BeOS Max 3 is a collection of third party updates, drivers and new applications on top of BeOS 5 Personal Edition (e.g. enabling AthlonXP and P4 machines to work, install on its own partition etc). Because of the non-standard nature of burning a BFS ISO (discussed here and here) and also because the .cue file (needed to burn the BFS ISO) has a undocumented typo in it, many tried to burn it unsuccessfully (you need to edit the MaxV3.cue file with a text editor and enter the correct .iso filename in it). Now, the French print magazine Login carries the BeOS Max 3.0 in its cover disk. OSNews heard that BeOS Max 3.1 is ready for weeks now but its developer doesn’t have the bandwidth to upload it yet.
Login Carries BeOS Max 3.0 on Cover Disk; 3.1 a Victim of Bandwidth
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Besides very little documentation about burning and that typo I would like to add here that there is very little iformation about installing it. I mean what partitions we need what happens to windows, etc. I also want to write here that you cannot open BeOS .iso files in Wİndows or Linux because of their filesystem. I first thought that the isos got corrupted when my winiso and winrar could not open them up. But I saw that in a forum address I don’t remember unfortunately. So any volunteers over here that are using BeOS and want to write a brief install howto? I’d be very thankfull.
Well I am from Greece too and I have the bandwidth to give to him… If he is interested he can contact me anytime!!
Yes, Vassilis is Greek. I also emailed him asking him to send me the 3.1 zip file in a CD and I could upload it for him. If you live close to him please send him an email too.
3ero oti o Vassilis diavazei OSNews kai etsi pisteuo oti tha epikoinonisei mazi sou.
Eugenia, i seem to remember (vaguely as i don’t have much experience with beos) seeing something you had posted, either here or on some support forum, about beos having some problem with geforce 4 mx cards? were there ever drivers for them released or something worked out… or is that still the case with this max thing?
i have some older cards i can use but that seems to be alot of trouble to go through to try something out :o(
BeOS Max comes with the latest GeForce driver from BeBits. Now, there is also another geforce driver available on bebits I think (which only supports up to GeForce3), so if one doesn’t work, you might want to try the other one which is newer. My Asus Geforce2-MX400 works with the old driver, but newer geforce3+ will need the newer updated driver .
The problem generally comes from the fact that not all hardware IDs are inserted to the driver’s code, so while the driver might be compatible, it won’t recognize a particular card as “compatible”, so the driver won’t load willingly.
Most Geforce4 and GeforceFX cards work now in fact. You just need to install this driver: http://www.bebits.com/app/3636
i think ill give it a try then :o)
*crosses fingers and hopes
Giving the chance to people to install and test this OS is a good thing. I think we have to “feel” an OS to give an opinion on it. Even more important for BeOS.
Login is filling this lack today, thanks.
Well I got it and it works. I was very VERY surprised to find that my USB mouse got detected fine, my GeForce4 Ti4200 works great with it, and I’m on the net with BeOS for the first time (this computer has never been able to get on:))
It’s fantastic… but there is one snag. I haven’t tested it extensively, but NetPositive and Mozilla are both horribly slow scrolling osnews. They load pages in a zip though, but watching each frame load as I scroll is a bit strange. The rest of the system is incredibly snappy though:) Now If I could just find out how to get my sound working.
🙂 Everything else works fine though – so YIppie!
Does BeOS Max contain BeOS Personal Edition? Has the undocumented typo been corrected, or at least documented? The only reference I could see in the burning instructions to a cue file was the instructions for 2.1. If you follow the instructions on the first ‘here’, will that get the CD created properly without any worries? I’ve really wanted to try BeOS for some time, but simply haven’t had hardware that is compatible with it, is this likely to make it work? Is it better to wait for BeOS Max 3.1 because my desire to test BeOS is not that urgent?
Sorry if this information is answered somewhere, but I’ve seen better-designed websites than BeOS Max’s.
am up and running now… thanks Eugenia and Anonymous :o)
*goes to play around abit
>Does BeOS Max contain BeOS Personal Edition?
It *IS* Personal Edition, plus more stuff, drivers and updates.
> Has the undocumented typo been corrected, or at least documented?
No. Vassilis doesn’t have the bandwidth to upload another 300 MB file, his ISP cuts him off every 3 hours.
However, all you need to know to successfully burn the .cue file is in the info and the links on my story! Just open the .cue file with a text editor and correct the filename’s typo and then burn it according to the instructions.
> The only reference I could see in the burning instructions to a cue file was the instructions for 2.1.
The links that I put in this story talk about the 3.0 as well. Just follow the links.
>If you follow the instructions on the first ‘here’, will that get the CD created properly without any worries?
Yes. After you correct the .cue file of course.
> haven’t had hardware that is compatible with it, is this likely to make it work?
More likely than BeOS5PE.
>Is it better to wait for BeOS Max 3.1 because my desire to test BeOS is not that urgent?
Your choice.
“OSNews heard that BeOS Max 3.1 is ready for weeks now but its developer doesn’t have the bandwidth to upload it yet.”
This sounds like a perfect candidate for BitTorrent:
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/
It even works with BeOS:
http://www.bebits.com/app/3386
I’m very happy to hear BeOSmax keep providing updates to his software. I think he said before he’d stop once Zeta is out. I, for one, hope he will not. This BeOSMax thingie is a very good way for new users to try out BeOS. Different from PE the original install, BeOSMax comes with a lot of the software people really want and that is indeed good.
Webbrowsing IS still a huge issue on BeOS. Fyysik and some other people has done great efforts on Mozilla but it simply isn’t where most people would want it. However, I would not let that discourage you, work is being committed very often to Zilla and it progresses very well, if you like BeOS, go for Max and see if you can help out with some of the stuff where help needs to be done.
