BeOS Personal Edition

BeOS is one of several

operating systems in the market today. Being a relatively new operating

system, its user base is still low. With Personal Edition 5, Be has given

everyone a chance to check out their operating system for free. This version

can be freely downloaded from www.be.com.

The operating system is

available as a single self-extracting EXE file. The file size is

comparatively small, about 43 MB, considering the fact that it contains the

entire OS. This is actually a bare bones installation, and consists of a few

simple applications like Web browser, text editor, mail client, etc.

Additional applications for BeOS are available for download separately.

There’s also lots of free software for BeOS on the Internet. Sites like

www.bebit.com are loaded with such goodies.

BeOS is labeled as a

multimedia OS and is meant for intensive design work. It can work with

audio, video, image, and Internet-based applications. Be claims that the

full OS can handle file sizes in millions of gigabytes in real time.

Installation was one of the

smoothest we’ve seen. You can run the install through Win 9x or NT. It

doesn’t need a partition of its own, and lives happily in a 512 MB folder

under Windows. Installation takes roughly 15 minutes. The beauty of this OS

is that it doesn’t interfere with your current operating system. It adds

an icon on your Windows desktop, clicking on it restarts your machine into

BeOS.

Hot features

BeOS automatically detects

all your hardware and installs the necessary drivers for it. No user input

is required for this. However, hardware support is stingy. For example, some

of the latest 3D cards, like the Creative GeForce are not supported. We ran

a couple of applications including Gobe Productive (reviewed on page 122)

on BeOS Personal Edition. The performance was okay. Nothing to break into a

jig about. But then the performance penalties of running over Windows needs

to be taken into account. For a technology demonstrator–something’s you

can play and explore, before deciding whether you want to go in for the

full, priced product. This is a neat package. If you decide that this is

something you like, switch to the full commercial version available from GT

enterprises, Bangalore (www.gtcdrom.com).