This years first festival of BeOSing was held again at the Dusseldorf Youth Hostel April 17-18th April 2004. As ever it started on the Friday night and these days you can also stay the Sunday night, I missed number 11 (which I am told was the biggest ever) but I made it this time for my 8th BeGeistert. Article includes 6 pages of pictures.
The timing was especially apt because I had to recently give up my iBook (wasn’t actually mine) so I’d just gone back to my PC running BeOS (The dodgy Dano and a perfectly legal BONE 7a).
I nearly didn’t go this time after I checked the cost of the train fare but luckily myself and Francois Revol managed to get a lift from Jerome Duval who was driving. Francois came complete with a full PC in a handy (not) carry case. These days almost everyone uses lap tops, in the earlier BeGeisterts I went to (4 years ago!) it was mostly desktop PCs.
As per usual I arrived late after everyone had already gone for food but we managed to bump into most of them on their way back while we went. I think it was the first time I’ve been in a German restaurant without someone who speaks German so that proved to be an interesting experience.
After that it was back to the hostel to catch up with everyone and drink plenty of Alt while doing so. Alt is an interesting beer and a pretty amazing “digestive aid” but I’ll not go into details of that aspect…
As usual everyone sits around to all sorts of strange hours on Friday night catching up on the news and general goings on. I haven’t really been following the goings on in the BeOS world for some time now so there was a lot to catch up on – and boy did I catch up!
The BeOS world has had some problems of late and I heard various bits about this, it seems there is a lot of misinformation and rumours going around so, given what I’ve learned, before I go into the main review I’ll comment on this.
BeOS Max
Some seem to think this enhanced version of BeOS PE (Personal Edition) is illegal which is a highly questionable view. At most it may be in breech of the PE license but since that license is with Be inc – a non-existent company – it’s difficult to do anything about it. PalmSource may be able to do something but since it’s not interfering with their business I doubt PalmSource could justify the cost of doing anything about it. If it was being sold (it’s a free download) and thus potential source of revenue they might do something but even then they wouldn’t do anything until it made some real money.
In any event all the author needs to do is split the distro in two, installing BeOS PE first then in a separate step installing the changes. I’m not a lawyer but this should clear up any potential license problems.
Zeta
I have been aware of the Zeta project for some time but this time has been something of a revelation. For some time there has been an apparent split forming in the BeOS community with some strongly against Zeta. This seems to be based on rumours such as the following:
Even my own opinion of Zeta was that it was a BeOS Dano with extras and like many I assumed they would eventually base the system around OpenBeOS. However the rumours have grown to such an extent that some people have turned against it with quite some real zealotry, when bebits recently added outside moderators to remove broken or old links some took it upon themselves to remove some of the Zeta compatible software (Bebits has since suspended the outside moderation program).
I do not understand what people have against YellowTab, they are after all trying to further the platform. Do the detractors seriously think attacking YellowTab is going to do any good? I can only assume the people perpetrating such actions are actively trying to ensure BeOS (and variants) remain dead. It wont have any good effect: When the Amiga community started diverging a lot of (still ongoing) arguments broke out and it drove many users away from that scene.
As I said this time was something of a revelation, Zeta is not what people think. I can say with absolute certainty that zero of the above rumours are true. They have quite simply no basis in reality whatsoever. They are either false assumptions, malicious gossip or both. I think one might have been true at one point but I’m not sure about that and I know it’s not true now.
I have no reason to believe anything of Zeta is illegal or that they are missing anything. In fact I have several very good reasons to believe the complete opposite. I can say this because of things I seen, things I heard and conversations I had. The YellowTab people are notably evasive when you ask direct questions but there are always ways and means of finding things out if you really want to.
It may sound like I was doing some form of investigative journalism but I’m neither an investigator or a journalist, I was just trying to find out more for myself and in doing so heard a lot of stuff which all pointed irrevocably to the same conclusion.
YellowTab will most likely neither confirm nor deny my comments here but there is a good reason for this. You can pretty much bet there’s an NDA been signed somewhere. Business people understand this but many consumers don’t get it, having singed a few NDAs myself I fully understand their predicament they must be in.
