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.