it was not finished quality. Be was working on it on and off, mostly the engineers in their free time, in the last year of Be’s history. Then, they got bought, the thing never got finished.
In some PCs that BeOs used to boot it does not boot anymore, while others that couldn’t boot BeOS 5, it does boot. All in all, it is a beta quality software.
But it had great potential from what I briefly saw.
BeOS r4.5 supports Voodoo3, so it goes to stand that R5 does too.
I know this because we bought R4.5 back in the day, and the video card we had wasn’t supported, so we went out and bought a Voodoo3.
You no understand huh. Well, me explain you.
PE contained an installer. You could install it wherever you wanted and expand it to suit you very own needs.
Just imagine the rest.
There is a way to use the iso as a beos install just like the PE was. I think there is a tip also at betips about using it that way. I think it is something like just make a subdirectory /beos and put the iso there (renamed image.be).
I have never tried it myself but have read it more than a few times.
A lot of people have a spare partition that they wish to try it on. If you don’t then search the forums for the above method. I am sure it has been also posted on Osnews.com
Dano is a great peek at what could have been. Real nice work seemed to be going on to the end. I really am impressed with all the work Be did.
I heard R5 could be booted off NTFS5 (WinXP) with indexing disabled… didn’t try it though.
About CPU problems…
Try either of those bootfloppy images:
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/AthlonXP_boot_floppy.zip
this one should enable you to boot any R5 CD and partition
so you can install them and patch, on AthlonXP.
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/kpatch_p4-athlon_test.zip
This one is meant to enable AthlonXP and P4 to boot R5 CDs and partitions, and automatically patch the partition after you click “Ok” to the alert.
Please report any success/failure with this one, as I’m still not sure it works.
🙂
LOL, I do understand now – and have gone over and read more. I never used PE because I have a computer than runs Pro 5.03. It was just my understanding that, with PE, you could not expand it beyond its 500+ MB limit, but I see now there are other things you can do with it. Thanks!
BeOS PE and Pro both support Netgear cards natively, however I just installed Max and it does not support netgear NICs, for whatever reason someone removed netgear network card support.
Also I would highly support the plan to release a version of BeOS Max that leaves BeOS untouched in every way except to add the new drivers and Athlon/P4 support.
Voodoo3s rock in beos. Mine works great. Too bad BeOS doesn’t support GeForce 4s…
BeOS is what X-based desktop should be, but isn’t yet even close. BeOS is elegant, clean, efficient, and fast. Commercially they might have been failures, but from a usability and technology standpoint, they were great sucesses. It’s sad to see it in a state of antiquity.
There is no support for any other USB devices, because the USB stack of BeOS 5 sucks (I mean it). It only supports
printers, mice, keyboards,
I have an old Acer Aspire K62 333 w/USB kb&mouse and have NEVER been able to make The USB kb or mouse work under BeOS(although this stuff has always worked fine under Linux,QNX,and what have you)Too bad ’cause everything else works fine.My theory on this is because Acer,in their infinite wisdom,made it impossible to disable Plug and Pray in the BIOS.I have a serial mouse hooked up and mainly use the BeOS partition on this machine as a Jukebox(which it does much better than the win98 part.)but if anyone knows how to get that USB keyboard woking on this machine I’m all ears!!! BeOS rocks!!!
Is there a way of burning the CD with another program than Nero? I tried to use Easy CD Creator, but the CD wouldn’t even boot.
Does anyone know af a working driver for Via Rhine based ethernet cards? I found one after googling around for a while, but I couldn’t accomplish more than crashing BeOS (kernel debugging land). There’s none at BeBits.
new drivers, but my usb optical mouse still won’t work. i’d think it would be the first thing that they’d add to the “max” edition. the ps/2 adapter makes it skip all over, and is a complete pain.
I know Matrox cards work in general. They’re my favourite and I use them in all my machines, BeOS or not.
My question was in regards to hardware 3D acceleration. There is ZERO hardware 3D in BeOS right now and I do not believe (until I see it) that Zeta will change that. If they do change that, I’d like to know if there’s 3D support for Matrox cards.
