BeOS Dano vs Dev vs Max

Be, Inc.
1

Hi. I vaguely know the differences between the BeOS editions. Normally I use Professional 5.03.

What’s the difference between:

Professional 5.03
Developers Edition 1.1/1.1.7
Dano

By difference, I mean what is compatible with what. Will any program that runs on Professional 5.0.3 work in Developers and Dano, and will third party drivers work. Is there any reason I shouldn’t use Dano or Dev Ed?

I did a Dev Ed VM and there are a few minor differences, and some programs, protocols, and drivers added and or updated.

Which ones does BONE work with or not work with, and are there any tradeoffs with BONE?

And with UI, does Dano have the weird ugly UI? Can that be turned off?

I’m thinking of trying to use Developer’s since it seems to have more up to date drivers and format support. However, I did a lot of setup on my Pro machine and don’t want to go through all that testing if there will be some dealbreaker.

1 Like
2

MAX works with more than 4GB Ram and has most compatibility

3

Dev Ed and Max are based off R5.03
Dano is a pre-release of a R5.1/R6/whatever; its not something easy to work out

MAX4 has various modifications that let it run on newer hardware. You can do this to normal R5 or Dano if you want, but it can be hard to even get booted in the first place sometimes.

Dano has BONE already, it can be installed on the other two. Some apps, some drivers don’t work with it; also many apps you build on it cannot run on normal R5. Newer means 2005/6, not 2024.

If you have Pro installed and running, ignore Dev Ed and Max.

4

I can make Professional into Max?

Developer’s edition seems to have some newer formats built in, I was setting up a OS/2 BeOS dual boot on a laptop so need to reinstall anyway with this particular setup.

Also, what does Dano add? I suppose I could set up a virtual machine to check, but mainly I posed the question for compatibility concerns.

1 Like
5

DevEd and Max are “distributions” of BeOS based on the last official release (5.0.3) + various apps, patches, drivers, and things backported from Haiku and other places. For example they include the kernel patches to allow running on machines with SSE2 instruction set, and the RAM limiting bootloader for machines with more than 1GB of RAM.

They also include BONE, because really no one wants to use BeOS without that.

As a result, they are a good choice if you’re trying to run BeOS on some modern hardware, where it would be difficult to get the official version up and running (you need to find all the needed drivers and patches and everything all by yourself). But they may give a better impression of BeOS than what was released officially.

Dano is a leaked version of the last work in progress from Be when they decided to stop working on a desktop OS. It has a few additional APIs that Be engineers were working on at the time. Of course, being an unofficial leaked version, it didn’t go fully through the quality insurance checks at Be, and may have more bugs than the other ones.

6

The input server in Dano is buggy. It registers phantom mouse movement. Or maybe it is some other driver. All I know is I ported my palmos graffiti style gesture based input add-on to Zeta/Dano and it worked poorly because the mouse tracking is horribly broken.

They also changed the way BMessages work. The format is different. So if you take a serialised BMessage I believe it is not compatible between BeOS R5 and Dano. The app server also uses BMessages in a slightly different way, not needing to deserialise them before reading the data.

There was a good thread on OSNews where Dianne Hackbourne talked about the differences. She was specifically talking about Zeta, but that is based on Dano so it applies equally.

7

Do you have a link to that thread?
UPD found it myself in the comments section here: Send Messages in a Post PostMessage() API – OSnews

8

Why do most not want to use BeOS without BONE?

Dev Ed already includes BONE?

Thanks for that explaination.

9

net_server is not particularly reliable, particularly with faster networking. 56k modem or 256k DSL was pretty much the norm; and 100mbit NICs were fast back then; whereas there are gigabit ethernet drivers available for BeOS (for older Intel, Realtek and Broadcom cards) and my basic cable package is 500/50 now…

Dev Ed, from memory, does not include BONE

Not sure about Max.

10

I see. Thanks. I may stick with Professional then, but if I have trouble it seems like developers has a bunch of fixes built in.

11

Dev was mainly a distro with dev tools.

Max was a more extended complete community-based OS based on BeOS Personal Edition. You could boot it independently without a host OS. You didn’t get the commercial software included with the Pro Edition. You got more updated patches to boot and install on various Intel-compatible processors from CD.

So, you don’t need the Personal Edition distro variation that required a host OS. Nor do you need the Dev Edition distro.

