Post by thread:OT. BeOS

Yeah, A friend lend me the 4.5 and I cleaned 500Mbytes of my second HD to try the x86 version. The CD has an autorun script to install a custom Partition Magic version for Be. It installs and when you run it you may select a drive to make a Be partition. It does everything and at the end a window ask you to eject the CD and reboot with the boot floppy (???). Searching the CD (it always try to reinstall the Partition Magic...) I found a "booting" folder with cpimage.exe, make.bat and readme. Reading the "readme" it«s very iluminating, says to run the make.bat from any DOS window in Win95. I then opened a DOS window, switched to E: (my CD) and "cd booting". From there I finnaly typed make<enter>. The swift cpimage.exe shows the usage and exited. The make.bat doesn«t work. Then I read the make.bat and typed it myself: E:\>\booting\cpimage zbeos a:<enter> For my surprise the cpimage started to (?) copy the zbeos disk image to a formatted floppy in drive A:. It then wrote something like ...successful created... and quited. (heaven) Ok, now the boot floppy is created and I finnaly may evaluate the 15 min installation time for Be (as they advertise in their site). I shutdow the PC and rebootted with BIOS set to boot from floppy, and... the same old Win95 shows up - wonderfull I thinked. Seaching again the CD and killing the Partition Magic Setup again I discoverd a \Win95\BeOS subfolder with a readme (claiming quick&dirty) explaining I had to copy the BeOS folder to C: (a crap explanation about hardcoded scripts) to allow a lean boot fron Win95/DOS. Ok, I copied the sub-folder.... Then I run the BeOS in that folder - it switched Win95 to DOS mode (rebooting) and (crying) a blue BeOS 4.5 screen showed up. The boot code started and sequentially illuminated the circulars icones of the process. And my stopwatchrunning... Suddently it stops with a white line message like script error (?). After a 1000s Win95 reboot and Partition Magic Setup killing, I tried to copy the whole tree \Win95\Beos to my C: drive. And here we go again. This time the Boot process continue until its end copying a lot of stuff from the CD to my second HD. Suddently a pointing hand icon shows up. My two buttons serial Logitech mouse was (?) not connected with that Icon (anyway) and it desapeared and a agreement window shows up. >From that moment on I tried all keyboard/mouse combinations until I found one key that allowed me to continue - the RESET key. Three hours later I got an RedHat 6.0 CD and installed it in that 500Mb partition in less than 15 minutes. Oh, I forgot to mention that the cpimage never worked and I run Norton Diskedit in DOS mode just to check the boot sector of that boot floppy had only zeroes...no boot sector at all. I then leeched the Be ftp site getting the 4.5.1 bootimage. There I discovered in the bootimage.readme that for DOS users the magic program to prepare the infamos boot floppy is named "rawrite". (back to Linux) With a copy of rawrite from a Linux distribuiton - no I didn«t find it at the Be site, maybe I was so tired I didn«t seached all site - I finnaly got a workable boot floppy from the zbeos file. (that one at least worked) Well, I give the CD back to my friend and start to learn Linux. Sorry for my english and maybe this why this attempt didn«t worked. cheers, J Souto Stuart O'Reilly wrote: > Has anybody had any experience with the BeOS opperating system? Any > comments? > Regards > Stuart

Thanks for that, If i decide to ever try it i'll keep that in mind. Regards Stuart Jose Luiz Pinto Souto wrote: {Quote hidden}> Yeah, > > A friend lend me the 4.5 and I cleaned 500Mbytes of my second HD > to try the x86 version. > > The CD has an autorun script to install a custom Partition Magic version > > for Be. It installs and when you run it you may select a drive to make a > > Be partition. It does everything and at the end a window ask you to > eject > the CD and reboot with the boot floppy (???). > > Searching the CD (it always try to reinstall the Partition Magic...) I > found > a "booting" folder with cpimage.exe, make.bat and readme. Reading the > "readme" it«s very iluminating, says to run the make.bat from any DOS > window in Win95. I then opened a DOS window, switched to E: (my CD) > and "cd booting". From there I finnaly typed make<enter>. > The swift cpimage.exe shows the usage and exited. The make.bat doesn«t > work. Then I read the make.bat and typed it myself: > > E:\>\booting\cpimage zbeos a:<enter> > > For my surprise the cpimage started to (?) copy the zbeos disk image to > a > formatted floppy in drive A:. It then wrote something like ...successful > > created... and quited. (heaven) > > Ok, now the boot floppy is created and I finnaly may evaluate the 15 min > > installation time for Be (as they advertise in their site). > I shutdow the PC and rebootted with BIOS set to boot from floppy, and... > > the same old Win95 shows up - wonderfull I thinked. > > Seaching again the CD and killing the Partition Magic Setup again I > discoverd > a \Win95\BeOS subfolder with a readme (claiming quick&dirty) explaining > I had to copy the BeOS folder to C: (a crap explanation about hardcoded > scripts) > to allow a lean boot fron Win95/DOS. Ok, I copied the sub-folder.... > Then I run the BeOS in that folder - it switched Win95 to DOS mode > (rebooting) > and (crying) a blue BeOS 4.5 screen showed up. The boot code started and > > sequentially illuminated the circulars icones of the process. > > And my stopwatchrunning... > > Suddently it stops with a white line message like script error (?). > After a 1000s Win95 reboot and Partition Magic Setup killing, I tried to > copy the > whole tree \Win95\Beos to my C: drive. And here we go again. > > This time the Boot process continue until its end copying a lot of stuff > from > the CD to my second HD. Suddently a pointing hand icon shows up. > My two buttons serial Logitech mouse was (?) not connected with > that Icon (anyway) and it desapeared and a agreement window shows up. > >From that moment on I tried all keyboard/mouse combinations until I > found > one key that allowed me to continue - the RESET key. > > Three hours later I got an RedHat 6.0 CD and installed it in that 500Mb > partition in less than 15 minutes. > > Oh, I forgot to mention that the cpimage never worked and I run Norton > Diskedit in DOS mode just to check the boot sector of that boot floppy > had only zeroes...no boot sector at all. > > I then leeched the Be ftp site getting the 4.5.1 bootimage. There I > discovered > in the bootimage.readme that for DOS users the magic program to prepare > the infamos boot floppy is named "rawrite". > (back to Linux) With a copy of rawrite from a Linux distribuiton - no I > didn«t > find it at the Be site, maybe I was so tired I didn«t seached all site - > I finnaly > got a workable boot floppy from the zbeos file. (that one at least > worked) > > Well, I give the CD back to my friend and start to learn Linux. > > Sorry for my english and maybe this why this attempt didn«t worked. > > cheers, > J Souto >

