I run BeOS R4 on a Dual PII 450. It a damn awesome operating
system. The user interface is one of the nicest I have ever
seen and the graphical installation is really cool too. You
can set each of your virtual desktops to a different resolution!
While it does support limited hardware, it does a really nice
job of utilizing the hardware it can. It detected and configured
every device in my computer from install and I have never had
the operating system crash.
The multimedia features are fun to play with both as a user and
a programmer. For example, through the use of the very robust
application messaging system you can start two copies of the
same program and have them communicate with each other. There
is a OpenGL demo that ships with the OS that has a little rendered
ball that bounces around in a window. If you start two copies
of the same application, the program automatically realize,
and the OpenGL ball will bounce from one window into the other.
This may not be that cool except for when you realize that it is
a standard application behavior available from the application
development kit.
The operating system in completely multithreaded, so it runs really
nicely on my PII. When writing Be Application, each window of your
application is automatically given it's own thread by the
application kit... to bad linux isn't so nicely integrated
with X windows.
Of course, the limitations are pretty large in the fact that there
aren't very many applications available, so I tend to use Linux
mostly, and BeOS just eats up my drive. No netscape yet, and the
browser that ships with it is.. well slow.
The media stuff is really cool... all audio is streamed through
the operating system, so you can do crazy stuff like play MP3's
backwards and pitch shift MP3's and stuff. You can't do that
on any other operating system that I am aware of.
Overall, it is pretty cool. I wish it was open source so I could
get my computer blessed by Richard Stallman, and also wish more
developers were writing open source apps for it (most are shareware
binaries or commercial programs).
Mostly it is of limited use right now, although porting most
non-X based Linux apps to BeOS is supposedly not very difficult.
The full set GNU development tools is available (make, gcc, etc..)
Anyway, yeah, I recommend trying it to anyone.
get ideas on where to take linux next.
--
tod.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
James Yeung wrote:
>
> Has anyone here used BeOS? I just got introduced to it, and it sounds
> very interesting("the media OS")...if anyone here has anything to say
> about, I'd really like to know!
>
> James
>
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