BeOS Dano vs Dev vs Max

Be, Inc.
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Did my comment get moved? I have no clue why I asked the mapping memory question. Weird.

Anyway, I am using the ram limiter. It should be clipping the reported memory to 1GB, and it does work that way with 2GB installed. 3/4GB breaks that for some reason.

Funny you replied to this post today. I had just been testing different BeOS versions in a virtual machine. I really don’t see any need to use anything but professional 5.03, as I need nothing BONE or dano exclusive. Also they really went the ugly route with dano. The community updated versions like PhOS and others are also quite ew.

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BeOS DevEd contains patches from OpenBeOS and other sources, dozen of tools, games, and the like, patches for translating parts of the system to French, some version of OpenTracker, and much more. It’s not just development tools.

It is installable to hard disk. Its legal status isunclear at best: it is based on BeOS personal edition, but heavily patched and modified, most importantly allowing to install it to a partition instead of an image file as BeOS PE did. But it was developped after Be had abandoned distribution of BeOS, so, no one really cared.

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BeOS DevEd 1.1 and older is just BeOS with dev tools and without some of the limitations of BeOS PE.

BeOS DevEd 2 and up is a personal project of mine, when I was a teenager.
I added lot of free and/or open-source games and apps.
And then, DevEd 2.1 and 2.2 were updated using the OpenBeOS versions of everything that could work at least as well as the BeOS version.
That helped me translate or use already made translations for quite a bit of the interface.

As I’m French, it was important for me.

It’s old memories, so I’m not sure about it, but I think there was a tool to switch between English and French versions of everything, and between netserver and B0NE.

I was quite young when I done this, so I was pretty oblivious to the fact that using the name of an other (dead at the time) “distribution” of BeOS was confusing.
And other stuffs like that…

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Well, we had fun running it in the process leading up to using Haiku, so thanks for that great time we had with it! (PS, nice to see you are still around)!

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Thanks
I never really left, I always had an eye on haiku.
It reminds me of an era when computers were fun.
And since beta 4 it’s starting to make it fun again for me!

Some stuffs are rough around the edges, but it works!
Some of the fun is back, everything feels light and the OS don’t look like a bloated mess grafted on top of a command line prompt.

I still miss the incredibly efficient apps we had back in the days.
But to conform to the standards of today, especially on the web browser front, we just can’t do anything about it…

I never liked zeta’s ways, and had too many bugs with Dano, so that’s why I’ve done my Frankenstein BeOS/Haiku hybrid.

I was, and still am, a big fan of Haiku/OpenBeOS, so I was updating my sources everyday, reading the commits, building the results every couple of days, and using every bit I could.

I loved thoses days.

But it was very apparent that it was the end for BeOS.
Despite the efforts of many, and the false hope zeta provided, it was more and more difficult to make it work on newer hardware.

I had to progressively switch to Ubuntu in ~2007.

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Do you by any chance still have the original DevEd 2.x archives? The archives currently available online are repacks.

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Do you mean what I used to make the releases, or the releases themselves?

I think I still have the last release somewhere on my NAS.

It’s hard to burn on a CD nowadays, because it’s made of too images that you need to burn together on the same CD.

With Nero on windows, it’s was pretty easy using the “.cue” file, I don’t know if it’s still a thing.

It’s the same as BeOS Max I think, so I don’t think it’s a problem if you know how to boot that.

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I found it!
That was way easier than I thought.

I didn’t know it wasn’t backuped anywhere on the internet.

@PulkoMandy has backuped his, already burnt on disk, copy of 2.2.4, I don’t know if it’s the full thing, but It’s missing the alternatives kernel to work around boot up bugs on some hardware.

The 7z I linked is the 2.2.7 version.
I’m not even sure it was even released officially.

Edit: my bad it’s just the 7 of the 7z file extension. I don’t know what version this is!
But it’s not impossible it’s some pre release version.
I don’t have all the history of the releases sadly. Just this one.

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That’s amazing! Thank you so much!

