First Day of the 09/10 Financial Year

[Märk]

Fluffy, any idea where I could acquire a copy of BeOS for PPC? I have an old PPC603 Mac and I'd like to run something other than OS 9 on it...

[fluffy]

I'm sure you can find it on torrent sites. Also, have you considered Linux? That works on PPC too, and will probably be a lot more useful than BeOS (although not as sexxay).

[Märk]

I've tried linux (specifically, Ubuntu 6.01 and 7.04) and neither will get through the boot process using BootX. They both halt on some error about mounting root device, and either freeze or drop to a shell.

BeOS 4.5 shows up on torrent searches, but with 0 seeders.

I briefly considered dropping this old 6500 from a high place to watch it 'splode, but I guess I'm too environmentally responsible to litter like that.

[fluffy]

Have you tried Yellow Dog Linux? It's intended specifically for PPC, unlike Ubuntu which basically has it as an afterthought.

[mrbeany]

I thought BeOS R3 ran on the 603.

I had R4 which ran nicely on my K6-233, although I could never get it to work with my ne2000 network card.

It's amazing how many things on Linux try to emulate the BeOS look (and like everything on Linux it's a thin veneer of a visual simulacrum which completely misses the point from a design and functionality standpoint).

I corrected you.

First, the 603 chip was supported -- but the system itself wouldn't have been supportable if it didn't have a PCI bus. BeOS for the PPC required both a supported chipset, as well as a PCI bus. It supported the ISA bus for x86 chips (as it is well-documented, and the BeBox had an ISA bus), but we never supported the Apple NuBus.

Now for the details of the correction:

It went from DR's in the early-early days (up to DR8 -- if memory serves, this was all prior to any Mac-compatible releases) to PR1, PR2, then it dropped the P and became R3, R4, and R5. What was headed toward becoming R6 was illegally sold under a different name in Europe. (I forget the name off-hand.)

With R4+ PPC was still supported, but a fading memory, as the demands of the OS slowly grew to the point it was slowing down the older machines. (Remember that when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the first thing he did was kill the Mac Clone market, and make the Apple specs private.) R5 was pretty unusable on the PPC machines we supported, and the PPC machines we supported were being far out-paced by the new Macs which used chipsets we could get no specs for. Sometimes we would get something working on some of the machines, but it was hit-or-miss and never fully supported.

The DR stood for Developer Release (not suitable for humans), the PR stood for Preview Release, and the R was just Release.

BeOS tended to work with most NE2000 cards. IIRC, if it was an ISA NE2000 card there was a greater chance of problems. As of R4, the PCI NE2000-clones worked really quite reliably.

R3+ worked on x86 hardware. The PPC line used Metrowerks compilers (the standard on Mac OS prior to OS X). R3 itself also used a Metrowerks compiler, just their compiler for x86, this was developed for the Windows market, and only produced PE executables (like Windows). As the DOS code stating that it needs to run within Windows is a part of the PE file-format, this means this header existed in BeOS executables for R3.

R4+ switched to the GNU toolset, and the ELF executables (like Linux).

When I first saw tabs in Google Chrome, and that they're located in the title-bar, I was like "holy sh.. someone actually did it." This was something our UI designer was pushing us to implement in BeOS, but it wasn't finished before the end came. Some of the Be folks moved to Google for a time, and some of them have had reasonably high positions, so I wasn't surprised really, just impressed that they got it to work in Windows of all things.

Back in the day, I had a window office in Menlo Park. I, like all of the developers, wrote an newsletter article from time-to-time.

Be, Inc. died as a direct result of a Microsoft employee violating an NDA and threatening a manufacturer. Can someone say monopoly? Microsoft settled out-of-court, as they probably intended to from the start.

This is why I don't use Windows, and do not use any other Microsoft product.

[mrbeany]

I've tried linux (specifically, Ubuntu 6.01 and 7.04) and neither will get through the boot process using BootX. They both halt on some error about mounting root device, and either freeze or drop to a shell.

BeOS 4.5 shows up on torrent searches, but with 0 seeders.

I briefly considered dropping this old 6500 from a high place to watch it 'splode, but I guess I'm too environmentally responsible to litter like that.

You're looking at the wrong Linux distribution. I've a PPC Mac at work. Ubuntu dropped PPC support a little while back. It is "community", but I had trouble getting it to work for me.