I asked about Zeta making use of OpenBeOS code in the future but I was quite
surprised that YellowTab don’t intend to make much use of it. Much of the community assumes Zeta would switch over to OpenBeOS based code at some point so again this was something of a revelation. This is another case of a rumour being completely wrong, YellowTab are working on what is going to effectively be BeOS R6, with OpenBeOS working on a replacement for R5 using OpenBeOS would be going backwards.
I admit I’m being evasive in reporting exactly what I’ve heard but this is a dead giveaway. If YellowTab didn’t have code or were missing anything of significance they would by necessity have to switch to the OpenBeOS source base, in fact they would probably work on it themselves to speed it’s development. However since they are not doing this and have no intention of using significant parts they obviously don’t have those problems.
I for one expect Zeta R1.0 will be nothing less than what I would have expected from BeOS R6. I also expect it (or subsequent versions) will be able to handle larger memory sizes – without hacks – and indeed solve the other internal issues present in BeOS.
Perhaps some of those who don’t like YellowTab should be looking at the system rather than making up rumours, they’re in for a surprise. If they don’t like what YellowTab are doing then they can try developing a commercial OS themselves, it’s a very difficult and very expensive business. At the same time I also think YellowTab need to work on their PR if they are to get the existing community behind them (they need developers). They are allowing a lot of patently false rumours to circulate but by not addressing them they are at least complicit in the negativity which has developed. That said they are apparently doing quite well in business circles and outside the BeOS community.
Anyway, enough of my rant comment, back to BeGeistert…
Saturday
On Saturday we were awoken by the Youth Hostel blasting us with music at 8:00 AM. They didn’t do that last time I was there, and a little annoying after going to bed only 4 hours previously. That said it was useful as it woke me up enough to get up in time for breakfast.
Saturday was a beautiful day with the a good hot sun shining. Of course the sun chooses a day when everyone was inside to shine. There were several presentations throughout the day including Squeezer, Zeta, WonderBrush and generating PDFs in Python.
Squeezer
This is a very clever app for handling archives (Zip etc) written by a Italian guy called Massimiliano Origgi.
You may think archiving is about Zipping and unzipping files but Massimiliano has taken it to a whole new level with Squeezer which allows you to arbitrarily add/remove individual or groups of files to/from archives.
It also allows filtering so you could if you wished extract only files of a certain type.
The example given was that of HTML files, If you only wanted the documentation you could set a filter and only the html files would be extracted. Of course you can also do the reverse so if you had packed a software product and had a last minute documentation update you could add it without re-archiving everything.
Massimiliano also seems to be working on 10 other projects simultaneously (including OpenBeOS) and somehow getting them all done:
NewsSniffer reads and displays RSS feeds on your desktop so you don’t have to keep checking web pages for the latest news.
MultiClip gives you multiple clipboards accessible via the function keys, this lead to quite a discussion on how the contents of each clipboard should be displayed.
NetMonitor is a small tool for monitoring your network activity like the one in Windows for monitoring modem traffic.
A new FTP client is also in development which will allow you to use the normal window interface to upload and download files.
I think he’s working on other stuff as well, quite how he manages it all I don’t know!
Zeta
Bernd Korz gave us a demo of some of the recent changes in Zeta,
There is a lot of work going into Zeta that goes well beyond fancy looking windows. The USB stack is being improved to access a wider range of devices than the current stack which is apparently quite limited, this is proving to be a challenge as the number of devices which actually implement the USB spec properly is quite low.
The preferences system is being completely revamped with preferences displayed in a single window and many new ones being added. There is a lot of work going on under the hood so to speak and the basic applications supplied are also being enhanced or in some cases replaced with better tools – Squeezer being one example.
YellowTab also seem to be answering their critics, the so called “Linux-isation” comments seem to have been listened to and some things are being simplified, i.e. some options have been removed from the installer and even the number of border options have been lowered.
The talk was interrupted by lunch so I missed the second part. There was also a talk on the encryption system being put into Zeta on Sunday but it was in German so I didn’t attend.
Wonderbrush.
Stephan Assmus showed us the advancements he made in the development of WonderBrush. It was very basic last time I seen it a year ago and has clearly came on a long way since then. It did some pretty smart stuff then but now it’s even smarter with tricks like the clone tool being added. This allows you to clone an action so if you drew a red circle it would clone it and you can move it elsewhere. If you then decided you’d prefer it blue you can then of course colour it blue, the power is when you have a selection of clones on screen and you want them all blue – you just colour the parent and all the others will copy the behaviour and also change to blue.
