BeOS Gaining Ground

Part 2: Working With BeOS

Installing BeOS for Intel proved to be rather tricky, but since it was an unsupported system after all, this should not be the typical experience. A standard install should go much more smoothly. A disk partitioning tool was included on the CD. Installation on the unsupported PowerMac proved to be much easier. I actually installed it on a Zip disk to get started before I had an available hard drive to dedicate to BeOS. You can also install it on a partitioned drive.

Once you have BeOS installed and boot up, you'll be presented with a pretty familiar interface. You have folders that open up when you double click on them. Like the Apple menu on the Macintosh and the Start menu on Windows 95, there is a Be menu. You can actually move it around to different sides of the screen so that it resembles the task bar on Windows 95 or the dock under NEXTSTEP. For Mac users, instead of the Finder, BeOS has the Tracker, which serves the same purpose.

Clicking on the lower lefthand corner of a Tracker windows displays all the parent folders for easy navigation.

There are some user interface enhancements as well. You can set preferences that control how the scroll bars appear and how the menus work with the mouse. One feature I particularly liked was how you could access parent folders from a current window. When viewing a folder's contents, you can click on the lower left portion of the window frame which reveals a pop-up menu for jumping to folders that your current folder resides under. It helps to reduce clutter on the screen while still providing easy access to your hard drive.

Screen clutter can also be reduced by using workspaces, which are directly supported in BeOS. It's essentially like having multiple screens and you can toggle which one is displayed on the monitor. So you could have your web browser going in one workspace, and switch to another workspace that contains your word processor. Each workspace can be set to different resolutions and bit depths. Very cool.

Networking is well integrated into the operating system. It ships with it's own mail client and web browser. PPP capability is also built-in. BeOS can also become a server pretty easily. A basic web server is included in the installation, as well as telnet and ftp servers. If you need to make any changes to your networking, you can restart the network services without having to reboot.

BeOS also includes a terminal application, much like the MS-DOS session under Windows 95. The BeOS terminal uses the bash shell, commonly found on UNIX systems, and the available commands are very UNIX-like. You generally won't need to use the terminal, but for some things it might be faster and it's there if you need it.

The BeOS running it's bundled web browser. The Be meny is in the upper right, and the lower right contains the workspace manager. (Click for a close-up)

BeOS is able to read and write to HFS volumes (the format used on the Macintosh) so if you're running multiple operating systems on your machine, you can transfer files between them pretty easily. It can also read from FAT volumes from the DOS operating system with improved support on the way.

So what can you do on BeOS? Well right now, the options are somewhat limited (although in the next section we'll take a look at some of the programs already available.) The operating system itself is still new and it takes time for people to develop applications. You can be sure some major companies are keeping their eyes on BeOS to see how it does. If it picks up enough speed, expect some ports of popular programs or some major projects to appear. But I think BeOS will have failed if only existing programs are ported to it. Be has laid a strong foundation and an application that will truly take advantage of all the features may not exist at all anywhere else. I don't think the "killer" app has been created yet, but someone will come up with it -- it's just a matter of when.