Technically, it’s not a Be topic, since this series is on what unofficial distributions or releases came in between Dano and Haiku alpha1, but I’ve published the first review out of three on BeOS MAX.
The other two will be Phosphorus and Zeta (which I’ll only be covering one iteration of).
Like all my reviews so far (Haiku Beta 1 and R3 - Dano), these are screenshot heavy and really long, so definitely be prepared to wait for the page to load and for a lot of reading! Both the main part and the second part on installing it are available on Medium:
I’ll be posting updates to this series in this thread as I finish the other two articles, and after this, my hope is to take a look at Haiku Beta 2, and backtrack to Alpha 1 - 4(.1) from there.
Thanks, everyone; hope you enjoy reading these as much as I do writing them!
If you have a link to a working disk image or an ISO, I’ll gladly review it
Seriously, my goal is to build a real library of Be articles, so if there’s stuff I’m missing, any help is appreciated.
As for covering any built-in IDEs or messing with programs, (you’ll notice I did nothing in yab and BeXL here, or in BeIDE in the BeOS series), it’d be nice to have enough subscribers for me to put in the extra time for writing articles on those, which is what I believe these apps would need. Right now, I’m basically doing this as a fun hobby for $9 (which I greatly appreciate, but if I had more support, there’s more topics I could get into).
Okay, everyone, I got it running! I’d taken the CD burner out of the main Mac I use to run virtual machines, write reviews, etc. (replaced it with a 2nd hard drive/SSD bay), so that made getting the “Be Dev Edition” going interesting, but in the end, voila! It works.
For any other Be+Mac fans reading, a quick (and free) way to handle BIN/CUE files on Mac OS (10.3+) is to use an open source app called Burn. However, if you don’t have a CD writable on hand and a burner, there’s another way. Compile or download a pre-built version of qemu, which you’ll need to continue CD-less. The first I tried is to assign the first track/image as a floppy disk, with track 2 for the CD. However, as I might’ve guessed, this ended in a KP with the CD being unable to mount (at least on my system). It’s a long shot anyway. So, the way I’ve confirmed works (which I discovered when trying to bring R3 back to life to review it) is to create/install a second hard disk (as -hdb), initialize it (with the BeFS), mount then copy everything from the second track of the CD (I used Dano for this; R5 may work), write the boot sector and set up menu options (I usually let it wait 5 seconds), and restart from the new manual install. After that, start with the new hard disk attached only. The VM should boot up and work (be sure to boot in safe graphics mode for color).
First thing BeDE asked for is the timezone. One difference I noticed is that the background solid is set to a deep blue, which is different than what I’ve seen so far:
Anyways, proof it works is here’s the main desktop. I noticed the desktop background is the same as PhOS if I’m not mistaken, and I also noticed the about box mentions “VIMBA”.
And now that I’ve got it up and running, the only thing I could think this refers to is a fish. The release notes mention the Vimba team, but no mention on what it stands for. If anyone knows, that’d be great
It’s the default hostname for BeOS DevEd. I happen to run that when I need to test BeOS things, because it’s easier to run on my slightly too modern hardware from 2003 (I need both the Athlon XP patches and RAM limiting bootloader)
It’s largely similar to BeOS DevEd 1.1, but includes many extra packages, replaces some of the components (translators, for example) with ones from Haiku, some updated drivers, newer version of Mozilla, etc.
As for the “vimba team”, the release notes for DevEd 1.1 and 2.1 link them to beosonline.com, maybe webarchive has some information there.
I found DevEd 2.1 on a torrent. I will take an image of my 2.2 CD (if someone else has a copy of it, or even better, the original zip file, that would be great) and put them on beosarchive.
one was released to developers of the BeIA platform, and was different to the version that was leaked.
there was the Dano release that most of the post BeOS R5 versions were based off of (Zeta and PhOS)
there was the version for PowerPC, which lacked BONE, but had the new app server and all of the new control look and feel, as well as the skinning of the window tabs. Pretty sure this was built from leaked source code.
there was a least one version that was very similar to the PowerPC version (because it was built from the same source I believe.)
I used to have the IA build as I had the whole IA SDK. But I don’t know if I still have it as it was on a random CDR.
BeIA, the good old days of the internet appliance!
I have 2 machines running it, a Compaq IA-1 and a FIC Genesis 2000, the former works perfectly, the latter not so much.