This doesn’t just apply to primitives, you can also do this with tools, so you can clone a blur effect. What’s more since everything is done as layers you can pick up the blur/s and move them around independent of the original image.
Stephan has also added a text tool complete with anti-aliasing, it not complete yet but you can do a lot of tricks with it as well.
Stephan also showed us a clever scaling algorithm which he’d implemented in eXposer. It outputs animations and you may wish to scale them when generating a final film. However normal image scaling algorithms tend to blur everything slightly thus reducing the quality. In order to address this Stephan added a scaling algorithm which looks for edges in the image and makes sure they are not blurred across pixel boundaries. The results of this were plain to see with the new algorithm generating much better images.
PDFs in Python
Charlie Clark gave another talk on Python, this time about how he used Python to generate PDFs which were used to produce the badges everyone wears. These were previously done in Gobe but because the main logo was an image they never came out very well due to Gobe’s insistence on printing everything at 72dpi (you should print images at 300dpi or better).
This time Charlie generated the badges in PDF using a short script and some PDF generation libraries. PDF is a compiled version of Postscript which is a language for describing pages. Generating Postscript can be a very complex operation due to the number of calculations you have to do but the libraries simplify this process and then creates the PDF.
The end result was a page of code and name badges which look a lot better, though of course nobody noticed this until it was pointed out!
On Saturday night we did a copy of last year’s visit to Lupo’s Pizza restaurant in the centre of Dusseldorf. The atmosphere was very good and as last year the pizza was made quickly and was absolutely delicious. At the end we all had a small cake to celebrate Eddy’s 18th birthday. Afterwards we were treated to a glass of Killepitsch by Eddy and Charlie, quite amusing seeing everyone’s reaction after taking a sip – it’s potent stuff!
Sunday
Blasted by Music again on Sunday morning though this time I managed 5 hours sleep.
More Python
I didn’t attend the talk on encryption in Zeta but myself and Giuseppe Gargaro managed to get an introduction to Python from Charlie.
I’ve seen bits of Python before and I very much like the concept of a powerful but easy to use language but never really been introduced to it. Many of the concepts are very similar to Perl which I’ve used quite a bit but the syntax is completely different and much easier to understand. Like Perl, Python is generally considered as a scripting language and can do much of the same stuff in much the same way but can and is used for bigger projects as well. I think one of the biggest differences between Python and Perl is the readability, Perl is a nice language to use but it’s very easy to make code completely unreadable, I know one person who once described it as a write-only language! Python on the other hand is designed to be readable by people who don’t even know the language and this is very good for readability.
OpenBeOS Media Kit.
Marcus Overhagen gave us an update of the Media kit he’s been working on.
Things have obviously moved along here as we were shown movies being played with different codecs including MPEG 4 and Ogg. Movies can also be played simultaneously.
One thing I was not aware of was the addition of support for 6 channel sound schemes so you’ll be able to play DVDs complete with 5.1 surround sound.
There’s lot of work gone and going into the Media Kit and Marcus is doing excellent work. OpenBeOS is moving along, it’s no easy or short progress but they have some very good developers working on it.
Marcus has however had his own share of controversy recently when he decided to charge for a gigabit ethernet driver he’s recently developed. Some have asked why it was not free but Marcus’s reply is that it took him around 40 hours work to develop the driver and wanted to earn something back for it, he’s not exactly going to sell truck loads of licenses so it’s not as if he’s going to get rich of this.
People seem to be under the impression that drivers are free, this may be the case for open source stuff but the majority of drivers have been developed by paid developers, you pay for this as part of the hardware or OS cost so you don’t generally see this. Marcus is perfectly entitled to charge for a driver, if people don’t want to pay for his hard work perhaps they should try working for free and see how they like it.
Digital Annoyances
As ever I had annoyed everyone by taking pictures of them but this time I had a better camera so I was a better quality annoyance at 6 times the resolution. Everyone seemed to have a digital camera this time so it’d be pretty hard to avoid having your picture taken.
