I ran one of the last developer releases a little on my PowerMac
8500/180, and it was quite impressive. Latter I used BeOS 4.5
briefly on my old dual 400Mhz Celeron, and it was awesome! The
downside is development ground to a halt. There has been some modern
activity, and there is even work being done on an Open Source version.
I still run BeOSR5 (last one) on my PC (multi-boot system with XP,
FreeBSD, and BeOS). From what I've seen, there's still a lot of open
source development going on for it in the form of drivers and software.
I was finally able to get my Nvidia TI4600 card up much to my delight.
As for the open source version, there's actually a bunch of them:
Open BeOS -
http://open-beos.sourceforge.net/news.php
FreeOS (Now Called Mockup, a BeOS/Linux mixture) -
http://www.mockup.org/faqs/whats/
Athos -
http://www.atheos.cx/ Athos is peculiar in that everyone except
the author calls it a BeOS clone. ;)
There's also a new commercial version called Zeta developed by YellowTab
(former European distributor of BeOS), based on directly on BeOS.
According to one site it's based Dano/EXP's codeline (which was supposed
to be BeOS 6 but was never finished as Be sold its IP to Palm).
http://yellowtab.com/products/
Here's a review of an early beta from 3 years ago -
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3692
It would have been nice to see it continue, but after Apple bought
NeXT rather than Be, Inc. they sort of started to run out of steam.
I might be typing this on a dual 2Ghz G5 running Mac OS X, but I
can't help but thinking how much better the system would be if it had
been BeOS based, rather than OPENSTEP based. The good thing about
them buying NeXT was getting Steve Jobs back, but BeOS was a far more
efficient OS. And yes, I've run OPENSTEP and BeOS on the same system.
Zane
I have to agree, but then that efficiency could be because BeOS isn't
running a kludge verson of FreeBSD/Mac GUI in a MACH environment. ;)
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems
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Marty