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BeOS 5
reviewed by Josh Ellis
There are a lot of people out there who are
sick to death of Microsoft. I am one of them, needless to say. People who hate
Microsoft tend to be art-house types or hippies, and they also tend to be Mac
or Linux users, for the most part.
But there are also people out there who are
sick of Macintosh; sick of Apple's Leaving Las Vegas downward spiral of stupid
decisions. There are also people out there who are tired of the Linux
movement's elitist tendencies and constant ignorance of end users.
These people are BeOS users.
Neal Stephenson has written an excellent long
essay about user interfaces called
In The Beginning Was The
Command Line. In it, Stephenson compares the different OSes to cars.
Windows, he analogizes, is like a minivan; MacOS like a sleek, hermetically
sealed Euro sedan; Linux is something like a tank. And Be, he says, is a lot
like the Batmobile.
Be is the Velvet Underground of operating
systems; it is often talked about, yet very few are actually familiar with it.
Pundits have been predicting its demise for years. But, like Lou Reed after the
Velvet Underground, Be continues to sputter along, bought by almost no one and
yet universally acclaimed.
When Bill Gates was addressing the DOJ last
year, he protested that no, his company wasn't a monopoly. There were other
people making commercial OSes for the x86 platform. Be, Inc. for example. The
absurdity of insisting that a 60 employee company is competing with a
multibillion dollar juggernaut is, of course, quite obvious. And yet it says
something about Be's curious reputation.
And now, Be has made an even bolder move:
they've released the new BeOS for free online. This move--which coincided to
the day with Judge Jackson's ruling against Microsoft--is an insane one for a
company which, until very recently, only had this one product. But it also may
just bring Be into the spotlight. There have already been a few million
downloads of the OS, in only a month; and I saw it on the shelf at Best Buy the
other day, prominently placed.
So what, you might be asking yourself, is the
big deal?
Plenty. BeOS Release 5 (available from
free.be.com) downloads as a single 60MB
Windows or Linux executable. When you run it in Windows (as I did), it brings
up a simple InstallShield wizard like any other app. It installs into a folder
on your Windows partition and throws an icon on the desktop.
Huh?
What Be for Windows does is create a 500MB file
on your drive, which it uses as a "virtual file partition". When you
double-click the icon, it shuts Windows down and restarts within this file,
which contains the OS and a good bit of space for apps and other stuff.
Great idea. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite
work the way it should; this sort of hot swapping causes a lot of errors. There
are two easy ways to solve this: either make a Be boot floppy or use its
Installer tool to install the OS to a separate partition.
I chose the latter route. I held all my calls
and canceled all my appointments, expecting a multi-hour nightmare of IRQ
configurations and display adapter settings, the sort of thing that anyone
who's installed Windows or Linux expects as a matter of course.
Ten minutes later, Be thanked me and asked me
to restart. Not once did it ask me a hardware question, other than where I
wished to install it and whether or not I wanted to make my destination
partition use the BFS file system. I configured my graphical boot manager
XOSL, and hit reset.
The BeOS booted in roughly five seconds. I've
since added 128MB of RAM, but it still takes the same five seconds. Its boot
screen is quite similar to a Macintosh's; a logo and a list of system
extensions, which appear as they load.
 The similarities don't end
there. Be's GUI is also quite similar to that of the Mac, except that each
window has a small yellow tab for a titlebar. Almost everything else looks the
same, though; if you're a Mac person, it will take about five minutes for you
to become accustomed to Be. Be also features a Bash command line like Linux,
which is apparently where people get the idea that Be is based on Unix.
In fact, Be is based on nothing at all. It is
one of the only ground-up OSes out there. The command line is not necessary;
it's there mainly for POSIX compliance. There are no 16-bit or even 32-bit apps
for Be; everything is 64-bit and quite happy about it. Though it looks like a
Mac, Be is vastly different; it actually takes advantage of the hardware it's
given (supporting up to 8 processors natively).
Be has been much touted as the "media OS", and
it's easy to understand why. Multimedia is built into Be at the system level;
it almost expects you to have video capture equipment. It treats MP3s as a
native file format and, in the full commercial version, incorporates the
Frauenhofer codices at a very low level. You don't encode MP3s in Be; you save
files.
Also, because multimedia and 3D are worked out
at the OS level, apps for Be tend to be very, very small. I have a Be app that
is a 3D map of all the stars within 25 parsecs of the Sun, with a virtual
trackball and clickable zoom navigation system. It looks and runs like
something out of Star Trek. And the best part is, the executable is less than
500KB.
There are lots of incredible things about Be;
the database file system, which allows each file to have custom "attributes"
and lets you create virtual file folders; the simplicity of burning CDs in a
CD-RW drive (you copy files just like any other drive); its recognition of
every major file system. After using Be for a while and popping back into
Windows, I felt like Dorothy, returning to Kansas from Oz.
Which brings up a good point: if it's so great,
why would I be going back to Windows at all? This is where we run into the
great problem with the BeOS: no applications.
There are a few drawing programs, and a few
audio editing programs, and some games (like the omnipresent
Civilization: Call To Power, which has been
ported to every single OS ever invented going back to Babbage's analytical
engine). There are some cool toys like the star map mentioned above. There are
even a few office apps like AbiWord. But there aren't any really great apps.
There's no version of Photoshop for Be; there's not even a GIMP. There are no
really cool multitrack audio editors, or HTML editors, or video editors.
There's not even a port of Java for Be.
It's that last which has me popping into
Windows. Be can't even handle Javascript. The upshot of this is that my web
e-mail won't work, I can't get half of my favorite sites to work correctly; and
I certainly can't do any real HTML design work.
Despite these problems, I haven't given up on
Be. I still think it's the greatest thing since Cheez-Whiz. The apps will come;
that's only a matter of having enough users to make it viable. Once they do, Be
might find itself in a real position to take on some of the market that Linux
and Mac have right now.
b i o :
Josh Ellis has worked at Mondo 2000,
Revolting!, and Axcess Magazine. He currently resides in the Las Vegas
area. |