>I have an old Acer Aspire K62 333 w/USB kb&mouse and have NEVER been able to make The USB kb or mouse work under BeOS
BeOS supports well the Intel BX and a bit later Intel chipsets regarding USB (and that only for mice,keyboards, some printers and very few scanners), but it has problems with the USB implementation of any other chipset (VIA, SiS etc). Some VIA mobos work, but for the most part, they don’t.
I use 2 dif Via mobos with Athlons TBs, never had a problem with USB KB, mouse even logitech optical mouse. Now I can’t get the wireless optical mouse to work with BeOS or W2K. If anything W2K is still a pain in the neck for PS2 & USB during the initial install. I would get a USB zip drive to replace the SCSI zip but I doubt that would work. Can only dream about other USB 2/FW devices.
I’d like to know what the current state of Matrox drivers for twinhead display, only need basic hi rez 2d. Also wonder if the resolution list couldn’t be hacked to support upto 2k pixels. Funny thing is I can Basilisk my old Mac roms on Windows so that emulated Mac can fill the highest 2k rez, yet the HW Mac was stuck at 640 or 1k. This leads me to hope that all the OBOSs will fair better under VMware or VPC.
To get more resolution on BeOS above 1600×1200, go download ProposeMode from BeBits.
Inspite it is unfinished, as Eugenia said, it was used internally at Be Inc (AFAIK) as BeIA development platform since 2000.
And yes, it is available here and there, for those who wish to test it.
Inspite i saw different “Dano” versions, i don’t use it myself, as i’m developer and keeping backward compatibility if you build apps under Dano is a pain.
Under dano (BeOS unofficial release), usb ZIP runs as OHCI USB controllers.
This should be the same with Zeta and/or OBOS …
Tried ProposeNode a while back, very dangerous & unstable. Did anyone ever get that to work well, like could the info from messing around be added to the Screen prefs?
I am just now playing with VPC trial version. It defaults to safe mode, BeOS installed sort of okay (1.4hrs 1GHz TB), but still stuck in 640 grey scale, keeps auto changing monitor. Will waste more time on it with Vesa accepted etc but it is looking to be real slow, maybe 4x slower than native.
All this tells me is that BeOS was so close but so far, just a bit more effort in a few places.
>Under dano (BeOS unofficial release), usb ZIP runs as OHCI USB controllers.
Yes, because *Dano’s USB stack* was re-written from scratch. It is not the same as in R5, it has _many_ bug fixes, it works with more devices and it is way faster.
You can do it by installing the Windows 2K or Windows XP NTLDR.
Then use bootpart (http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm)and add BeOS (or other OS) in the NTLDR menu.
This is clean, realiable (ms made it !) and works even if you have for example BeOS on a other drive. Forget lilo (did crash my MBR once) and all that shit. They are poor compared to NTLDR.
The author suggest a FAT16/32 as primary partition, but it is optional. NTFS will do.
If it’s NE2000 compatible, yes. I own/use a noname PCI card with this chipset, and it works for me.
I think it’s great that there are all sorts of customized distros coming out for BeOS. However, I’m a bit worried because Palm (or Palmsource) has never made any sort of statement regarding the individuals who repackage and distribute the software on which they hold the copyrights.
I personally think that Palm just doesn’t care. The only situtation in which they would care is if someone makes money off of a BeOS distro. If Palm went after free BeOS distros, not only would it waste their time and money, it would be a PR mistake (it wasn’t Palm’s intention to kill the OS, they just have no interest in continuing it – why get the public image of actively trying to kill it ion spite?). So, instead, they just act like they see and hear nothing. Again, that’s just MY opinion.
uhmm just manage to install BeOS PE 5 MAX2, my sound card is sblive! value, it works but i can’t manage to activate my rear speaker…… also i can’t get any irc clients i found to work on BeOS
anyone know how to activate rear speaker with sblive on beOS?
You can’t. the BeOS driver of the SBLive only supports the two normal speakers.