283 lines
15 KiB
HTML
283 lines
15 KiB
HTML
<!--startcut ==========================================================-->
|
|
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
|
|
<HTML>
|
|
<HEAD>
|
|
<title>The BeOS and Linux LG #37</title>
|
|
</HEAD>
|
|
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#A000A0"
|
|
ALINK="#FF0000">
|
|
<!--endcut ============================================================-->
|
|
|
|
<H4>
|
|
"Linux Gazette...<I>making Linux just a little more fun!</I>"
|
|
</H4>
|
|
|
|
<P> <HR> <P>
|
|
<!--===================================================================-->
|
|
|
|
<center>
|
|
<H1><font color="maroon">Comparison of BeOS-r4 and Linux</font></H1>
|
|
<H4>By <a href="mailto:layers@marktwain.net">Larry Ayers</a></H4>
|
|
</center>
|
|
<P> <HR> <P>
|
|
|
|
<center><h3><font color="maroon">Introduction</font></h3></center>
|
|
|
|
<p>After using Linux exclusively for a couple of years I began to feel a bit
|
|
out of touch with the computer users in our rural community, nearly all of
|
|
whom use some version of Windows. It had become more difficult to help
|
|
people (especially over the phone) with computer problems, as my memories of
|
|
Windows configuration and tweaking had faded. With a fresh set of
|
|
YARD boot-disks at hand, I reinstalled Win95 from the CDROM, rebooted from the
|
|
YARD disks, then reinstalled lilo on the usurped master boot record.
|
|
|
|
<p>After completing this unpleasant and tedious task I felt that I deserved
|
|
some sort of reward. Due to an inherent and insatiable curiosity about
|
|
software and operating systems, I had ordered the BeOS release 4 CD a week or
|
|
two before but hadn't gotten around to repartitioning a hard disk and
|
|
installing it. In this article I'll discuss my first impressions of this BeOS
|
|
installation, as well as compare the relative features, appearance, and
|
|
usability of Be and Linux
|
|
|
|
<center><h3><font color="maroon">Installing the BeOS</font></h3></center>
|
|
|
|
<p>The BeOS is a young operating system. Its hardware support and software
|
|
availability reminds me of Linux in the mid-nineties. Since not everyone is
|
|
willing to spend money on new hardware in order to run Be, the company is
|
|
willing to refund the purchase price (no questions asked) if someone buys a
|
|
copy but can't get it run. Luckily my hardware was supported, which was as
|
|
much a matter of luck as anything else.
|
|
|
|
<p>Be can only be installed on a primary partition, in contrast to
|
|
Linux, which can be installed on any sort of partition. Earlier releases of
|
|
Be were limited to IDE drives, but release 4 can be installed on SCSI drives
|
|
as well, but only when connected to certain brands of controller cards. It
|
|
happens that I have one of the supported SCSI cards, but the drivers are new
|
|
so I thought I'd play it safe and make room for a new primary partition on my
|
|
IDE drive. Be Inc. has licensed a limited version of the partition-resizing
|
|
utility Partition Magic and included it on the Be CD. This version of
|
|
Partition Magic is meant to be run from Windows, so it wouldn't be of much use
|
|
to a Linux user without Windows installed. It's also limited to three preset
|
|
partition sizes. I tried it but it refused to recognize the partition I had
|
|
created.
|
|
|
|
<p>The other method of installation is to boot from the supplied boot-floppy and
|
|
insert the CD during the booting process. The new partition was still
|
|
unrecognizable. To make a long story short, after several attempts I found
|
|
that only one of the first two primary partitions would work for the
|
|
installation. Unfortunately the first two primaries on my IDE disk were
|
|
occupied by Win95 and Linux, so I ended up moving the contents of some
|
|
Linux partitions on the SCSI disk, edited the <kbd>/etc/fstab</kbd> file to
|
|
reflect the changes, and created a new first primary partition on the drive.
|
|
BeOS installed without a hitch once it could find an acceptable boot
|
|
partition, but it struck me as being rather picky about its partitions.