The Dano-related distributions like Zeta. Dano provided the newer rewritten and/or improved Beos 5.x/6.x APIs, new OpenGL kit, and BONE. Certain API and kernel changes may contain bugs and stability issues.

Zeta started providing more packaging with printing, multiuser support, multimonitor, drivers, etc.

Most of the newer distros were moving away from floppy disc booting requirements to CD booting. Also, removing the need for a host OS to boot and/or install.

2 Likes
12

The main trial with BeOS in general these days is finding some modernish hardware that is compatible. It is really picky about what it wants to support and so anything vaguely past the Pentium 4 era starts to get exponentially more complex to get working. Let’s also not get started on PowerPC.

13

Intel 9xx chipset Core/Core2 is basically the absolutely and utter newest you can run on. But there’s no drivers for the graphics chipsets; so you need a graphics card.

There are about five PCI Express graphics cards with drivers; the Matrox G550 probably being the easiest to find; but even that isn’t that common anymore.

You need the RAM limiting bootloader unless you physically have >1GB memory, and if you go >2Ghz, the cpu_fix driver to actually have any form of timing.

Those chipsets have HDA audio for which there is also no driver; so you need a soundcard. Hopefully you still have PCI slots, cause I don’t know if there’s a single PCIE soundcard with drivers - although BeOS had more functional USB audio drivers than Haiku does right now. Audigy2s are good but the later ones use a cut down chipset that doesn’t have drivers.

Onboard NIC might be good, though my machine from that era has an onboard Broadcom that should be supported but never appears in Devices; I have the exact same chipset on a PCIE card which works 100%. Most onboards from that era are from the three gigabit families with R5 drivers.

Also, it’s just easier to stick with PS2 input. I still have a nice Microsoft PS2 wireless setup that works perfectly.

14

BeOS seems to work fine on P43/45 chipsets. As long as the motherboard has a setting for MPS. You will need to change other settings as well. I also noticed with the ram limiter, anything above 2GB causes a problem.

I have an MSI P45 board that has the settings, and has 4 pci slots. A promise ultra TX2 is necessary as well, so maybe the 945 chipsets have functional IDE? For graphics, there are drivers for some Radeon cards, idk how much better an x700 is than a g550 if at all.

I’m using an x300 though, as the 700 breaks Terminal for some reason.

15

I’d need to check the chipset on my machine, but it can put the first SATA port in to IDE Emulation mode which works perfectly; but it also has real IDE too. I use a SATA SSD.

The Radeon and Geforce cards that have BeOS drivers are much faster if you dual boot the machine, but probably no faster in BeOS than the G550. They’re many, many generations newer but also much harder to find.

17

I guess I got lucky with the video cards I’ve found. I am dual/tri/sept booting on the desktop, so did want the faster graphics. Although Windows is the only one that would be improved by it.

18

How does one map out memory?

19

DevEd22-cocobean

BeOS DevEd 2.2.4

A little bit more info. If I remember correctly, when BeOS DevEd ended users migrated moreso to BeOS Max as dev/users still wanted a freely distributable bootable “self-hosted” Live CD distro versus the “licensed non-redistributable” BeOS R5 Pro Edition. BeOS Max included most of the software tools from DevEd.

DevEd 1.1 contained these apps;

  • BePDF
  • BeShare
  • CL-Amp v371
  • Helios
  • Mozilla web browser (12-05-2002)
  • NetPenguin 1.64
  • PPPoE
  • SpLocale
  • Storage Volume Monitor (SVM)
  • VesaAccepted 1.1
  • vlc 0.4.4
  • VNCViewer
  • WindowShade 5.0.1

Screensaver:

  • OpenBeOS

DevEd 2.2.4 contained:

Apps:

