BeOS/Haiku/Zeta stories (share your cool or weird experiences)

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#1

Hi everyone.

I started this toipic because I have a story to share regarding my experience with BeOS. Can’t reproduce with Haiku since I have no CD/DVD drive in my current system.

Long time ago, I had BeOS R5 Personal Edition installed on my Pentium MMX 166 computer. My computer had the crappiest, cheapest 24x CDROM drive ever. It would fail with almost every CD (either original or CD-R). Copying or installing something was almost impossible, although the stupid drive worked way better in rainy days or with hight humidity (!). Yes, it’s weird, but I swear I’m not making this thing up. On dry days, I wasn’t able to do a thing wtih the stupid drive.

Enter BeOS, that wonderful yet failed and underappreciated OS. I usually booted BeOS and used Tracker to copy the files. It used to fail too, but at least I was able to complete the task to some extent, then try again and copy the rest of the files, and so on until I had all the content copied.

Isn’t that strange? All I can say is that BeOS saved me form despair many, many times. Was BeOS doing something different with my drive? I don’t know. But BeOS does what Windon’t :rofl:

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#2

I was setting up a BeOS Pro 5.03 system back around 2003 I think, for our radio station. I accidentally opened a long list of MP3 files at the same time in SoundPlay. It played all of them simultaneously. That was jaw-dropping, since at the time I was only familiar with Windows 98 and DOS. It was on a Dell Pentium3 500mhz desktop with 256mb RAM. Could not believe what I saw. Windows would have locked up if trying to play far less files.

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#3

Back in the CD rip to mp3 days, the Cure disc 4:13 Dream had a copy protection scheme which didn’t allow the disk to be recognised by the mainstream OS’s. Couldn’t even play the disc using standard CD-Player software, and no CD ripping tool for those platforms worked since the disk layout was quirky. Not a problem for BeOS R5, it mounted the audio disc immediately and the songs were available as standard PCM 16-bit WAV files. Easy.

At least twice on my MacBookPro a windows update stuffed the EFI bootloader to boot Windows in bootcamp (in configurations where the NTFS bootcamp partition was not first or second - later on I discovered this was due to a fix for a Dell BIOS bug, which fixed Dell machines but broke Mac’s with windows on 3rd partition). Ubuntu in 2018 also stuffed up the boot sequence by installing Grub partition on USB stick so needed USB stick to boot Windows from hard disk. Anyhow, windows recovery boot STILL doesnt allow mounting Fat32 EFI partition in R/W mode, and for the last 6-8 years, every Mac OSX update seems to remove more and more admin features like mounting EFI or NTFS partitions in R/W mode. All these mainstream OS’s seem to be on the path of limiting access to files in order to protect the user from themselves. Anyhow, Haiku to the rescue, mounted the EFI partition and restored a working bootloader. Several times.

At work I had a 8gb log file (text) which I couldn’t examine with popular text editors on Windows. StyledEdit although slow did the job.

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#4

My pc back in 2000 didnt had a compatible sound card, so i was looking for a cheap (ideally free) supported pci soundcard as a solution.
I have mentioned this for my friends and one said: snap, i have a SB Live but it is broken and not working.
I nevertheless asked him to give it to me and i have received it for free. A closer inspection did not shows any damage on the card, but i was told it is silent / non-working.
I have installed it in my pc, and yep, it was silent in windows and in BeOS, but on the second boot to BeOS the card magically started to work both in BeOS and in other operating systems.
Never had any other issue anymore with that card. Miracle.

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#5

I notice less stressed out feeling when using Haiku & Zeven OS compared to using other open source OSes. :thinking:

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#6

Just tonight, I was scouring StackExchange to find out how I can set a MIMEtype from the command line. All the great gurus there said that it was basically impossible, you are at the system’s mercy because MIME is an abstraction that doesn’t really exist. Lots of talk about web servers and magic numbers.

On Haiku? Trivial. Use the settype command.

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#7

yes, that isn’t incorrect as such. Linux for example does not save the MIME type at all, only where it is mandatory, say mails and web servers, it employs a best guess, plus web server configs.

Haiku on the other hand saves the minetype in the attributes of a file, it can also guess, but the webbrowser can save the minetype it got (aswell as other apps saving files). so no further guessing is required after that. The next application that needs it can use the correct type, this also makes it possible to just set the correct type indeed :slight_smile:

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