What did work for me was Debian Linux. Ubuntu is based on Debian, so it isn't far removed from Ubuntu. The difference is that Debian is entirely community driven, and that in Debian the PPC Mac's are fully supported. (Well, and they call Firefox IceWeasel due to a legal issue with the Mozilla Foundation -- http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/ar ... hp/3634591)

I followed the normal, recommended procedure for installing and it worked fine. I don't rightly know what bootloader it is using. The bootloader is a bit odd, and I don't rightly know how to change the default OS it boots... but it works.

If Debian Linux doesn't work with it, you could always investigate a BSD. NetBSD still supports 68k Macs, as well as practically everything else on the planet.

I used to love BeOS. I could actually triple-boot some of my hardware back in the day. (I was a Linux guy back before I started at Be, Inc. Only reason I kept Windows on some of the hardware was to run games.) And yeah, that's triple-booting with all of my hardware supported in all operating systems. I had to be picky, but conveniently, if it worked with BeOS it was basically guaranteed to work with Linux.

The thing is, I used to love BeOS. Even I wouldn't recommend you use it anymore -- not on a PPC, at least.

For those with an x86 processor, there's http://www.haiku-os.org/. It is an attempt to create an open-source version of BeOS. They've been working on it since before Be, Inc. died, and they're still going strong. They're working on getting work-a-likes for all the native BeOS apps (ideally, they want the same library interfaces). They're actually a Google Summer of Code project this year, which is neat.

[fluffy]

When I first saw tabs in Google Chrome, and that they're located in the title-bar, I was like "holy sh.. someone actually did it." This was something our UI designer was pushing us to implement in BeOS, but it wasn't finished before the end came. Some of the Be folks moved to Google for a time, and some of them have had reasonably high positions, so I wasn't surprised really, just impressed that they got it to work in Windows of all things.

A ha, well, long before Chrome, there was pwm for Linux, which I used for many years. It let you turn ANY arbitrary windows into a group of tabs - they didn't even have to be in the same application. Sadly, it became less and less useful over time since more apps had their own built-in tabs and more things switched to using gtk2 which didn't do popup dialogs correctly (it treats them as regular windows, which makes it impossible for pwm to differentiate between them).

Plus, modern Linux distributions have so many dependencies on the crap that gnome does at startup (especially networking) that it's not worth the effort to even try pwm out anymore, unless you're running it on a desktop system connected via wired Ethernet.

Be, Inc. died as a direct result of a Microsoft employee violating an NDA and threatening a manufacturer. Can someone say monopoly? Microsoft settled out-of-court, as they probably intended to from the start.

Toshiba, right? I remember them offering a BeOS dualboot briefly, but then MS threatened to revoke the OEM pricing agreement. I don't think that's the ONLY reason Be died, though; at that point the Toshiba dualboot thing almost seemed like a Hail Mary play anyway (at least from my comfortable position in academia).

[Eric Y.]

Does anyone else have a cool story like that?

I'm still waiting for the cool stories.

[mrbeany]

Be, Inc. died as a direct result of a Microsoft employee violating an NDA and threatening a manufacturer. Can someone say monopoly? Microsoft settled out-of-court, as they probably intended to from the start.

Toshiba, right? I remember them offering a BeOS dualboot briefly, but then MS threatened to revoke the OEM pricing agreement. I don't think that's the ONLY reason Be died, though; at that point the Toshiba dualboot thing almost seemed like a Hail Mary play anyway (at least from my comfortable position in academia).

Microsoft didn't want dual-boot from anybody. Their licensing required (at the time, at least) Microsoft software from the start of the boot process -- that means a Microsoft MBR. Basically, it meant it was impossible to ship a dual-boot system that had the capacity to automatically boot in to BeOS before you started Windows the first time.

The product at the end was something that was never released with BeOS on it. (The manufacturer was Compaq.) It was going to be our first foray in to the "Internet Appliance" market. It needn't have been a super seller to keep the interest up for the next version. The whole "we've not released a new Desktop release recently, as we've been focused on the Internet Appliance Market, and BeIA 1.0 never shipped on anything" just didn't make the shares sell well.

I still think that BeOS could have been a contender if it had just managed to stick around long enough to get in to the Media Appliance market. Internet Appliances may have been a dead-end, but Media Appliances appear to be a viable niche market.

[JonPorobil]

Yeah, to this day, it's still a hassle if you want to dual-boot Windows and anything else. Microsoft wants to be your one and only.

[fluffy]

Didn't the Sony eVilla come out running BeIA (to much derision from the Internet)?

[mrbeany]

Didn't the Sony eVilla come out running BeIA (to much derision from the Internet)?

You may be right. I think we did ship on a Sony unit. IIRC, it wasn't the big 1.0 release. It was an earlier release.