Be Bounces Back With the 'FreeBe'

Elegant Structure

Release 5 of BeOS looks similar to its predecessor, Release 4.5 (see the review, link at right). You get the same clean (or spartan, depending on your point of view) interface, with only a few changes. Those include the useful Recent Documents and Recent Applications items for the Deskbar (similar to the Documents item in Windows), and "spring-loaded" folders (hold a desktop object over a folder, and a menu of the folder contents will pop up, allowing you to easily navigate the folder without opening multiple subfolder windows).

With BeOS Personal Edition, Be bundles a CD-burning application, various multimedia players, and Internet apps such as the PoorMan Web server, a Telnet server, the NetPositive Browser, and an e-mail client. The Internet programs are adequate, but they're limited in functionality. For example, the NetPositive browser does an acceptable job of rendering basic HTML pages, but it fails to offer Java support (no Java Virtual Machine is yet available for BeOS), and it chokes on JavaScript forms. Also, the BeMail client supports only a single POP3 and SMTP account, so you'll want to upgrade to something better. I downloaded Beta 7 of the excellent Opera Web browser (special for BeOS); several good e-mail clients are available for BeOS as well.

A Few Rough Edges

Hardware support is improved over Release 4.5, and BeOS Personal Edition handles some IEEE 1394 cards, wheel mice, PC Cards, and color printers. But printer support is still fairly limited; PostScript, Hewlett-Packard PCL 3, and Epson Stylus are the only choices, and network printing requires AppleTalk.

Also, while Be says that Release 5 supports hardware-accelerated OpenGL 3D, the company doesn't yet have drivers for all graphics boards. (OpenGL is an application programming interface for creating three-dimensional images.) Drawing in 3D is highly processor-intensive, which is why using 3D hardware rendering engines on video cards is of real benefit.

BeOS Personal Edition supports read and write access to FAT16 and FAT32 partitions, and read access to Windows 2000 NTFS 5 and Linux Ex2fs drives. Users who might have upgraded to Windows 2000 or NT for the increased security those OSs offer should note that BeOS still has no log-in facility or any kind of security, so by installing BeOS Personal Edition on a Windows 2000 machine, you will open the data on the NTFS partition to anyone with physical or network access to the system.

Those small criticisms aside, there's not much to complain about in BeOS Personal Edition. It's free, it's fast, and it's rock solid. Also, the ease of installation should help to entice more converts to this elegant object-oriented operating system. Check it out--you won't regret downloading it.

There will also be a version of Release 5 called BeOS Professional Edition, which will be available on CD-ROM on April 15 through Gobe Software. Priced at $69.95, that version will offer additional features, including multimedia software such as RealPlayer G2 and Intel's Indeo 5 video encoder.