[olug] Re: BeOS in public domain & meetings

[Cale Lewis]

> I thoroughly enjoyed using BeOS for the short time I got to... and was 
> really curious what a BeBox would have been like :).  Sadly, no one has 
> taken me up on the offer yet. Weirdos.
>
Want to see a BeBox? ;-) Also have r5.0.3 running on a Mac 9500 dual 604e's 
and had it running on dual 1G P111's till we had a house fire.
BeOS runs on up to 8 CPU systems out of the box with some of the best SMP 
around.  
I can burn you a CD, or you can go to BeBits  http://www.bebits.com/  to dl a 
free version, the original 'Personel Edition' released by Be Inc, or an 
updated, enhanced version
http://www.bebits.com/app/3892    BeOS 5 PE Max Edition
http://www.bebits.com/app/3893    BeOS Wind

X is also working much better on BeOS now if you want to use it. But why? Try 
Tracker and the native GUI, you'll see what I mean! + you still have BASH in 
a terminal window. Apache and several other apps run very well on it. 

> 
> Although I'm not sure if it's still viable, one of the developers for 
> openbeos (at the time) used to hang out in Undernet's #beos.
>  
> > Since BeOS was a very modular design
> 
> This is something the people have to see to understand.  It's still years 
> ahead of linux and microsoft (can't speak for apple on this one).
> 
Granted, as some people point out, there are things Linux is much better at, 
but there are things that BeOS is still amazing at. 

Ever play up to 50-100 video clips, each in its own window on your desktop? 
How about on a 450-500 MHz K6-2? With 512 or less RAM?
 
Multi-user is there but not complete yet in BeOS--was improved upon in BeIA 
but not released.  Will be taken care of with the move to the new kernel.

BeOS originally would not boot with over 1 Gig RAM, but there are now 
workarounds, and this is also a done-deal with the new kernel.

If you remember the old Netserver, it's been replaced with BONE, a BSD 
network stack.

> has a shell, so you can telnet/ssh all you want, etc.  I don't recall any 
> odditities concerning it interacting, although I don't recall ever 
> attempting to print from BeOS.

Printing MUCH improved already, and now CUPS is being test run on several 
systems.

Excuse my raving over it, but I do not think we need the market, public, or 
industry relying on any 1 or 2 systems too much, whether it's Windows, *nix, 
or anything else. Diversity creates a bad environment for the spread of worms 
and virus', and a system as easy to use as BeOS would be a boon to the 
general public for home use. It could work well with just about any other 
system out there, and would go a long way towards showing how much Bill Gates 
and his "Inovation" has actually held computing back and denied much to the 
world so he can fill his pockets and feed his ego.

To other matters, didn't someone mention running the new Novell/SUSE release? 
I'm currently running SuSE 8.2 and am curious about how much it's improved.

Cale Lewis