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.

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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 82) 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 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).