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I ran BeOS for almost a year around that time. I remember it as fairly stable and packed with neat little features that made it feel lean and modern. Then I sta

I ran BeOS for almost a year around that time. I remember it as fairly stable and packed with neat little features that made it feel lean and modern. Then I started to get disappointed that the community didn't seem to be growing fast enough... It felt a bit like computing while stranded on a desert island

KMag 12y ago
I was tripple-booting Linux, Win2k, QNX, and often booting the BeOS demo from floppy. The BeOS driver for my 3c905 Ethernet card was buggy and about every other morning I'd wake up to find a dialog to the effect of "Your network driver has crashed. Click OK to restart the driver." It stunk to have a poor driver, but it was really cool that a bad driver didn't take down the system. A couple years later, I had a CD-R with some of my old financial records on it that got corrupted and would kernel panic Linux, Win2k, and OS X. These days, DVD and CD drivers should really be in user space. Though, I was playing around with semaphores and found a way to reliably kernel panic BeOS, though the exact same source ran perfectly on Linux. Enough kernel panics and I slowly got filesystem corruption. One morning I woke up to my disk light being on. It spun all night and wore a visible track into the coating of that floppy. Both the floppy drive and the floppy were ruined. I used the vendor's version of tar to back up my data before reinstalling the OS. That's when I learned that all of the NetPositive browser bookmarks were stored as zero-sized files with the links in metadata that wasn't preserved by tar. When resizing the partition once, I learned that non-tar-preserved metadata was also what kept the userspace drivers from showing up in the BeOS task bar. As much as it would have been cool to have OS X based on BeOS, QNX was much lighter weight and robust. Plus, the QNX Photon GUI subsystem was like X11 and Synergy on steroids. OS X is a lot of things, but the Xnu kernel is quite heavy, and it's not clear that it's possible to implement Mach ports in a lightweight manner. Both BeOS and QNX show it's possible to have a light weight high performance kernel that's isolated from most driver bugs.
- A_COMPUTER 12y ago
  Haha, I was doing the same thing in college. It was a great time for messing with OSes. I started running BeOS and QNX on a daily basis because for some reason my machine started crashing in Windows and I needed to get work done. BeOS beat out Linux because the install was simple, it booted fast, and the desktop was a hell of a lot nicer. People forget this, but Sun created a Java runtime for BeOS before Linux. I agree about QNX though, it wasn't as stylish as BeOS, but it was far more robust and polished.

KMag 12y ago

I was tripple-booting Linux, Win2k, QNX, and often booting the BeOS demo from floppy. The BeOS driver for my 3c905 Ethernet card was buggy and about every other morning I'd wake up to find a dialog to the effect of "Your network driver has crashed. Click OK to restart the driver." It stunk to have a poor driver, but it was really cool that a bad driver didn't take down the system. A couple years later, I had a CD-R with some of my old financial records on it that got corrupted and would kernel panic Linux, Win2k, and OS X. These days, DVD and CD drivers should really be in user space. Though, I was playing around with semaphores and found a way to reliably kernel panic BeOS, though the exact same source ran perfectly on Linux. Enough kernel panics and I slowly got filesystem corruption. One morning I woke up to my disk light being on. It spun all night and wore a visible track into the coating of that floppy. Both the floppy drive and the floppy were ruined. I used the vendor's version of tar to back up my data before reinstalling the OS. That's when I learned that all of the NetPositive browser bookmarks were stored as zero-sized files with the links in metadata that wasn't preserved by tar. When resizing the partition once, I learned that non-tar-preserved metadata was also what kept the userspace drivers from showing up in the BeOS task bar. As much as it would have been cool to have OS X based on BeOS, QNX was much lighter weight and robust. Plus, the QNX Photon GUI subsystem was like X11 and Synergy on steroids. OS X is a lot of things, but the Xnu kernel is quite heavy, and it's not clear that it's possible to implement Mach ports in a lightweight manner. Both BeOS and QNX show it's possible to have a light weight high performance kernel that's isolated from most driver bugs.

A_COMPUTER 12y ago
Haha, I was doing the same thing in college. It was a great time for messing with OSes. I started running BeOS and QNX on a daily basis because for some reason my machine started crashing in Windows and I needed to get work done. BeOS beat out Linux because the install was simple, it booted fast, and the desktop was a hell of a lot nicer. People forget this, but Sun created a Java runtime for BeOS before Linux. I agree about QNX though, it wasn't as stylish as BeOS, but it was far more robust and polished.