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I know, you expected this blog to be all about Linux…..

Linux is great, and I plan on keeping it as my daily operating system, but I love to dabble in other OSes. I just love BeOS.

Be is such a remarkable piece of engineering; it was a sad day when Be, Inc. announced that they would sell the assets of the company to Palm.

For anyone who has not used BeOS, there is a free Personal Edition, which has the most major limitation of not being installable on its own partition. At least, that’s what they would like you to think.

Last night, I just made a bootable BeOS installation CD from the contents of the Personal Edition. Unbeknownst to the user, the BeOS boot sequence and kernel have the installer built-in. The CD will acts as a boot disk, of sorts, and if it finds no BeOS volumes with the operating system on it, it politely offers to install it. Full color, no less! I was very impressed, to say the least. For anyone who is interested in trying it out, you can still get a copy from some mirrors linked off of BeTips. And as far as books, the major publication that, deservedly, gets the most attention is Scot Hacker’s BeOS Bible.

Work calls, so I must leave more experiments with BeOS for later.

I am thoroughly enjoying my classes this quarter, but I am so not used to having homework.

For my Unix class, I do not have any actual homework, but I have some reading I can do, as well as planning out my second Linux installation at school. For the first one, Mr. Matney wants us to simply have two partitions on the drive, root and swap.

In my second install, I want to tweak out the system. I am going to have Linux installed, leaving Windows alone, but I am going to split up the Linux install into proper partitions. Also, I ju
st created a bootable BeOS cd last night and plan to install it and QNX alongside the other two operating systems. And all this for only another 9 weeks or so.

In Science, Art, and Literature, I have a lot of reading to do, including finishing up “The Two Cultures,” one of the most disjointed books I have read. There are some interesting points, but C. P. Snow, the author, tends to wander off into odd tangents. To make it even more difficult, the book is a transcription of a lecture he gave on the subject at Cambridge University in the
UK.

Oh well, so is life. Full of homework…. Work is coming up too soon today, but it is Lottery, so it won’t be too bad. Maybe I can do some reading…..