Previously I was able to find some repacked versions here:

Those are the files from the “BeOS - the ultimate collection” torrent released in 2020 (though I’m not sure how reliable/safe that site is). The DevEd.txt file there says:

BeOS Developer Edition 2
========================

These files were recovered in the following ways:

  • DevEd2.1: from a torrent download, converted from Alcohol 120% to cue+iso with IsoBuster.
  • DevEd2.2: from an old CDR, converted to cue+iso with IsoBuster.

It would be great if we could recover the original archives as they once were
on www.deved2.com. If you happen to have a backup of these, please get in touch!

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These are my files from PulkoMandy's BeOS software archive as mentionned earlier in the thread. The disk images themselves should be accurate, but it’s missing the READMe with instructions to burn a disk, and it’s re-extracted from a CD for the second one, so it may not be bit-for-bit identical with what was distributed (if I remember correctly, there was no .cue file and you had to manually prepare the CD with two sessions or something like that).

I didn’t know that, that explains why we had different experiences/memories of it with cocobean. Indeed I used DevEd 2.x back then, and it is the version that got me into BeOS, so, thanks for that :slight_smile: I will copy your file to my archive with the other ones.

The original BeOS wouldn’t run on my hardware without the patches (AMD Athlon XP processor), so if that distribution hadn’t existed, maybe I would have ended up using AROS or Syllable?

This means it would be interesting to find backups of DevEd 1.x as well, being a quite different thing.

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I used deved 1.1 as a base, at it was clean, stable and worked well with my own hardware.
I never known why, but Max edition was sluggish on my computer.
That’s why I made the deved 2 initially.

I had a lot of computers, and wanted to make it compatible with all of them.

I loved collecting, repairing and using all sorts of old computers.
That helped me to choose the drivers and try to avoid any conflicts or breaking things.

I don’t think I have the original deved 1.1 backuped, and I modified my version so heavily that you really can’t just “remove what I added”.

As I said before, the last version is mainly BeOS 5 Pe (updated with the latest patched kernels, a lot of updated/added drivers), with every front-ends swapped with Haïku’s ones.

So I don’t even remember if deved 1.1 came with opentracker or the original Be one…

I’m really proud that my little distribution helped you @PulkoMandy.
I didn’t know that!
I’m reading you for so much time, that I thought you where here even before me!

Oh also, I discovered BeOS accidentally on, I think CNet, it was way lighter than Linux to download, as I was still on a dial up modem at the time.

I then used the BeOS Pe installer on my terrible Windows Me PC, and my life changed!

Strangely it was in black and white (my Sis chipset was not fully supported, and no Vesa driver in the official BeOS 5 release), but it really had my curiosity going!

And that’s how it all started for me.

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There was a VESA driver in R5, there was just no way to configure it unless you knew how - you could select the settings during boot if you hit space; and could create a text file to set it.

No way to change modes while running like Haiku’s VESA driver can,

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I seem to remember a third-party utility called VesaAccepted to work with that.

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I remember VESAme which we have in the bebytes archive, I recall hearing about VESAaccepted too

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Yeah, they both created the text file that the built in VESA driver needed.

It would be incredibly useful for emulation purposes if the much better Haiku VESA driver was backported to BeOS but I’ve no idea if it’s even practical to do so - how much have the driver interfaces changed over time would be a major part of it.

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Yeah, I actually found out some time after I had posted my comment that two of the three DevEd releases there (2.1 & 2.2.4) were from your archive, but I didn’t have time to write the update. Thanks for the clarification.

But there’s also one additional file BeOS_Boot.7z in the “BeOS Developer Edition 2.21” folder. I haven’t checked it yet, but it might be the same version as @Electronikheart shared above.

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Between 2.1 and 2.2 there is a difference in the 512MB RAM limiter usage, software, and additional artwork.

BeOS DevEd 2.2 surpasses BeOS Pro R5.0.3 without the additional commercial software licences and usage restrictions.

A high quality BeOS R5 .0.3 LiveCD distro.