what is Beos?
 

NOT sure if this ways the place to post this.

But what is Beos?

I know what it stands for.

Just not clear is it is own operating system.

Does it run as a shell in linux operating systems.


Never heard of Beos until tonight.


well good night....

BIOS?

Oh, yes. It is most certainly a separate OS.

The BeOS was an operating system developed for many years by the only company more likely to die than Apple: Be, Inc. (run by an ex-Apple employee and almost bought by Apple).

It's claim to fame was amazingly fast and tight code, as it was a multimedia creation OS. On top of a Unix-like directory structure and command line, it ran that famous yellow-tabbed GUI.

Now that Be's assets have been bought by Palm and the company has actually died, the BeOS community has huddled around various updates of the Personal Edition, several rewrites such as YellowTab, and other reimplementations based on AtheOS or Linux. Every once in a while there's a rumor about big things a-comin', and you can still use the BeOS for everyday tasks (Mozilla runs on it), but it is not... lively.

Sounds interesting but is this operating system sold anymore or has it turned into a opensource OS.

Hmm I've seen a few sites stating it was a better operating system at running older versions of windows OS. For ti could support older hardware that linux does not support..


I was wondering if this statement above holds water?

The Personal Edition of BeOS 5 is a free version of the last release made. You can download this in various places (like here). Be, Inc. is no more, so they won't sell you anything.

It boots from Linux or Windows, but it replaces them in memory. It does not run on top of Linux or Windows, nor does it run their apps unless you use emulation or compile a special version for the BeOS. It had pretty good hardware support for the time, and most common stuff should work with it.

There are several updated distributions based on the PE, such as the BeOS Developer Edition and BeOS Max.

Several projects exist to clone the BeOS, such as the commercial yellowTAB Zeta, and the OpenBeOS. Other BeOS-like projects you may wish to learn about are AtheOS and NewOS.

only 43mb for an os? thats small init, i think i will have to download and try it out, class how it loads in windows/linux and then takes ova the memory.

Warning: 43MB->500+ decompressed.

And once you really get into it you'll probably want one of the updated distros I mentioned.

Man! Tight compression!! How'd they do that??

Most of it is empty space in the 512MB BeFS partition in a file.