Of course with film cameras when you run out of film you just reload, no worries about needing to download your pictures or recharge your batteries. My CF card was nearly full on Saturday night but not having a computer with me I had to get the pictures off it. I knew Macs could recognised my camera without any special drivers so Peter and Nadia Stegemann allowed me to use their iBook to download the images. Then I had to find a way of keeping the images but their iBook didn’t have a CD-Burner so I transferred the pictures to Marcus’ PC, he didn’t have a burner either but he did have a FTP server so I could then move the pictures to anywhere else. Eventually I found Francois had a burner so I got the pictures transferred again and finally burned to CD.
Why am I telling you all this? Because on Sunday afternoon I got talking to Jan-Rixt Van Hoye who had written a plug-in for Exposure (an image downloading program) which happens to speak PTP. PTP is a recent protocol for communicating with digital cameras and it turns out my camera speaks it…. aaaarrrrrrrrrrgggggg!!!
Another developer I got speaking to is Oliver Tappe who wrote the Beam (BEware Another Mailer) mail client. Having recently switched back to BeOS I needed a new client as BeMail can no longer log onto my mail server. Beam works fine in this regard and also handles multiple mail accounts which BeMail couldn’t. I was wonder why it couldn’t send Word attachments and he suggested that BeOS had not correctly identified the .doc and gave it the wrong mime type, when I got home I tried changing the mime type and low and behold it works fine.
Closing
Sunday afternoon most people started to pack up and go home, in the evening those remaining moved to a smaller room and stayed there for a while. Some of us went for a meal at a nearby restaurant which, like Saturdays meal was plentiful and absolutely delicious. Eventually most of the rest left for home leaving only those who were remaining for Sunday night (our car and the YellowTab guys). As usual we sat up most of the night chatting though I was a lot more talkative than usual (I can be after a few drinks), I think one of us remaining had a few too many drinks though – you know who you are 🙂
Eventually even us stragglers went home the next day, I slept most of the way back and Jerome managed to deliver me almost to my door. Once I was back I went back to sleep, then I got up had something to eat and went back to bed again, think I tired or something? Thankfully though my dinner didn’t try and kill me this time.
All in all BeGeistert was a fun and informative event, as indeed it always is. It is also becoming increasingly international with I think 7 nationalities present this time including groups from Italy and France.
By physically getting people together you find they get on and discuss things much more rationally than on-line where the lack of emotional content means comments are very often taken differently from the way they are intended. Many developers attend BeGeistert, these are the real backbone of the community and are not the people spreading rumours. You have people from YellowTab, OpenBeOS and users and developers of various systems all in one room and it’s a very productive and fun environment.
The Pictures (6 pages)
As mentioned I took quite a few pictures at the event, I actually took around 200 but don’t worry, I’ve since selected the best, sorted, cropped and generally tweaked them. I even tried to name people this time (Thanks to Marcus Overhagen for putting names on his site!) – Enjoy!
There are quite a few other sets of pictures and reviews out already and some of these proved rather useful for remembering the details of talks etc – Thanks!
Other Reviews:
French
English
German
Turkish (with Pictures)
Itialian (with Pictures)
Jerome Duval (pictures)
Other Pictures:
Marcus Overhagen
Begasus
Don’t know who took these
By Nicholas Blachford
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
BeGeistert 012 videos (226MB)
http://www.kaldience.com/misc/zeta/BG_Unleashed.avi
http://www.micronuke.net/BG_Unleashed.aviw
notice than it’s mostly in german
I have no reason to believe anything of Zeta is illegal or that they are missing anything. In fact I have several very good reasons to believe the complete opposite.
Although I know that you are trying to put an end to the discussion you are doing the opposite. Your comment is nothing but a rumour and you obviously have no proof. So please don’t put more wood into the fire.
I agree that the childish acting by some people is unacceptable. I have bashed YT myself a lot, but it’s always on a not so serious level. Though I am a bit bitter by the fact that got the SVG-tracker when it was agreed that the community would be able to buy it if we had the cash(and we had). I know it’s not YTs fault (afaik).
I think that the biggest problem with YT is that they have such lousy PR. They need to be more direct, open and honest. Few people will trust a company acting the way they do now.
Squeezer. This is a very clever app for handling archives (Zip etc) written by a Italian guy called Massimiliano Origgi.
