BeOS Gaining Ground

Part 4: Current Drawbacks

There are still a number of severe limitations with BeOS - most notably, spotty hardware support. On the Intel side, there is no SCSI support (although you may be able to find experimental drivers), so you'll need an IDE hard drive and CD-ROM at least. The only officially supported sound card are the SoundBlaster AWE 64 cards (there are mixed reports of the AWE32 working), OPTi931 chipset-based cards, and Yamaha YMF715 chipset-based cards. There are some experimental SoundBlaster 16 drivers out there, and reports of some PCI cards that seem to work fine. Does this sound like a Media OS yet? Not right this minute maybe, but I wouldn't worry. Be has not been working with the Intel platform for very long; they know the shortcomings, and are working to resolve them. The driving reason behind the minimal sound card support is a revised Media Kit that will find its way into the next major release later this year. Those changes should make for even better audio and sound card support in the future.

On the Macintosh side of things, none of the new G3 Macs from Apple are supported (although some G3 upgrade boards may work in otherwise supported systems). This stems from the fact that Apple no longer appears willing to share technical data about their logic boards. Apple is likely defending their turf, perhaps seeing Be as a potentially strong competitor -- after all, Apple considered buying Be to help build it's next generation operating system, opting for NeXT instead. The future of BeOS on Apple hardware looks pretty grim right now. Unless Apple changes their position or commits to an open hardware platform (or cloning), BeOS on PowerPC will fade away. Be's expansion to Intel did upset some people at first, but the move may prove vital to Be's continued existence.

For all the latest information on supported hardware systems and hardware which seems to work, but is technically not supported, visit Be's web site at www.be.com.

Since BeOS is not a finished product, you will also have to put up with some growing pains as it evolves and develops in the near term. Since Be is still making some fundamental changes to the operating system, current applications will not necessarily work with a new OS release. So when you upgrade to R4 and possibly beyond, you may very well have to download your favorite programs again when they are updated. Don't expect to see backward compatibility until the official "1.0" consumer release of BeOS.