The perfect OS

pfft I still have beos4 installed on my p75. /flex

 

/Salutes alphawolf's leetness

 

about that BeOS R5 edition, I didn't understand why it isn't a self contained OS, if you need windows or linux doesn't that defeat the purpose? also I frustated by the lack of a PowerPC version (and I couldn't find one).. I wanted to find BeOS because there's a macintosh with PowerPC 601 lying around, 80MB ram, the OS is the most terrible, slow loading and useless pile of shit I've ever seen and we laugh at the one button mouse.
The actual BeBox had one or two PowerPC 601 I think.

haiku isn't probably very usable if they don't even offer an install CD, and it's x86 PC only.. too bad! I really only needed BeOS because an old Mac is totally useless anyway and it looked like a great OS to use on such limited hardware.

 

You can look for BeOS4, it should work fine with that Mac I think. There's also another (commercial, but cheap) clone out there but I forgot the name. You may find it here in forum if you search for BeOS.

 

Zeta
as BeOS Zeta... 6th letter of the greek alphabet.

http://www.zeta-os.com/

 

it is your getting confused with BeOS R5 Personal Edition which installed and ran from windows it was suppossed to be a sort of easy introduction to BeOS so people could try it out /get a feel for it
(installed/uninstalled to a folder withinn windows. No need to mess with partitions ect)

 

I was pretty excited about the potential of QNX on the desktop at one time. Lack of drivers pretty much doomed it from the start, though. It just didn't ever support enough hardware to be useful (at least to me). That bootable floppy that contained everything you needed to boot up the OS with a full GUI and (if you had a compatible network card) get you onto the internet with a web browser was pretty damn impressive.

 

BeOS 5 Personal Edition used a security hole in Windows 9x to take over the computer. When you clicked the icon, it really wiped the existing OS from memory and loaded itself to entirely replace it.

There's Haiku (http://www.haiku-os.org/) which should enter alpha soon ^^

QNX was impressive, but lack of apps & drivers made it useless.

 

QNX is owned by Harmon Kardon now. They do the real-time systems for all the new BMWs or something. A person I know from work's spouse works at QNX, and they get to drive all the fancy new BMWs before they hit the market. I guess they're doing alright.

QNX is pretty neat.

 

Ya, that was very impressive. I am still of the impression that it would be the idea OS for a neural network simulation.

IIRC it is used for avionics, medical imagine machines, and a whole host of other vertical implementations. The fact that you could strip it down to such bare essentials was appealing from a support / debug perspective.

 

I can clearly remember that Quake III for BeOS ran way over 50% faster than the windows version. There we had a small glimpse of what's possible when the OS is not a bloated bunch of crap.

 

Have you tried Sabayon Linux? (spelling) I have heard good things about it.