I have had a totally different experience with BeOS. I started playing with it at version 3.x, they upgraded me to version 4.0 and then 4.5 at no cost at all. J Souto is correct in that I could never create a boot disk from DOS per the instructions - but then in that I was using a legal copy that came with the boot disk that was not a problem. I was able to create a boot disk while running BeOS - but I am digressing. BeOS does have limited support for hardware (video, nic, scsi controllers). It likes IDE best of all. I found that by placing my cdrom as the slave device on the primary ide port and the hard drive as the master, the boot diskette could find the cdrom. As J Souto pointed out - on a system running Windows, you run the BeOS cd which starts a special version of Partition Magic (this version is currently not included on the regular PM product). PM creates a partition for BeOS. You then reboot with the BeOS floppy and it should take about 10-15 minutes at most to load the whole operating system - with no questions asked. BeOS includes a boot manager. After installation, take out the boot diskette and reboot. BeOS is fast. It finishes booting and is ready to go long before Win98 can ever get to the logon screen. For particulars - BeOS has declared themselves not to be in direct competition with Microsoft, but rather have selected a niche market of digital media. It excels in graphics and audio. One demo they include is a rotating cube. You can drag and drop movies onto each face of the cube. As the cube continues to rotate, the movies continue to play. BeOS includes a full C++ development system. BeOS is net-workable, but with limits. Version 4.5 allows you to see a Microsoft network (TCP/IP only). BeOS is capable of addressing something like 6x10 to the 18th megabytes of hard disk space - if you could ever find that much! In the BeOS Bible, Scott Hacker compares that to all the data ever created by man (books, movies, music) and BeOS could store that and have lots of room left over. BeOS started on a PowerPC, moved to Mac and then to the Intel Pentium. Apple has cut BeOS out of any specifications on the newer Macs, and therefore in the future only Intel Pentiums will be supported. I have not done any "work" with BeOS at this point - mostly just play. Bottom line IMHO is that one person's bad experience and one person's good experience does not make for a good sampling. I like BeOS. I hope they make it. But like other OS's of the past, it will require 3rd party applications. Without that they are doomed. It is a fast clean OS with no baggage to carry from previous attempts or other OSs. Their price is good (~$69 US). Getting 2 versions worth of upgrades for free is unique in this industry. My $.02 David V. Fansler Network Administrator AutoCyte, Inc. 336-222-9707 Ext. 261 spam_OUTdfanslerTakeThisOuTautocyte.com <.....dfanslerKILLspam@spam@autocyte.com> Now Showing! http://www.mindspring.com/~dfansler <http://www.mindspring.com/~dfansler> Updated July 13, 1999 {Original Message removed}

<x-rich>I am running the BeOS v4.5 and have had no real problems with it. I had a blank partition on my HD so I booted off the CD and it installed fine. The only complaint that I have is they don't have a driver for my video card. There is supposed to be a third party solution commin g soon though. If you have any specific questions please let me know. Troy Scevers At 12:49 PM 09/03/1999 +1000, you wrote: {Quote hidden}>Has anybody had any experience with the BeOS opperating system? Any >comments? >Regards >Stuart > > <color><param>0000,0000,ffff</param>******************************************** ***** </color><color><param>8080,0000,0000</param>Troy Scevers </color><color><param>0000,8080,8080</param>Software Design Engineer Cadence Design Systems, Inc. Portland Design Center Phone: </color><color><param>8080,0000,0000</param>(503) 439-3112 </color><color><param>0000,8080,8080</param>Fax: </color><color><param>8080,0000,0000</param>(503) 439-3200 </color><color><param>0000,8080,8080</param>E-Mail:</color><color><param>8080,00 00,0000</param> troysKILLspamcadence.com </color><color><param>0000,0000,ffff</param>************************************ *************</color> </x-rich>