To be honest, I haven’t tried the app for a few months. However, the last time I tried it it still had the same issues to DND files and handleling large zipfiles. It seems like the basic funtionality should be focused on instead of adding cool features. Other than that, It’s a nice app.
OpenBeOS Media Kit. Marcus Overhagen gave us an update of the Media kit he’s been working on. Things have obviously moved along
here as we were shown movies being played with different codecs including MPEG 4 and Ogg.
I am so excited about this
It’s the part of OBOS that I care most about. It’s really nice to hear that it keeps moving. Thanks a lot for your hard work Marcus!
Having recently switched back to BeOS I needed a new client as BeMail can no longer log onto my mail server.
Did you try MDR2?
Seems like a nice BeGeistert, I wish I could have been there. Some of those pictures made me smile.
Bioinformatics, Distributed and Parallel Computing, Grid and Cluster Nodes, WebServices, Nanotechnologies, I.A., CAD, Non Linear Video Editing, …
Grow up boys… the ex- Be engineers are laughing and Gobe is preparing a serious lawsuit.
…he would have taken more pictures of Karoline Becker
She’s gorgeous.
Why won’t they just honestly address the source/legal issue already? Who would even consider buying a product from a company that displays such evasive and dishonest behaviour? What is Palm’s response to all of this? Someone please get to the bottom of this and put these issues to rest finally.
My only hope for beos is better hardware support. I keep trying it and though my hardware isn’t the greatest I can’t figure out complete support. I even upgraded my sound card for three reasons. I thought soundblaster would be supported, Linux would like the sound blaster card anyway, it’s cheap.
I Loved how Beos tied everything together nice a neat. email, Instant Messages, web all together in one easy to use system. No wonder why MS crushed it and beat it using monopoly money.
Give me better hardware support and I am there
Why is it that everyone seems to feel the need to package settings into one giant monolithic app? MacOS is doing it, KDE and Gnome are doing it. Does this have any advantages? I for one prefer lots of tiny apps that start in a split second, over one giant one that takes seconds to load. Also, if all settings are in one application, I have to first start that program and then select which setting I want to change. With tiny applications I immetiately get to the options I want to edit. Big bloated “configuration centers” waste valuable time, IMHO.
First big thanks to Nicholas, who wrote a informational review with really nice pros in hitting some feature details of developped Apps on BeOS/Zeta, which shows th difference on this platform…
There is an app x like on Windows or whatsoever, but it gots the nifty features that makes it unique 😉
The Development of Zeta in deed is going slow but what we saw on BG12 is that the existing version of YellowTAB is in deed much further developped than the sold version (RC2).
YT is on a turnpoint in the development stage of ZetaOS.
Sure, they got really neat developers and great ideas – the ZintrO which is shown is really impressive and there are some further surprises on the road (sorry folks for spreading gossip again).
But if they want to make the R1 a true Post BeOS R6 the right way, they need an investor which inject some moderate mount of financial aid to get along with the development in short terms.
The Development is going on; even Be’s R5 was nearly outdatend when it became moderately known. A 10 – 15 mad developer gang is really impressive, but they have to speed up their fixes, implementations, improve Professionality such hardly needed branches like PR and Q&A.
Some really important develpments are still unsolved although worked on at Zeta for example like CUPS, Java2, Mono or HW OpenGL.
Of course Zeta Users needn’t look for Grid Computing like mentioned above which is just one more silly blurb.
But Video Editing or Server funtionalities for Media Services are key solutions and vital for ZetaOS as well as everyday useability (in which is Zeta quite well in once you started fiddling).
That brings me to the final point to hint:
without Companies signing in for development in Software or Drivers for Hardware or Support for Internet Technology, yT would be on the same position like Be was in 1998: developping a great OS but no industrial support.
Of course I don’t believe yT will do the same bad decision series like Be did after the BeOS train just got started rolling with companies like Maxon, Steinberg or Bias (in just telling the Companies “Folks, PC’s are dead – Smart Devices are the future, BeOS is out BeIA is in, thanks for your help & support! P.S. for the distributors: we bring out a free beer version within the next week!”)
So the solution is simple:
Want a supported driver for BeOS/ ZetaOS of your hardware?
