Be Bounces Back With the 'FreeBe'

Be Inc., developers of the BeOS operating system, recently decided to focus on Internet appliances with the BeIA software platform. But BeOS for PCs hasn't been abandoned. Instead, it's been updated and made easier than ever to install. And, best of all, it's available to everyone: BeOS Release 5 Personal Edition is now a free download. Be has also decided to make its desktop components--the Tracker and the Deskbar--open source, which should interest developers.

With this edition, the Be developers have managed to squeeze a modern, 32-bit operating system with multitasking capabilities into a single 44.72MB file--not much bigger than your average game demo. BeOS Personal Edition runs on any Windows 98 or 2000 system, and can be started from within Windows. It can support terabyte-size files, as many as eight processors, and as much memory as the Intel x86 hardware can handle. Not bad for a free OS.

Easy Install

I installed BeOS Personal Edition on a Compaq Deskpro Pentium III-500 PC with 128MB of memory, a 6.4GB hard drive, and both Windows 98 and Windows 2000 Professional installed. You should have about 600MB of free disk space--though not necessarily in a separate partition--to install BeOS Personal Edition. The installer creates a single 500MB file containing an image of the BeOS file system that you boot into. Of the 500MB allocated to the BeOS 5 image file, some 300MB is used for the OS components; the remaining 200MB is available for user data, within the image file. If you need more than that, you can use the included disk setup program to create new BeOS file system partitions, either by using free space on your system drive or by re-creating your Windows partitions. The extra 100MB ensures that BeOS will run without a hitch.

Installation went quickly and without problems, taking less than 15 minutes. If you've installed BeOS Personal Edition on a Windows 98 FAT32 partition, you simply click the Start BeOS Personal Edition icon that the installer creates: Doing that pushes Windows out of memory and starts BeOS Personal Edition. (You can't switch back to Windows without rebooting, however.) If you've installed the OS on a Windows 2000 partition, you'll need to create a boot floppy for BeOS.

The run-from-Windows technique allows users to try out BeOS with a minimum of setup hassles--and to use it as an easy alternative operating system for multimedia work. I found network settings particularly easy to deal with; unlike Windows, no reboot is necessary after you change them.

Despite living in an image file on a FAT32 partition, BeOS Personal Edition performed very well. The OS made Windows 98 and 2000 seem like slouches in comparison, thanks to its responsive interface and smooth multitasking. And I loved BeOS's antialiased font rendering (antialiasing smooths out curves in text and graphics by filling in jaggies with grayscale pixels). In contrast, the graphics subsystems on Linux and most forms of UNIX don't perform antialiasing.