|
|
|
|
<p>Be comes with a bootmanager (based on lilo) but I chose to add a new stanza
|
|
to my existing <b>lilo.conf</b> file, as lilo has always been dependable for
|
|
me and I couldn't see an advantage to using Be's. The stanza is simple:<br>
|
|
|
|
<pre><kbd>
|
|
other=/dev/sda1
|
|
label=be
|
|
</kbd></pre>
|
|
|
|
<center><h3><font color="maroon">Booting Be</font></h3></center>
|
|
|
|
<p>Accustomed as I am to the verbose Linux boot-messages scrolling by, Be's
|
|
seemed spare and uninformative. The messages which do appear let you know
|
|
that a "boot-volume" has been found, and that unspecified devices
|
|
are being initialized. Be requires about the same amount of time to boot as
|
|
Linux if you add in the time X takes to start up.
|
|
|
|
<p>The developers at Be have created a GUI which is reminiscent of both the
|
|
Mac and OS/2 interfaces. Not spectacular or flashy, but nevertheless cleanly
|
|
designed and functional. Linux users have become accustomed to
|
|
configurability, a trait which aficianados cherish but which can be confusing
|
|
to new users. A few minor tweaks of the interface are possible with Be, such
|
|
as scrollbar style and desktop background, but the basic window appearance is
|
|
hard-wired. In a sense, the legions of Linux programmers have, over the
|
|
years, transformed a liability (X-Windows' lack of a built-in window-manager)
|
|
into an opportunity. That this was even possible is due to X's inherent
|
|
flexibility along with the availability of the X source.
|
|
|
|
<p>Poking around in the directory tree I found some familiar names,
|
|
directories such as <kbd>/etc</kbd>, <kbd>dev</kbd>, plus a directory
|
|
<kbd>/beos/bin </kbd> which contains the standard unix utilities such as
|
|
<i>ls</i>, <i>cp</i>, and the <i>bash</i> shell. These are Be ports of the
|
|
GNU utilities; I suspect the source is tucked away on the CD in order to
|
|
satisfy the GPL. An old, non-GUI version of the Vim editor is even included.
|
|
These utilities can be run from a Terminal window, which is similar to xterm
|
|
with the addition of a menubar from which font-size and colors can be set.
|
|
|
|
<p>One interesting feature which I was interested in trying out is the support
|
|
for more than one color-depth simultaneously (on separate pager desktops).
|
|
This works, but not consistently in my case. Even though my video-card is
|
|
supposedly one of the highly-recommended cards for Be, switching back and
|
|
forth from an 8-bit to a 16-bit desktop will eventually result in a corrupted
|
|
display. I quickly learned not to try a high resolution and then set it as
|
|
default for all desktops, as if all screens are garbled rebooting is the only
|
|
solution. A reboot into "safe mode" to reset the defaults is
|
|
necessary when this happens.
|
|
|
|
|
|
<center><h3><font color="maroon">Font Rendering</font></h3></center>
|
|
|
|
<p>This is one part of the OS which the Be developers got right. The screen
|
|
fonts are crisply rendered at all sizes. Among the many demos included with
|
|
Be is a very impressive font demo which displays fonts in a variety of ways:
|
|
skewed, rotated, smoothly changing size, etc. One possible reason for the
|
|
high-quality on-screen font display is that the only type of font currently
|
|
supported in this release is TrueType, though Type 1 support is planned.
|
|
TrueType fonts typically just look better than Type 1 on a computer screen, as
|
|
can be seen in Linux when using one of the TrueType font servers such as
|
|
xfstt. A basic editor is included with Be, called Styled Edit. It's similar
|
|
to Microsoft's Wordpad in that it can use scalable fonts along with their bold
|
|
and italic versions and saves the information in the file.
|
|
|
|
<center><h3><font color="maroon">Filesystems</font></h3></center>
|
|
|
|
<p>Be uses a new filesystem called <i>befs</i>. It sounds impressive; a
|
|
64-bit journaling filesystem which can store file metadata in a file's
|
|
attributes. This is similar to OS/2's HPFS file-system, except HPFS files
|
|
just have attribute pointers stored in the file; the actual attribute data is
|
|
stored in a binary configuration file. When I first read about Be's
|
|
filesystem I hoped that they had avoided using binary-database configuration
|
|
files, as in my experience they cause more problems than they solve. The
|
|
filesystem also has inherent database capabilities, whatever that might mean.