 ATIVideo             Ghostscript                         pWarpConfig
'Audio&vidéo'         Graphic                             QuickLaunchPeople
 autostart           'Guido 1.0'                          RobinHood
 Beezer               hfa384x-0.0.7                       SB16
'BeFull 0.04'         HotEdit_x86                         Server
 BeHappy              HotLauncher_x86                     SpLocale
 BeNES-050            Jeux                                StickIt
 BeNoPPP              JoystickUtilizer                    SVM
 BePDF               'LnLauncher 1.1'                     TAResizer3-2
 BePrinter           'Macromedia Flash Player for BeOS'   TaskManager
 BeS9x_1.41-1_bin     MemoChip86                          uninstall
 BitTorrent           MinimizeAll                        'USB Commander'
 Capture              MPlayerStarter                      USBDeskbar
 cdrdao.BEOS          NoIP_Client                         VesaAccepted
 ClipUp               nplay-0.0.3-beta                    VNC-Server0.1
 dosbox              'Open Sum-It v0.1'                   VNCviewer
 Download-Agent       People                              VNCViewer.net_server
 EndSession.BeOS      People_v2.4_Bin-FR                  VorbisToolsExes
 exposure             People.iro                          WorkspaceSwitcher
 FilWip               PrintQueManager                     ZooKeeper.zip
'FormatFloppy v1.1'  'ProcessController ƒ'

Packages:

CircusLinux      Mozilla              SampleStudio
 4Wins              CLAmp            Much                 Sanity
 AbiSuite           ColdCut          NetCount             Seeker
 APlayer            CoolCat0.6       Pe                   Sequitur
 ArtPaint           CPU_fix          Peek                 SimpleBackup
 Batterie           DarkSite         Perl                 SoundPlay
 Bcc3               DeluxeSnake      PFS                  SpicyKey
 BeAccessible       Dev              php                  StampTV
 BeAIM              DivX             prep_Am              Starfighter
 Beandsee           DVDRip           prep_dev             Themestris
 BeBreakOut         Easel            prep_documentation   TuxPaint
 BeFinancial        ePicture         prep_games           Vision
 BeGet              Globe            prep_graphics        Vlc
 BeLines            Gogo             prep_internet        VNCServer
 BeMSN             'Helios 1.72b5'   prep_media           X11
 BePacDeluxe        Invaders         prep_Net             Xcalc
 BePhotoMagic       Kedit            prep_office          XGalaga
 BePuyo             KernelAmd        prep_system          Xitami
 BeShare            LameGUI          prep_utils           Xitami_Startup
 BeSreenCapture     Mahjongg         Python               YahooMessenger
 Betris             MailIt           Refraction
 Blender            MeTOS            Resourcer

Extras:

  • B-Moggie
  • BamBam
  • BeTheme
  • Dynamic Composer 0.2
  • Firefox
  • Ghostscript 8.15
  • GutenPrint 5.0.0rc1
  • MidiSynth
  • Netswitch
  • Personal Studio 1.5
  • Realplayer
  • SpiceyKeys
  • Zeta OSS scripts

Games:

  • aba_be_alone
  • BugSquish
  • Defendguin
  • ElastoMania
  • lbreakout
  • Lingua (French/German)
  • Netpenguin 1.64
  • PowerManga
  • SkyORB VR 2002
  • SuperTux
  • Technoball
  • TicTacToe
  • VisualBoyAdvance-1.7.1
  • Windows Shade 5.0.1
  • WSControl 0.5

Demos:

  • Iterview
  • Kaleidoscope
  • Mandelbrot
  • Stars
Release Note  BeOS Developer Edition 2.2

System

- Installation Boot-CD + live cd
- Standard Installation resolution is 600x400 Pixel
- Include BeOS Update 5.0.3 and FTP security Patch
- Include the Locale Tracker 1.3.5 New FS + Tracker fr
- Include BeOS Developer Tools 
- Include the ProcessController 3.1
- Athlon / Athlon XP SSE Kernel (optional in setup)
- Pentium 4 SSE Kernel (optional in setup)
- Standard Kernel without SSE for all other CPUs
- IDE replacement driver 0.5b for UltraDMA 100/133
- Include Pulse 1.04 Replacement for AMD Processors
- Include APM-Driver to use power management functions in a notebook PC or an ATX PC
- We make a Menu-Link Development
- Change the Package Builder Icon from Applications to Development
- Change the BeIDE Icon from Applications to Development
- Change the Terminal Icon from Applications to Development
- New Uninstall Applications in Preferences
- Added some BeOS Links to Netpositive and Mozilla
- Add a Printer for Write PDF Documents
- Add .profile and .dircolors Script for Bash Shell 
- Change some ugly Icons
- Add more new Fonts

