I do have a tendency to try out different esoteric operating systems every now and then, the last of which was Rhapsody. It’s a shame that the Rhapsody entry was lost after my hard drive crashed, but I’m now trying out BeOS. I haven’t used BeOS since I was in high school, but was plesantly surprised by BeOS Max. BeOS Max is a repackaged version of BeOS 5 Personal Edition–released not very long before Be went under and was acquired by Palm.
The funny thing I noticed was that it’s surprisingly usable, much like Mac OS X. While it isn’t quite Unix, it’s surprisingly similar to it in many ways. I’ve got a shell and a terminal, even though there aren’t tools such as ifconfig, but I can use it for stuff like wget and gcc. I was also able to find fairly recent copies of FireFox and Thunderbird, along with a fairly recent terminal emlator and was pretty happy with that. VLC plays the latest anime just fine. It’s looking like this could actually be as usable as your typical linux distribution, though I’d probably need to add more things, such as some sort of X server.
In fact, the only thing that has been annoying the hell out of me is the fact that I can’t figure out how to take screenshots of it. I found a nifty app that will make movies of stuff you’re doing, but not screenshots. When I figure it out, I might just post some 
.
Update: Okay, so who would have known that taking a screenshot was as easy as hitting “print screen” ?
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Print screen… the exact same method used in Windows.
Bill, perhaps it’s time to take a vacation.
Congrats on getting Beotch working, my coworker Dean tries to pimp it out fairly often.
So, what are the benefits of this Beos install to a custom Linux install. Boot time and?
Comment by Jeff — 6/23/2004 @ 11:23 pm