HIR Issue 10: Yet Another Operating System Review
A look inside The Be Operating System (BeOS 4.5)
So, towards the beginning of November 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, inexpensive. 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.
