I have had a totally different experience with BeOS.  I started playing with
it at version 3.x, they upgraded me to version 4.0 and then 4.5 at no cost
at all. J Souto is correct in that I could never create a boot disk from DOS
per the instructions - but then in that I was using a legal copy that came
with the boot disk that was not a problem.  I was able to create a boot disk
while running BeOS - but I am digressing.

BeOS does have limited support for hardware (video, nic, scsi controllers).
It likes IDE best of all.  I found that by placing my cdrom as the slave
device on the primary ide port and the hard drive as the master, the boot
diskette could find the cdrom.  As J Souto pointed out - on a system running
Windows, you run the BeOS cd which starts a special version of Partition
Magic (this version is currently not included on the regular PM product).
PM creates a partition for BeOS.  You then reboot with the BeOS floppy and
it should take about 10-15 minutes at most to load the whole operating
system - with no questions asked.  BeOS includes a boot manager.  After
installation, take out the boot diskette and reboot.  BeOS is fast.  It
finishes booting and is ready to go long before Win98 can ever get to the
logon screen.

For particulars - BeOS has declared themselves not to be in direct
competition with Microsoft, but rather have selected a niche market of
digital media.  It excels in graphics and audio.  One demo they include is a
rotating cube.  You can drag and drop movies onto each face of the cube.  As
the cube continues to rotate, the movies continue to play.

BeOS includes a full C++ development system.  BeOS is net-workable, but with
limits.  Version 4.5 allows you to see a Microsoft network (TCP/IP only).

BeOS is capable of addressing something like 6x10 to the 18th megabytes of
hard disk space - if you could ever find that much!  In the BeOS Bible,
Scott Hacker compares that to all the data ever created by man (books,
movies, music) and BeOS could store that and have lots of room left over.

BeOS started on a PowerPC, moved to Mac and then to the Intel Pentium.
Apple has cut BeOS out of any specifications on the newer Macs, and
therefore in the future only Intel Pentiums will be supported.

I have not done any "work" with BeOS at this point - mostly just play.

Bottom line IMHO is that one person's bad experience and one person's good
experience does not make for a good sampling.  I like BeOS.  I hope they
make it.  But like other OS's of the past, it will require 3rd party
applications.  Without that they are doomed.  It is a fast clean OS with no
baggage to carry from previous attempts or other OSs.  Their price is good
(~$69 US).  Getting 2 versions worth of upgrades for free is unique in this
industry.

My $.02

David V. Fansler
Network Administrator
AutoCyte, Inc.
336-222-9707 Ext. 261
dfansler@autocyte.com <mailto:dfansler@autocyte.com> 
Now Showing! www.mindspring.com/~dfansler
<http://www.mindspring.com/~dfansler>   Updated July 13, 1999


                -----Original Message-----
                From:   Stuart O'Reilly [mailto:pig@AR.COM.AU]
                Sent:   Friday, September 03, 1999 2:24 AM
                To:     PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
                Subject:        Re: OT. BeOS

                Thanks for that, If i decide to ever try it i'll keep that
in mind.
                Regards
                Stuart

                Jose Luiz Pinto Souto wrote:

                > Yeah,
                >
                > A friend lend me the 4.5 and I cleaned 500Mbytes of my
second HD
                > to try the x86 version.
                >
                snipped
                >
                > Well, I give the CD back to my friend and start to learn
Linux.
                >
                > Sorry for my english and maybe this why this attempt
didn«t worked.
                >
                > cheers,
                > J Souto
                >