Sphere478 wrote on 2022-04-03, 23:52:

davidrg wrote on 2022-04-03, 23:40:

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-04-03, 21:24:

^Which version?

I can’t seem to get it to run. Anyone else running it on socket 7? What iso did you use?

dual 133? Pentium? What mobo? I have a dual tyan I’d love to try haiku or beos out on. But it won’t boot it

The BeBox had dual PowerPC CPUs - either a 603 at 66MHz or a 603e at 133MHz. BeOS wasn't available on x86 until R3 in 1998.

For Haiku the minimum requirement is a Pentium II with 384MB of RAM. I assume its mostly so high because the installer is a live CD (IIRC once the GUI starts you get asked if you want to install Haiku or continue to the desktop). Probably once installed it would run with less.

I wonder if a 400gp would do the trick? 🤔

Only one way to be sure I suppose - put the CD (or flash drive if it can USB boot) in and see if it boots. I imagine it will fail before it gets to the desktop if it has some problem with the CPU. Digging around a bit I get the impression the 32bit version just needs a 586/Pentium possibly with MMX. I guess the RAM requirement pretty much rules out regular Pentiums but the 400GP probably stands a good chance. Would certainly be interesting to hear how it runs!

Haiku is more heavyweight that the original BeOS, it does things than the original could only dream (like scalable vector UI: fonts, icons, etc.) . For a "modern" computer that's not really a problem (and Haiku is really lightweight compared to alternatives) but may be too heavy for computers of the era.

Albeit I actually prefer the original BeOS bitmapped-looking font than the fugly DejaVu fonts 😀

haiku says something about no boot volume found, beos won't even act like a bootable cd

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-04-03, 21:24:

^Which version?

I can’t seem to get it to run. Anyone else running it on socket 7? What iso did you use?

On my K6-3 I just remember it being version 5. It was a free version that could be launched from within Windows98.
I don't seem to have anything left of it in my archived files so I can't confirm, all I have left is a faded memory.
The description posted here for version 5.0.3
https://archiveos.org/beos/
sounds like what I was running. Not sure why there's 2 versions with such a huge difference in size, but I don't seem to remember mine being a CD .iso, plus I was on dialup back then, so I probably used the smaller .exe installer and installed it from within Win98SE. It makes a 512MB image file within the Windows C: drive which contains the OS. I don't remember if you can put it on a different drive. There was a procedure to move it to it's own partition which I remember doing eventually. I don't remember if that made it separately bootable, or merely gave it the benefit of more disk space.

My system at the time was a Tyan S1590, VIA MVP3 chipset, K6-3 CPU. Video card might have been either an S3 Virge PCI or a Geforce2 MX AGP... but probably the former.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-04-04, 02:48:

haiku says something about no boot volume found, beos won't even act like a bootable cd

What kind of cd/dvd drive do you use in that machine and how much ram is installed?
Try the personal edition of BeOS, or use a boot floppy..

I still have my boxed copy of v4 I bought back in the day, I lost my v3 in the move and still have haiku on my k6 box. its fune for dabbling in, but gobe office is so clunky and there is nothing good in way of apps really.

mwdmeyer wrote on 2022-03-31, 20:57:

Apple looked to purchase BeOS over Next but they wanted too much money. Would have been interesting to see what Apple would have done with the OS.

Interesting that you should mention that, especially the "wanted too much money" part. It has been reported that Be founder Jean-Louis Gassée had said, "I've got them by the b---s, and I'm going to squeeze until it hurts.", but he was actually willing to settle for much less than they ended up paying Jobs for NeXT, and BeOS was a much more responsive, Mac-like environment, that could have been ready much more quickly, than what eventually became Mac OS X. Remember that BeOS already ran well on a number of Apple machines, as well as the Mac clones of the time, while the Public Beta release of Mac OS X wasn't ready until 2001. When the Public Beta was finally available, it was a slow, memory-hungry, rather unstable kludge on most shipping Apple hardware, and the subsequent 10.0 release wasn't much better. Really, it wasn't until 10.2, in late 2002, that it started to show some promise as a usable day-to-day OS.

I have a great deal of respect for the people of Be, Inc., because they dared to try doing things their own way. They put aside "the way it's done", and dared to innovate. That's something that I think is somewhat lacking in modern times. Even now, on hardware that is far faster, none of Apple's software is even competitive in terms of boot time.

Was NeXT really the best choice for Apple? I'm not so sure. Yes, it was better than an outright sale of the company, or getting in bed with Microsoft, but I'm not so confident about the rest.

I think Objective C from NeXT was/is good as it is still used today. They also had lots of enterprise things (WebObjects etc). I'm not sure who was better but I think NeXT wasn't a bad purchase.

mwdmeyer wrote on 2022-04-08, 06:33:

I think Objective C from NeXT was/is good as it is still used today.

Objective-C was not created at, by, or for NeXT. They selected it as their language of choice, and ultimately added to it, but they didn't own or create it.

Is there any CPU specific issues in installing BeOS on modern CPUs such as Ryzen has on installing Windows 9x?

yes, beos had troubles with newer cpus (from my old memory). haiku probably does not. I think it was ok up to P3. after that needed a patch.

BeOS needs a patch for AMD processors starting with the Athlon series.
And it needs a patch to work on machines with more than 512MB.

I've got a copy of the Be FTP server here if there are any patches released by Be that are of use. You should be able to get a copy of the personal edition from there too.