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                              - HiR Issue #10 -
                   - Yet Another Operating System Review -
             - A look inside The Be Operating System (BeOS 4.5) -
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	So, towards the beginning of Novenber I was walking around Best
Buy (drooling over the Rio, and looking for some Linux stuff and audio
equipment) when something takes me by surprise: a BeOS Bundle (The OS and 
a really great book called "The BeOS Bible").  I'd actually been trying to
get a copy of BeOS from an acquaintance of mine who had a "Warez" copy of
it, just to try it out.  (It's $99 from BeDepot.com, and up until
recently, it was never carried in stores).  I was willing to cough up $100
for an OS that I like, but I wasn't about to cough up $100 just to
try something...

The bundle pack was going for $54.99... A Winner in my book.  So I picked
it up, but I had *NO* idea what was I was getting into...


Part I, The Bad News:

BeOS is NOT Unix.  It is not Unix based, and it is NOT built to be secure,
or to be a massive web/ftp server OS.  It is VERY picky about what
hardware it supports, and it didn't install on a single one of my
computers at home.  It is single-user, and offers no form of password
protection at the console aside from a screen saver password.  Period.
There is no full screen text mode.

Part II, The good news:

That wasn't a lot of bad news, but those are the ONLY drawbacks I saw.
You may be thinking "Why would I want to go back to a single user system
again?"  And I can agree... but consider the following:

BeOS ships with a telnet and ftp server.  When you telnet in (or open a
"Terminal" window), you use the bash shell to communicate to the kernel.
Lots of unix commands work on BeOS, because it's striving for POSIX
compliance, and many UNIX programs compile on BeOS.  Technically though,
it's not unix.  The fact that it allows you to compile UNIX software and
use unix commands makes it UNIX based about the same way learning to speak
spanish makes you a Spaniard. (I.E. it doesn't.)

In network settings, you can specify a username and password for ftp and
telnet, but only one username and password.  There are several third party
FTP servers out there for BeOS, and many of them support multiple user
profiles, and that allows you to toss different users into different parts
of the system, and keep them from seeing anything else.  

Processing SCREAMS on Be.  Period.  On my lowly Bitch Box (TM) (which, if
you will recall, is a Pentium 120 with 64 Megs of RAM, and a swappable
hard drive rack), I was able to run multitudes of number-crunching
graphical demonstrations at once.  While sometimes things slowed down a
little, nothing got lagged or choppy.  The BeOS is VERY scaleable from
what I see.

BeOS also integrates into the Internet rather nicely for the end user, and
it makes beautiful use of mime-types for files.  The file navigator
equivalent to MS's "Explorer" (Called "The Tracker"), will open pretty
much any file on your system.  You can set view preferences on a
folder-by-folder basis.  When you look at your E-Mail inbox, it's actually
the Tracker, and it will let you show E-mail attributes of the cached
files, such as date of arrival, Subject, Who it's from, etc...

NetPositive is the default internet content browser that comes with Be.
As far as I know, Netscape hasn't been ported to Be yet, but mozilla might
compile.  NetPositive has no java functions whatsoever, but it usually
does the job.  The Guys at Be, Inc. have done a lot of hard work on the
OS, and they are more worried about keeping the Operating system
feature-rich than they are about making sure it comes with the best toys
available.  This is to urge the industry to write software for BeOS, and
it's worked so far. 

There are already hundreds, if not thousands of BeOS applications.  Many
of them are commercial (must be bought), or crippleware (demo versions
that get un-crippled when you register).  The packaging program,
SoftwareValet, contains a mechanism for online registration of software
(if the author of the software chooses to make the registration
compatible with it). 

BeOS does have some major advantages over many other OS's though.  For
instance, it integrates very well with the Internet, as UNIX, but on the
users' level.  It doesn't start up loads of services that the user has to
figure out and set-up correctly.  It also uses the "Be FileSystem" or BFS,
which is a true 64 bit journaled file system.  (Journalling means that it
don't gotta fsck or scandisk if it suddenly gets shut off.  This is
because it "journals" all disk transactions as they are made).  Being a 64
bit filesystem, it also is very unlikely that drives sizes will exceed the
filesystem capabilities.  64 bits equals an 18,000 petabyte limit.  that's
about 180 times the estimated used hard drive space on ALL THE DRIVES in
the world right now... shudder...

I will be honest: I don't see BeOS becoming the next Linux or *BSD (as far
as being a majority player in the non MS/MacOS market).  It's almost a
project that I'd like to see eventually  become freely available or even
Open Source (Through a BSD or GPL license), but who knows.

Who SHOULD try this OS?

	Anyone who's an OS psycho like me
	Anyone who wants a user-friendly, yet very quick and scaleable OS
	Anyone who's tired of MacOS and MS, but not nerdy enough for UNIX
	Anyone who likes to sample the cutting edge
	Anyone who's prepared to pay small amounts of money for well-
		written software (BeOS IS commercialware, but in the scheme
		of things, inexpesive.  Most of the apps written for it are
		the same way. Unlike M$, you don't spend hundreds of bucks
		to get the software you need)

Who should NOT try this OS?

	Anyone who adores one OS, and doesn't like dual-booting
		(not enough software yet...)
	Anyone that's wanting to keep their parents/roomies out of their
		files
	Anyone who wants to run lots of services
	Anyone who can't live without full-screen textmode 
	Anyone that expects to have thousands of full-fledged apps
		ready to run.  More and more programs are being written
		for BeOS.  It even has it's own site on Tucows.