|
|
I'd like to see a demonstration of this feature.
|
|
|
|
<p>The be filesystem also has support for very large files, up to one
|
|
terabyte. All of this sounds impressive, but without applications which make
|
|
use of these features (I mean large applications which handle large amounts of
|
|
data, such as video-editors) it's difficult for an end-user to see any
|
|
particular benefit.
|
|
|
|
<p>There has been much discussion in the past few months on the linux-kernel
|
|
mailing-list about the feasibility of extending the trusty ext2 filesystem to
|
|
include some of these features. People doing video-editing in particular
|
|
would like large-file support; Linus Torvalds thinks that these people would
|
|
be better off using a 64-bit machine for this sort of work, as the ability to
|
|
make use of large files "comes with the territory". Journaling
|
|
ability for ext2 is being worked on, and after a lengthy debate about file
|
|
meta-data the consensus seemed to be that similar results can be achieved
|
|
using the existing ext2 filesystem.
|
|
|
|
<center><h3><font color="maroon">Stability</font></h3></center>
|
|
|
|
This is hard to judge, as I haven't really stressed the system much. I've
|
|
never had Be crash, but I've never run several large applications (like
|
|
Netscape Communicator, XEmacs, or the Gimp) simultaneously, mainly because I
|
|
don't have any for Be. Be does come with a decent web-browser, NetPositive, which
|
|
works well but doesn't have Java or secure transaction support. This browser
|
|
doubles as the default help-viewer, which is tolerable due to its quick
|
|
start-up time.
|
|
|
|
<center><font color="maroon">Networking and Printing</font></center>
|
|
|
|
<p>Be isn't a multi-user OS as Linux is, but the PPP networking is easy to set
|
|
up. Unfortunately, my modem wouldn't respond. It turns out that external
|
|
modems are autodetected well but internal modems can be troublesome. I
|
|
eventually found a configuration window which allows the user to add a non-PNP
|
|
ISA device, but it took me at least as long to figure out the format of the
|
|
memory addresses needed as it ever has taken me to figure out a cryptic Linux
|
|
config file. I finally found a newsgroup posting which explained it well, as
|
|
well as several which claimed to but were wrong. Once over this hurdle
|
|
opening a PPP session was easy, as long as the ISP uses PAP authentification.
|
|
Otherwise you're out of luck. Once online stability of the connection and
|
|
transfer rates seemed comparable to what I'm accustomed to with Linux.
|
|
|
|
<p>A few network cards are supported, nowhere near the number which Linux
|
|
supports. My card isn't supported, so I was unable to test an ethernet
|
|
connection.
|
|
|
|
<p>Printer support is very limited; only Apple Laserwriters and HP PCL3
|
|
Laserjets, and the Epson ink-jets are usable. I use an old Epson dot-matrix
|
|
printer; even if my printer worked with Be I would miss being able to use
|
|
Ghostscript.
|
|
|
|
<center><h3><font color="maroon">Applications</font></h3></center>
|
|
|
|
<p>There really aren't many, though much is promised. That's the
|
|
chicken-and-egg problem with any new operating system: nobody wants to port
|
|
applications until there is a sizable user-base, but people don't migrate to
|
|
the new OS without those "killer apps" available. There are several
|
|
e-mail clients, at least two word-processors-in-progress, but so far not too many of
|
|
the audio and video applications which Be needs if it wants to live up to its
|
|
nickname "the media OS".
|
|
|
|
<p>One problem with application availability is the change in release 4 to the
|
|
ELF file format, similar to Linux's. This means that programs written for
|
|
earlier Be releases won't run on release 4. Evidently recompiling can be
|
|
tricky, so there is a large backlog of ports and programs which haven't yet
|
|
been updated for the new release. This was disappointing, as I was looking
|
|
forward to trying the Be port of GNU Emacs. Another change made in release 4
|
|
is the adoption of the Cygnus egcs compiler as the default. Previous releases
|
|
used a crippled free edition of the commercial Metroworks development tools.