Late news on TBJ (http://news.beosjournal.org/?id=694) show that there’s a Driver Coding guide which needs translation, after that we might be able to expect more people to write drivers easier and revive HW compatibility to BeOS land.
Those of you who haven’t tried BeOS should really try it =)
Maybe somebody could make the CD available on a cheap (i.e. free except for the media & shipping) CD site like http://www.linuxcd.org/ or http://www.edmunds-enterprises.com/
However, all you need to know to successfully burn the .cue file is in the info and the links on my story! Just open the .cue file with a text editor and correct the filename’s typo and then burn it according to the instructions.
…
The links that I put in this story talk about the 3.0 as well. Just follow the links.
I’ve worked out the problem; the instructions for Linux don’t talk about that stuff, the instructions for Windows do, and I only checked Linux because that’s what I use.
Thanks for your replies nevertheless.
Corrected some mistakes Eugenia pointed out to me on the BeOSMax web site.
Also a BeOS Max V3 CD is available for purchase at [url]http://www.iso4linux.com/index.php?cPath=28_31%5B/url]
I started using it since version 2.1
I had some troubles initially since my mac Toast software could not use .cue files but once I got onto a windows machine at work I could burn it fine. The instructions were adequate enough for me
I also ordered the CDs from linuxcd.org (just in case)
too bad he is having bandwidth probs
mini-me
PS; grafoume kai greeklish?
Why not just make BeOS MAX available on P2P networks so that home users with broadband can help share the bandwidth burden? After a few copies are spread around, it will be easy enough to get and no one will have a huge bandwidth bill.
berlios.de
sf.net
sunsite.dk
etc etc it ain’t that hard, as long as you’re doing it the Law way. Which is the case.
For *nux users, you can delete the .cue and remake a new one (that’s easy; .cue is just simple metadata which can be recreated from a .bin) with ie. bin2iso or bchunk just read the manual it’s fairly easy
Last time I checked, BeOS PE allowed only 512mb to live in, is this still the case with BeOS Max 3.1?
Cycloneous
Now If I could just find out how to get my sound working.
Life is so unfair! My integrated VIA soundcard worked right away (AC’97 driver probably) – but having only a winmodem there is no networking on BeOS for me
. Well there are always external modems and ADSL…
Otherwise, the hardware support is surprisingly in shape, my GeFOrce2 works great and I even tested the left over soundcard (C-Media) and again works right away. It is kind of strange, though – BeOS seems to use some sort of a “PnP Extreme” – various servers and kernel detect PnP devices right away and start using drivers without saying anything. In other words – there is no concept of “adding devices” as there is in MSWindows. Kind of cool actually.
Now if only USB stack worked in general not just here and there…
I assume it allows you to setup a separate partion. You can do this with BeOS PE too. I suggest reading http://www.betips.net you can also read about preparing disk images if you want to create a bigger bfs-image to have BeOS PE in.
Those are some of the ugliest screen shots I’ve ever seen. Is that the default setup! What’s up with the icons scattered all over the screen, and the ‘MAX’ button looks like a six year old drew it.
there is a few beos maxes 3 for download on emule, download it and leave it in your share directory.
I downloaded this a few weeks ago at a friend’s house, actually. (*sniff* broken cd burner and dialup here…)
I used BeOS 5 PE a few years ago, and loved it. This Max version is great, it brings back good memories. The Athlon XP patch enabled it to work on my system, and the GeForce4 MX video card I have workes fine, although you need to manually edit the memory size in the nv settings file. Sound with my Soundblaster Live! works great, and my Linksys NIC was working like a charm as soon as I configured the network (tulip-compatable NICs rock). Mozilla is on the cd for those of you who don’t want to use NetPositive, along with lots of other apps. BeBits (www.bebits.com) is THE site for BeOS software – there are all kinds of things on it. I spent several hours just looking through them all. BeOS even has DVD playback with VLC. The Max cd also contains the developer tools, including the BeOS version of gcc, so if there is an app BeOS doesnt’ have you can port it.
In short, this is great for learning (or re-learning) BeOS. There are ports of many of our favorite applications to BeOS now – with more coming out every day. BeOS is definatly NOT dead, many people are keeping the memory alive by writing new programs and tweaking old ones. There are also a few improvements on BeBits that have come from OpenBeOS you might want to install. I installed the tweaker tracker I found, and while it’s beta software I haven’t had any problems with it. I’m very (im)patiently waiting for OpenBeOS to be done, but this should give all of us our BeOS fix in the meantime.
Last time I checked, BeOS PE allowed only 512mb to live in, is this still the case with BeOS Max 3.1?
Nope. I last tried BeOS MAX around version 2, IIRC, and it is fully capable of installing on its own partition, greate r than 512 megabytes if you wish (and I expect you do!)
Last time I checked it ran fine on my Athlon XP 1800 with Geforce 3 ti450 (Gainward). Modem was an issue (only had a dialup back then and no drivers were available) but networking worked fine with my Realtek 8139 card.
I might resize my (largely redundant these days, to be honest) Win2k partition and slap this on at some point soon. Always liked BeOS, but wished I could actually do something useful/fun with it rather than just running it “out of interest”. With this, Zeta and OpenBeOS such a situation looks like it’s approaching, slowly…
Hmm, if by his surname, Vasilis is from Crete, then I would be very happy to help him with his bandwidth problems.
Hurts. When i still had dialup i had such problems too. I bought a 56k6 external modem (couldn’t find the 14k4 which i got for free and the winmodem sucked) and it was quite expensive at the local computer store which is expensive anyway. 175 gulden (about 80 EUR)for a dynalink external one. But since the store was expensive, and since more users are getting something which is widely considered as “broadband”, i take it you buy these external modems for quite cheap on second hand stores like eBay. One important note: external modems are almost always NOT winmodems!