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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.