|
|
The software developed for and ported to previous Be releases was developed
|
|
with the Metroworks tools; evidently some code rewriting is necessary to
|
|
compile the old code with egcs. Yes, Be ships with a compiler, header files,
|
|
make, etc., as does Linux, but the trend in the Be world is binary software
|
|
distribution rather than the freely available source Linux users are
|
|
accustomed to.
|
|
|
|
<p>One of the most impressive applications available is Gobe Productive, a
|
|
word-processor with spreadsheet and image-editing modules. The documents it
|
|
produces are layer-based, similar to the usage of image layers in the Gimp.
|
|
Speaking of the Gimp, the image editor includes a subset of Gimp plug-ins,
|
|
though without preview windows. Unfortunately this application saves
|
|
documents in Yet Another Proprietary Format, though RTF is also supported.
|
|
Until Gobe Productive supports the ubiquitous Word file format (promised in a
|
|
future release) it's unlikely to sell too well unless Be really takes off.
|
|
|
|
<p>The apps situation reminds me of Linux a couple of years ago, minus the
|
|
open-source tradition which kept Linux alive and thriving before the advent of
|
|
commercial Linux interest (and is still responsible for much of the vitality
|
|
and yeasty ferment of the Linux community). I admit I find the
|
|
shareware-crippleware tendency in BeOS software to be a little irritating, but
|
|
Be is unabashedly a commercial OS with all that implies. Commercial, but not
|
|
above using driver and utility code developed by free software developers.
|
|
|
|
<center><h3><font color="maroon">Conclusions</font></h3></center>
|
|
|
|
<p>Right now the BeOS is not much more than potential. If Be Inc. can induce
|
|
hardware manufacturers to write more drivers (and if enough users migrate) it
|
|
may do well. This year is a perfect time for alternatives to Microsoft to
|
|
gain user-share due to Microsoft's legal entanglements and growing public
|
|
disenchantment. I don't think many current users of Linux will abandon it for
|
|
Be, though I imagine there will be a significant number who will dual-boot if
|
|
audio and especially video-editing applications for Be become available. I
|
|
doubt the user-interface amenities Be provides are enough of an incentive to
|
|
attract many current Linux users, as people who want these features are
|
|
currently using KDE, with a stable release of Gnome on the horizon providing
|
|
another choice. I believe in the principles fueling the free software
|
|
movement, but not in an exclusionary sense. If Be should gain popularity and
|
|
market-share the consequences will likely benefit Linux as well. Consumers
|
|
will begin to realize that viable non-Microsoft choices exist; Be's unix-like
|
|
structure could expose more people to the stability and other benefits of
|
|
unix-like operating systems.
|
|
|
|
<hr>
|
|
<!-- hhmts start -->
|
|
Last modified: Sat 30 Jan 1999
|
|
<!-- hhmts end -->
|
|
|
|
<!--===================================================================-->
|
|
<P> <hr> <P>
|
|
<center><H5>Copyright © 1999, Larry Ayers <BR>
|
|
Published in Issue 37 of <i>Linux Gazette</i>, February 1999</H5></center>
|
|
|
|
<!--===================================================================-->
|
|
<P> <hr> <P>
|
|
<A HREF="./index.html"><IMG ALIGN=BOTTOM SRC="../gx/indexnew.gif"
|
|
ALT="[ TABLE OF CONTENTS ]"></A>
|
|
<A HREF="../index.html"><IMG ALIGN=BOTTOM SRC="../gx/homenew.gif"
|
|
ALT="[ FRONT PAGE ]"></A>
|
|
<A HREF="./sharma.html"><IMG SRC="../gx/back2.gif"
|
|
ALT=" Back "></A>
|
|
<A HREF="./adler.html"><IMG SRC="../gx/fwd.gif" ALT=" Next "></A>
|
|
<P> <hr> <P>
|
|
<!--startcut ==========================================================-->
|
|
</BODY>
|
|
</HTML>
|
|
<!--endcut ============================================================-->
|