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Installing BeOS 5 Developer Edition 1.1
Well, since I'm a geek and need to test every freely available operating system (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.) I ended up
with downloading the BeOS 5 Developer Edition 1.1 from beosonline.com. They have a hardware compatibility list at beosonline.com,
so check out first if your hardware is compatible and supported.
Since I'm running on linux, I burnt the 2 image files (boot-image and OS-image) with cdrecord:
cdrecord dev=/dev/hdd speed=4 -eject -v -data deved_1_1_floppy.img image.be
The CD didn't boot on my development box, so I used my old friend "Smart Bootmanager", which is available from:
http://btmgr.webframe.org
That non-booting CD is not necessarily a BeOS "feature", since it also happens with other CD's like a testing version
of Fedora Core 2. Anyway, I booted the installation CD and a somewhat Spartanic GUI appeared. It suprisingly detected
all partitions on the harddisk from a previous Debian Sarge installation. I didn't mess with the partition manager though,
but told it to install BeOS on the first partition.
Just a few questions afterwards, the installer began copying the files onto the harddisk. This was just a matter of
about 30 minutes on my old PentiumIII 450MHz box, but there were only about 300 megs to install. At the end of the installation
it asked about the boot manager, whether it should install the native BeOS boot manager or leave the old one in place.
It also asked which partitions should be included in the boot manager - something the Linux developers at RedHat or
Debian could adopt ;-)
Well, so far so good! The installer told me the installation is finished and if I close the installer window, it will
reboot into my brand new BeOS.
Booting went fine and now here comes the shocker for all other operating systems:
It takes only about 20(!) seconds to boot on the P3/450MHz until the whole desktop is usable! (Shutdown takes only 5(!) seconds)
How long would it take to boot on a state of the art machine, like P4/3.2GHz ? 5 seconds ?
Anyway, I'm really impressed about this speed - granted, Debian boots very fast too, in contrary to RedHat's Fedora, which
takes ages to boot.
Conclusion:
BeOS seems to be a fast, user-friendly operating system. If it's suitable for daily use must be determined
by the user himself. I had no issues with drivers, but since Be Corp. was killed by MicroSoft a long time ago, it may
not support the latest and greates on hardware and therefore there might be problems on new machines. Despite some folks
who say this operating system is aging (actually the Developer Edition 1.1, which is based on R5, was released in 2000(!)),
it seems to be perfectly suitable for internet tasks. Plenty of software is available at bebits.com.
Last-Modified: Sat, 09 Apr 2005 20:03:56 GMT
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