Nag the companies who sell their Products to you!
Want a Software Suite ported for BeOS/ ZetaOS?
Nag the Software Company!
Regards
“and Gobe is preparing a serious lawsuit.”
That makes me laugh. Please consider getting information from yT’s LLC before bloaking around.
The Settlement is completely reverse.
Howdy,
The author mentioned that he had gone back to a laptop running BeOS. I am thinking that a laptop capable of running BeOS fairly well ought to be reasonable by now. Are there any laptop users of BeOS here who can comment? I am thinking of something like a ThinkPad 560Z. That is a 300 MHz P2 with 128 meg of ram and they go for about $150. I might need something else because I need a laptop with a supported video chip, but I would get something cheap like that.
Good day,
I’m glad to see that some people still have the spirit of Be, but it’s kind of a shame that most of the pictures are of guys staring at their laptops . . . I went to Linux Fest Northwest, and even though it was the same size, there was a lot more activity. The only guys who sat around like that were the ones at the Debian booth and the BSD advocacy booth.
“the BSD advocacy booth.”
There was a BSD advocacy booth, and the people were just sitting there staring at their computer screens?? I take it they weren’t doing much advocating…
Palmsource is such a deadbeat company. They buy BeOS and kill it. I read titbits of them using BeOS codes in PalmOS 6, C’mmon it does not take for you to be genius to figure out that a PC OS would be a mistake for a Pocket Device. Its been more than 5 years, if BeOS technologies may have been used for POS POS wouldn’t be a lame operating system as it is now. Why won’t Palm just release BEOS as a Opensource project like StarOffice. Not only will BEOS remain alive as a PC OS but I guess Palm could be benifitted too. I mean they can open BEOS source Code in Variety of Formats. Its the way to go these days. Real – Helix, Sun – Star Office, Apple – Darwin, Netscape – Mozilla, and maybe Solaris Soon.
What has been more than 5 years? It wasn’t that long ago that Palm bought the IP that’s what you are trying to say.
I don’t really see how Palm would benefit from opensourcing BeOS unless they want to make a distro themselves.
There was a BSD advocacy booth, and the people were just sitting there staring at their computer screens?? I take it they weren’t doing much advocating…
“BSD is much more secure to stare at”
Just this one thing: if yellowtab REALLY has all the sources and the right to modify them, then it’s a shame that Bernd owns these, not Phipps. If that’s true, OpenBeOS team could’ve done SO MUCH MORE with it by now than Zeta did.
Whereabout at Bebits (or somewhere else) would I go to find out about support for external modems? I have a dreaded Winmodem in my box and am not sure I want to try out the experimental configuration tool.
http://www.blachford.info/computer/begeistert012/S_IMG_3471.jpg
ShareReactor? Lol.
“There was a BSD advocacy booth, and the people were just sitting there staring at their computer screens?? I take it they weren’t doing much advocating…”
Nono, it isn’t like Krishna or Jehova. You go to them, tell them that you want to know what it is all about. Then they try to convince you how superiour their OS and their license is. Thanks for your time. Smiling, you walk away… knowing better, laughing inside… ;^)
Just this one thing: if yellowtab REALLY has all the sources and the right to modify them, then it’s a shame that Bernd owns these, not Phipps. If that’s true, OpenBeOS team could’ve done SO MUCH MORE with it by now than Zeta did.
Not true. It is all about perspective. The OpenBeos team I believe have come along way simply because people want a fully free implementation of the BeOS.
Whereas Zeta currently is not trying to improve the system too much yet. You need good software engineers for that. I think there strategy is to give the OS some really good default applications that will be able to compete with other platforms default applications.
Also Zeta is including a USB stack, and I really don’t know what else, because I am not following BeOS that closely? Does OpenBeOS have a USB stack? If they haven’t it is all about perspective again. I could post something like USB 1.x has been a standard for a long time now, the Zeta team has done SO MUCH MORE with it by now than OpenBeOS did.
I’m not the right person to ask since I’ve never used a modem with BeOS (I got broadband in 96). But why are you talking about an external modem when you say that you have a winmodem?
Most winmodems aren’t worth the trouble in other OSs. You could try to find a used external modem, it would probably be a lot easier.
