>to Dean Coffey: >Now you have me curious about BeOS, its future and where and how to get it, >and >will it boot with LILO. I heard about Be Inc going out of business, being >sold >to Palm who were not going to contiune developing BeOS.
>What kind of web browsers are there for BeOS, and how do they compare with >Arachne? I think there was a Bezilla? First let me apologize for the OT post, but I felt that some other folks on the list may be interested in this info, since we as a group seem to be a little unusual in our computing choices. As to your first question and statement, Be Inc. did sell their IP (Intellectual Properties) to Palm Inc., so technically speaking, since Palm did announce that they didn't plan to further pursue the development of BeOS as such, BeOS is "dead". As a side note, Palm has kind of said that they will use parts of BeOS to make PalmOS more robust. That being said, there are quite a few of us who still use BeOS and find it useful (sound familiar to any DOS geeks here?), even if it is no longer "supported". Personally, my main machine is running BeOS 5 PE, which is the free version that you can download at http://www.bebits.com/app/2680, I believe. There are currently 3 (that I know of) open source projects trying to reproduce BeOS or an acceptable duplicate based on Linux. The one that seems to be making the most progress is the soon to be renamed Open BeOS (http://open- beos.sourceforge.net/news.php), which is reproducing BeOS by using the publicly available info regarding the OS. As to your question regarding LILO, so far as I know BeOS plays well with LILO. I haven't tried it personally, but there is some info at http:// www.betips.net/chunga.php?ID=195 . As for web browsers, BeOS comes with a small, speedy, fairly capable browser called Net Positive (or simply Net+). Net+ doesn't like java and other things that are mostly eye candy or scripting based. An alternative to Net+ is Opera for BeOS. This was finalized a couple of years ago at 3.62 (I think), and works pretty well for me, most of the time. You can check Opera's website for more details. The other alternative is indeed BeZilla, the BeOS port of Mozilla. You can check for more info at www.bezilla.org, although the site is sometimes a bit behind on updates. So far as a comparison, I feel that would definitely be subjective, but of the three, I prefer Net+ for 80%+ of my surfing, due to it's speed. YMMV. For anyone interested, I would reccomend that you download the free version of BeOS, which isn't crippled, other than being stripped of royalty-bearing add-ons, and try it out. One problem unfortunately for some of you in this group is that you need to install it from Win95 or newer. To avoid using anymore bandwidth, let me extend this offer to all of you on the list: If you decide to install BeOS and have any questions, feel free to contact me off list at [EMAIL PROTECTED] and I will assist you to the best of my ability, or point you to more knowledgeable assistance. Now back to our regularly scheduled program....