Translators

- removed the GIF Translator 1.3 and added the GIF Translator from Haiku
- Add PSDTranslator
- Add ICOTranslator
- Add PCX Translator
- Add Word Translator
- Add Excel Translator
- and all others translators created by Haiku

Changes in BeOS System Structure

. Create "/boot/apps/autostart" for the Autostart Folder
- Create "/boot/develop/experimental" directory for experimental application/code 
- Create "/boot/develop/sample-code" directory for source code
- Create "/boot/home/config/logfiles"  for the Logfiles (Install/Uninstall)
- Create "/boot/home/media" for Media Files
- Create "/boot/home/documents" for own Documents
- Create "/boot/home/downloads" for Download Files
- Remove not used Apps Links in /boot/apps

System Tools

- The mew Mozilla 1.8c - very fast on BeOS!
- BeShare 2.14 to share your application with all beos users. The best share utility
- NetPenguin 1.64 - FTP Client  
- PDF Writer1.5b2 - Write PDF Documents
- BePDF Reader 0.9.4b1 (libxpdf 0.93/6, libfreetype2.1.2, liblayout 1.3.0) - Read PDF Documents
- Helios 1.7Final5 CD/DVD Writer Application - burn it baby
- CDR-Tools-1.8 (mkhybrid, cdrecord, readcd, isodump, isovfy, isoinfo) 
- Un/Packer: LHA 1.14i, Unzip 5.50, bzip2 1.01, UnRAR 3.0
- BeOS VNCviewer R6 an server
- wget 1.5.2 - Capture Websites
- w3m 0.1.10 - Telnet Browser
- ssh 1.2.26 Client, scp, ssh-keygen, sshd Deamon
- Cron and Crontab 
- PGP 5.0i - command line tool  
- cpuid - CPU Information
- Space & SVM Storage Volumes Monitor 1.1.1 (svm must be activatet in apps) 
- WindowShade 5.0.1 - change your windows color

Driver
Now we have the important Video Drivers: ATI, Matrox and Nvidia!

Graphics Driver
- VesaAccepted-1.1 
- NVidia Family
 	RIVA 128, RIVA 128ZX, RIVA TNT, RIVA TNT2, RIVA TNT2 Ultra, 	
 	RIVA TNT2 Vanta, RIVA TNT2 M64, RIVA TNT2 Aladdin, GeForce 256,
 	GeForce 256 DDR, GeForce2 MX, GeForce2 GTS, GeForce2 Ultra,GeForce3 ...,
	GeForce4,GeForce4 MMX,GeForce FX,Quadro, Quadro2 MXR, Quadro2 Pro, 
- Matrox Family
 	(G100, G200, 
	G400, G400MAX, G450 and 
	G550 cards
- ATI Radeon Family
	plain Radeon (i.e. before the numbering started) 
	Radeon 7000, Radeon 7000 VE, PCI-ID 5159 
	Radeon VE 64 MB, PCI-ID 5159 
	Radeon 7500, Radeon 8500 (64 MB) 
	Radeon All-in-Wonder 8500 (128 MB), PCI-ID 514c 
	Hercules Radeon 8500LE 
	Radeon 8500LE, Radeon 8500 (64 MB), PCI-ID 514c 
	Radeon Mobility 8 MB, Radeon Mobility 32 MB, PCI-ID 4c59 
	IBM Thinkpad T30 (Radeon 7500 Mobility) 
	Radeon 7500 Mobility (64 MB) 
	Dell Inspiron 8100 (Radeon 7500 Mobility, 64 MB), PCI-ID 4c57 
	Radeon 9000pro (no multi-monitor support), PCI-ID 4966 
- Trident 
	Blade3D/MVP4 driver for use with another Trident video chipset
	CyberBlade i7, CyberBlade i1, CyberBlade e4
	Blade3D 9880, Blade3D/MVP4, Blade3D/ProMedi
- S3 
	Trio64(V+ and V2/[GX,DX]) Graphics Driver
Filesystem
- ISO 9660 Driver with multi-session support
Network
- Realtek Realtek RTL8139 Family Driver
- PPPoE (ADSL) Drivers
- CAPI Driver for AVM B1 ISDN Card  
Sound
- C-Media CMI8338/8738-based sound card device driver
- Ensoniq AudioPCI ES1370 driver
- AC97 sound driver for certain Intel and compatible chipsets
	SiS 735 Chipset (SiS 7012), Intel 440MX Chipset (82443MX), Intel 810 Chipset (ICH), Intel 810E Chipset (ICH)
   	Intel 810E2 Chipset (ICH2), Intel 815 Chipset (ICH), Intel 815E Chipsets (ICH2), Intel 815EG Chipset (ICH2)
   	Intel 815EP Chipset (ICH2), Intel 815G Chipset (ICH), Intel 815P Chipset (ICH), Intel 820 Chipset (ICH), Intel 820E Chipset (ICH2)
   	Intel 830MP (ICH3-M), Intel 840 Chipset (ICH), Intel 845 Chipset (ICH2), Intel 845E Chipset (ICH4), Intel 845G Chipset (ICH4)
	Intel 845GL Chipset (ICH4), Intel 850 Chipset (ICH2), Intel 850E Chipset (ICH2), Intel 860 Chipset (ICH2)
   	Intel E7500 Chipset (ICH3), Intel E7500 Chipset (ICH3-S)
	The driver may work with the following chipsets:
   	AMD 8111, AMD 768, Nvidia nForce AC97, VIA chipsets are not supported.