Your comment is nothing but a rumour and you obviously have no proof. So please don’t put more wood into the fire.
Why won’t they just honestly address the source/legal issue already? Who would even consider buying a product from a company that displays such evasive and dishonest behaviour?
Please read caefully what I wrote about their comments on OpenBeOS (which were from Bernd) and especially about NDA’s.
Also please note I wrote I can say with absolute certainty. I would not say such a thing unless I meant it.
Did you try MDR2?
No, but Beam seems to work fine.
The author mentioned that he had gone back to a laptop running BeOS.
A big noisy PC actually…
kind of a shame that most of the pictures are of guys staring at their laptops…
I picked the pictures on the basis of being photogenic!
See the links to other peoples pictures, there was plenty of activity!
C’mmon it does not take for you to be genius to figure out that a PC OS would be a mistake for a Pocket Device.
Pocket devices are at most only 5 years behind in terms of CPU power and an OS known for it’s low resource usage make a good choice, that said IIRC only parts were used.
Why won’t Palm just release BEOS as a Opensource project
Due to licensed parts it would take months to prepare and give them no return whatsoever.
Like most companies however I expect they might change their mind if you were willing to wave a large wad of cash in front of them.
“I can say with absolute certainty that zero of the above rumours are true. They have quite simply no basis in reality whatsoever. They are either false assumptions, malicious gossip or both. I think one might have been true at one point but I’m not sure about that and I know it’s not true now.”
And your certainty is based on….?
“YellowTab will most likely neither confirm nor deny my comments here but there is a good reason for this. You can pretty much bet there’s an NDA been signed somewhere. Business people understand this but many consumers don’t get it, having singed a few NDAs myself I fully understand their predicament they must be in.”
You know what would be a good way to settle all the rumors (at least in the short term)? Simply say “Sorry, we are under and NDA, and can’t reveal any details at the moment.” That is, if an NDA is what is causing their silence.
Thanks for the article, it was really fun to read. And especially the 6 pages of pictures with the comments were very interessting.
Please read caefully what I wrote about their comments on OpenBeOS (which were from Bernd) and especially about NDA’s.
The same kind of things were said back in the Be days. People with “inside information” who said they knew a lot of things which turned out to be far from the truth.
With all respect, but there’s simply no reason that we should believe you since you won’t show us any evidence. I’ve heard Bernd answering the question with three different answers so I frankly don’t know what to believe. One thing I do know is that I don’t trust that man.
>>You know what would be a good way to settle all the rumors (at least in the short term)? Simply say “Sorry, we are under and NDA, and can’t reveal any details at the moment.” That is, if an NDA is what is causing their silence.<<
Well said. Plenty of us “consumers” understand perfectly well about NDA’s.
Has there been any public response from Palm on the issue?
Considering Zeta and OpenBeOS look like being out in the same time frame, I think Zeta had better have some kick arse apps and improvements for me to be enticed over to it. If not I will pick OpenBeOS. Pretty pathetic communication from the YT hasn’t helped Zeta’s case.
Ahh BeOS, the OS that could have been.
@Severian
Hi
I’ve found Compaq laptops are very well behaved with just about any OS from Linux, OS/2, Winders, QNX, Solaris and of course BEOS.
The old Armada 1750 (PII 366) has an ATI graphics chip that is recognised quite happily by B5 – sound is via a standard ISA SB 16 compat. chip so that side is well covered. Only problem is on the PCMCIA front for networking – I don’t have any NE2000 cards so have had to rely on modem instead which is a little dull.
On the later models E500 M700 there’s a built in Intel compat NIC port which is detected fine by B5 so all systems go but you need the Rage Pro driver from Bebits, or Vesa Accepted to get half decent graphics. Downside is that the Rage Pro driver does tend to flare the display panel when switching on – not sure if it’s trying to overdrive it. The Maestro chip is also supported with help from Bebits.
The antialiasing of the fonts does make it a bit hard work on the eyes on a laptop at 1024×768 – 800×600 is a bit easier. Dano allows a/a to be switched off and in that case 1024×768 is OK.
