What's BeOS ? Surely one of the most beautiful operating systems under PC platform.
It makes a little think of an hybrid between Windows 9x and MacOS, but with more ease of use (yes, it's possible) and especially more stability.

We can already note in its feature an excellent multiprocessors support (up to 8 cpu), a 64 bits journalized filesystem using extended attributes as a database, an intensive use of multithreading, a fast and easy installation (near quarter an hour) and a very well documented development API.
Its assets are innumerable, but it is better to try this OS to understand it.

Few operating systems are able to make at the same time a MP3 file encoding, a cd burning, a floppy disk format, the read of 2 videos and 1 sound file, and surfing the web. BeOS can do that.

BeOS is also very impressive by its stability. Its heart is built around an hybrid kernel between monolithic kernel and micro kernel. It thus uses most of the time servers for the management of its devices
For example, if the network interface stops because of a bug, you just need to restart the net-server and not the system to reinit the network stack.

There's no problem since Be Inc. released two editions of BeOS, a personal edition which can be freely downloaded and a profesional edition including more codecs, realplayer G2, mp3 encoding and other stuff.

However, you need to check the BeOS harware compatibility list and Bebits website before installing it, to avoid bad surprises.

Relating personal edition, you can install it by using one of these two methods :

• By using Windows 9x executable archive. The install program will then create a huge file of 500 MB and use it as a virtual filesystem, it's very useful if you just want to test the OS without creating new partitions.
• By downloading its ISO image, and burning it on a cd-r
  Don't forget in this case, to download the BeOS bootdisk image which will be used to begin install (use 'rawrite.exe' program in dos-mode or 'dd' under linux to make a real bootdisk with this image).

The install will need up to 20 minutes and the OS will be ready just after this if hardware is fully recognized.

This site will permit you to discover my BeOS projects, and some interesting links if you want to know more about this operating system.
My website will also be updated to become more complete... but not now ;-)