BEOS
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BeOS

BeOS was originally developed by the company Be with the former Apple coworker Jean-Louis Gasseè for its own type of computer, the BeBox. It contains 2 power PC CPUs and was equipped with maximally with 256 Mbyte of RAM. BeOS is written from sratch and does not contain obsolete operating system design concepts. Designed as a single user operating system BeOS unfolds his optimal efficiency on multi-processor systems with several parallel running programs through it modern multi-thread based structure. BeOS basically does not run other applications that are not developed for this operating system. This operating system is only available in English, French and Japanese languages.

With the new version 5.0 BeOS is at the first time free of charge for private use and was named "Personal Edition". This version can be used exactly the same as the "Pro Edition" as single OS or started from any Windows partition. However the free variant is limited to a 512 MByte virtual partition in one image file for the operating system installation and further files. For network employment are a large amount of applications available.

Update: August 2001: By the assumption of Palm Inc. for 11 million dollar BeOS is not any longer commercially developed. The BeOS Community and some BeOS developers keeps the support for the future.

Update: March 2002: The BeOS Online website is a good start to download BeOS software or the BeOS 5.0 private edition which was downloaded world-wide by several sources about 1 million time. Based on the approved source code of the BeOS Personal Edition 5 the BeOS Developer edition 1.0 was developed, which contains current drivers and is further maintained by the BeOS Online team. In December 2002 the BeOS Developer Edition 1.1 was published.

Under the web address www.openbeos.info you can find the official continuation of BeOS as open source project, provisionally named to OBOS (OpenBeOS). This project was started on August 18th, 2001. To go around the closed source code parts of BeOS only the free source code is used and the missing parts are new developed. On the WalterCon 2004 meeting Michael Phipps published on 19.06.04 the renaming of OpenBeOS in Haiku. This project has the goal to develop an Desktop operating system that does not need administration, is simply to use, open source, with high performance even on older computers, made possible complex applications and is exciting in use. In future the development of BeOS applications on the Linux platform and BSD derivatives are possible too. Primary platform is the x86 32-Bit architecture, secondary the PowerPC is supported. The support of these architectures with 64-Bit processors is planned. SMP is also supported. The first release of Haiku should be completely binary compatible to BeOS R5 and offers extended functions with user friendly design and numerous improvements. In any following release this operating system got multi-user support, an improved API and (new?) File system as well as many other improvements.

Another project is the commercial Zeta distribution developed by the company yellowTAB, this is an official successor of the BeOS Personal Edition with source code from the OpenBeOS project. The Zeta distribution was called at the beginning BeOS NG (new generation). yellowTAB was founded in Germany, Stuttgart by 10 persons. This company acquired the license from Palm to use and develop the BeOS source code. Yellowtab engages itself also in Eastern Asia and Latin America for the sale and marketing. Zeta was located for the German and English market and is planned in the variants Home -, Developer and Deluxe edition.
Zeta 1.2 was released in April 2006. New in this release is the enhanced support for SATA devices, new audio/video codecs (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, XviD), additional graphic and printer driver. The interface was redesigned, the in past release required activation was removed. The software publisher magnussoft takes over the YellowTab zeta operating system with May 2006 and provides the worldwide distribution and further development exclusively. The managing director Bernd Korz also changes to magnussoft, YellowTab is in the insolvency. The updated Zeta 1.21 live CD from 2006-09-25 is limited in the sense that no programmes can be installed and no files can be stored. The web site from YellowTAB was taken finally away from the server on November 24th, 2006. New releases of Zeta operating system shall be named with magnussoft ZETA. The property rights at the BeOS source code in Zeta lie further at the company Access.
Magnussoft Deutschland GmbH stops the sale of the products magnussoft Zeta 1.21 and magnussoft Zeta 1.5 update on 2007-04-05. Access Co. Ltd. gave a statement according to which neither YellowTAB GmbH nor Magnussoft Deutschland GmbH are or were entitled to the sale of the product Zeta. Due to the arisen uncertainty about the legal position Magnussoft Deutschland GmbH takes distance of the further sales until the clarification of the facts. Till now the exact licensing agreement between Mr. Korz and Access Co. Ltd. is unknown, at present it is not guaranteed that rights of third parties at parts of Zeta are not violated.

BlueEyedOS copies the features and the user interface from open source software. BeOS APIs were written again, so the BeOS programs remains to be executable. This operating system is based on the Linux Kernel and the XFree86 server for graphic functions. You can download on www.blueeyedos.com the demo version as an ISO image.

The Beos derivative eB-OS (Extender Beos Operating System) is based on the latest BeOS Personal Edition 5.0.3, current Haiku code, parts of BeOSMax 3.1, BeOS Developer edition 2.1 as well as drivers and applications from www.bebits.com. The last version is eB-OS 1.1 beta on bootable CD-ROM.

Field of Application

BeOS is designed for handling large amounts of data. Therefore it is suitable outstanding for Multimedia applications such as video and audio processing as well as Raytracing. By its structural short response time of 250 microseconds between individual Threads it is particularly suitable for time-critical tasks like the recording of videos in real time. The access to files takes under 10 milliseconds, depending on the used hardware. BeOS is capably to use Plug&Play devices, after the installation of new hardware the appropriate driver must be copied only in "/boot/home/config/" and the device is now useable. The object-oriented Design allows it to activate new drivers without complete restart. During the loading only the depending media modul is restarted in few seconds.

Area of application

support POSIX
CLI: bash Shell, GUI: Tracker
JFS support
Read/Write FAT16/32, Read ext2fs and NTFS/5, HFS, UDF(DVD) and ISO-9660(CD)
optimized for the web, integrated GNU compiler
OpenGL is supported
Microkernel
preemptive multitasking
Internal Client-Server architecture
Server: Services of the oeprating system
Clients: applications, which use the oepratign system services
protected memory areas
virtual memory
Object-oriented Design
Max. file size 18 millionen TByte
Pervasive multi-threading architecture (operating system is divided into small threads which profit optimally from several CPUs)

System Environment

x86 CPUs or PowerPC (up to release 5.03)
needs at least 32MByte RAM
64-Bit operating system
befs 64-Bit JFS file system, R/W HFS, VFAT, FAT
Symmetrical multi-processing (SMP)
Multi-processor support (up to 16 CPUs)
not designed as network server or multi-user support

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