Not *sure* about Presarios but have seen probs with various *ixes on some forums. I do know that Thinkpads are a bit of a pain with alternate OS’s – it was bad enough getting them to work with Winders!!! OS/2 – no probs – come to think of it, there’s a real operating system
I wish I had the cash to fly to Germany for BeGeistert – looks like another good one (even if to just stare at a laptop, with all those great coders around to ask questions
)
On the Zeta issue, well, NDA or no NDA – they’re aint winning trust by saying nothing. Still, I wish them the best.
On OBOS, come to WalterCon in June and see whats what for yours
Hey Nicholas, if you needed a Mac with a burner, you could just ask me… I’m the “Mac user” on page 3 🙂
Thank you for the photo, it’s one of the best I got in the last years 🙂
Anyway, I was working on a BeOS app… power of C++ :-)))
Nicholas doesn’t need a Mac or a PC with M$ Windows or Linux anymore. His camera does support(Nicholas didn’t know
) the PTP protocol, and with the new PTP plugin for Exposer, he can download his pictures on a BeOs/Zeta PC!! And that on a speed that is much faster than on any other OS 
. Great speed could be get on Zeta, thx to the driver of Ithamar 
.
Nicholas, it was a great review of the BeGeistert 12! I was one of the 2 Belgium guys over there. It was the first time we were there and it won’t be the last time!
greets
Jixt
P.S: Keep the BeOs-spirit high guys, its a great community, so keep it like this. It will bring more and more developers to the platform
And your certainty is based on….?
With all respect, but there’s simply no reason that we should believe you since you won’t show us any evidence.
I do not have proof, the YellowTab would not answer direct questions. They also said “revealing all” would at this point be highly counter productive which is why I’ve been pretty evasive myself in what I’ve said.
But if you are so sceptical, why not apply the same level of sceptisicm to the rumours. What are they based on? What proof is there for any of them?
Also, what would your explanation be of yT not planning on using major OpenBeOS parts, how can they do this?
Simply say “Sorry, we are under and NDA, and can’t reveal any details at the moment.”
Some NDAs also require you to not disclose there is an NDA…
However, there are always ways and means and I do think they could say *something*.
“Some NDAs also require you to not disclose there is an NDA…”
What, are they under a government defense contract? Get real. Why would Palm (or whoever) even care? Its not like there is some big secret about BeOS. If they are under an NDA, all they have to do is say so, and simply say “We cannot say anymore at the moment.” Instead, they choose to let people speculate.
my understanding that there isn’t any actual beos code in os 6, but just ideas such as the new be api that was being worked on, and the mediakit2 framework (apparently you can find header files for it in Dano, IIRC), both of which have been highly modified since the Be days, so it might not be anything like we’d be expecting…
yes you are correct. Cobalt is set to have preemptive multitasking like BeOS and other ideas they got from creating BeOS. There was an interview with the guy on OSNews if you wish to have a search through their archives.
Kelly wrote:
> If they are under an NDA, all they have to do is say so,
> and simply say “We cannot say anymore at the moment.”
Quote from “Bernd’s Corner” dated October 12, 2003
(http://www.yellowtab.com/column.php)
<quote>
Questions have been raised recently regarding to whether we have access to the sources of BeOS, and to what parts of it. This has recently been the cause for very heated debate and controversy. While we acknowledge that these questions may come as legitimate concerns, answering them would require disclosing the extent of our agreements with some of our business partners. As a commercial entity that we are, we have both legal and business reasons why we cannot disclose as much details as we would like to. The time may come, some day, when we will be able to make public the conditions under which we have made those agreements. Of one thing you can all rest assured: yellowTAB does have secured agreements that make it possible for us to legally develop and bring to market an enhanced version of BeOS in the form of Zeta, as well as evolve it into the future.
</quote>
Is that not enough?
Koki
As best I can tell, it looks like they are side-stepping around the issue, and using very “careful” word choices. They don’t once mention that they are specifically under an NDA, just that they have business agreements with unnamed business partners. Also, they never say that they have the source code to actually modify BeOS. Once again, careful choice of wording, they simply say that they “have secured agreements that make it possible for us to legally develop and bring to market an enhanced version of BeOS…”. They never mention to what extent they can legally do that. Do they simply have the rights to re-package BeOS with patches and a few apps? Do they have access to old source code? The most recent source code.
I don’t really care either way honestly. But for those that do want to keep using BeOS, you might want to think about it.