Media

- HybridDivx-1.3.0.4 
	Decoding Support: MS-MPEG V2 [MP42], MS-MPEG V3 [MP43], DivX Low-Motion [DIV3], DivX 	
	High-Motion [DIV4], OpenDivx [DIVX], Divx 5.0 [DX50], and XviD [XVID] 
	Encoding Support: MP43, DIV3, and DIV4. The included ASFViewer (not a codec) can play 
	some ASF, WMV, ASX, etc. 
- Codec: MPEG-1 Video Decoder (better)
- Screensaver: Matrix 1.1
- Screensaver: OpenBeOS 2.0 
- Screensaver: Nebular (cool Bump Effect, test it)
- Video Lan Client 0.4.4 -> Play DVD, SVCD, VCD, DivX 
- CL-Amp 3.7.1 Music Player like WinAmp for MP3 and more
- Add Sample Sounds in /home/media/sounds
- Add Sample Midis in /home/media/midi
- Add Sample Backgrounds in /home/media/backgrounds

Development

- New GNU Version 2.95.3
- the BeIDE 
- the PackageBuilder for pkg Packages
- SpLocale 1.3.3 with tools: LocalePrefs and LocaleEdit 
- All the tools to build OpenTracker (beres and libs)
- BeOS R5 Sample Code in /boot/develop/sample-code
- ld -> gcc linker: updated version to properly link apps with our libc library 
- jam 2.4 build tool: needed to build the source tree for openbeos
- cvs 1.1 Version Control: access the CVS source code repository 
- Reveng 0.9.9 is a disassembler for BeOS
- more Tools under /boot/develop/tools:
	Perl 5.6.1, autoconf 2.53, automake 1.6.2, bc 1.06, bison 1.35, diffutils 2.8.1
	fileutils 2.8.1, gettext 0.11.3, libiconv 1.8, libtool 1.4.2, make 3.79.1
	ncurses 5.2, ylib 1.1.4

Hints for Developer

Please use SPLocale for different Language Support!
See Documentation in "/boot/apps/SpLocale" 

Please publish your future BeOS Application with the PackageBuilder (in the Development Menu) 
to use the new uninstall function.

Thanks and much fun 
Beos DevEd2 Team
http://www.beosfrance.com

NOTE: CodeWarrior was used for a more professional-level cross-platform development tool environment similar to Borland C++, Think C++ / Symantec C++, and Microsoft’s Visual C++. Most devs started migrating to GCC since this was freely distributable and widely used on NeXT/MacOS X/BSD/Linux/Windows cross-platform development environments.

SIDENOTE: BeProfiler 0.9.1 - Code profiler for BeOS and the Metrowerks compiler. Collects data for a total of 50,000 function calls, 10 threads and 200 functions per run.

1 Like
20

BeIDE == Codewarrior.

21

Just obtain info on Haiku’s memory system resource allocation (i.e. versus BeOS R5 memory mapping and allocation).

See:

For starters, you’ll want to get the actual numbers on the minimum/maximum physical and virtual memory mappable and usable by the OS and applications for both BeOS R5 and Haiku R1b5 x32/x64.

BeOS 5.0.3/Haiku utility:

  • listarea > MyFile