BeOS P.E. for Linux

[drakster]

Has anyone gotten the Personal Edition of BeOS installed under linux? If so.. how?


:confused:

[S0larfluX]

I did awhile back... I just followed the directions.

;)

[rppp01]

just remember, it only works on ext2. If you are running reiserFS or another file system, it won't work.

[Beowulfs_Ghost]

It should be pretty straight forward.

The basics of BeOS PE;
When you download PE, it decompresses into a big fat 500meg file, and some smaller files. The big fat file is an image of BeOS BFS partition (think; like downloading a CD iso).

All you should have to do once you decompress the file, is make a BeOS boot floppy, and boot your computer with it. The boot disk will just scan your disk for a BFS partitions, mount it, and boot from it. You can reach various boot options by holding down the space bar while it's booting.

So you shouldn't have much in the way of problems (assuming your hardware is supported). If you don't like the boot floppy (it is slow), you can use the BeOS boot manager. Just boot into BeOS, start a terminal, and type "bootman". This will start a little app that asks you what partitions you want to boot, and what they should be called on the boot menu. Once it writes to the MBR, you can boot BeOS right off the hard drive (much faster). I've used bootman to boot BeOS, Win9x, Linux, and FreeBSD. I can say from experience that it won't boot Hurd.

Hope that helps.

[drakster]

Thanks for the responses, guys. Finally got it up and running after a little problem making the boot floppy. That was my fault, I was making it harder than it had to be. But it's all installed, and I'm loving it!! Took a little effort to get my NIC and CMI8330 soundcard working, but they're both aces now! Definitely considering buying the pro version!!

[FoBoT]

OT- nice sig ;)
and welcome to Team LNO/THINK! :)

[ 24 April 2001: Message edited by: FoBoT-9223 ]

[drakster]

:D thx :D

[EscapeCharacter]

i would like to know how they crame 500+ megs into 40 thats some awesome compression

[bobtcowboy]

Originally posted by EscapeCharacter:
<STRONG>i would like to know how they crame 500+ megs into 40 thats some awesome compression</STRONG>

thats what I'm screamin! :eek:

I think the 500 MB is just mostly empty space, though...

on a side note, I can't stand GRUB or LILO... I'm running Win98 and Progeny Debian... bootdisks don't seem to work (?) so I'm stuck booting off the CD...

Should I install BeOS, just for the bootloader? BeOS is nice n all, but it doesn't support my video card (2 bit color sucks. :( )

is it easy to configure?

Bill

[drakster]

It's incredibly easy to configure, but MAJOR lack of hardware support. As for the BeOS boot manager, I'm unable to use it because of the whole 1024 cylinder/lilo thing. But that's okay, MD8.0 has a pretty nice looking graphical lilo interface, so I guess I'll stick with that. It really doesn't matter right now anyway, at least until I get the pro version of BeOS, because the personal edition isn't installed on its own partition. So as far as I know, I'm stuck booting from the floppy. Which is okay, just slow and tedious. :D


[edit]
As for your video card problem, check bebits.com, they have a few new drivers available, one of which might help you out. If not, there's a prog called "VESA Accepted" that'll set it up for you in a VESA 2.0 compliant mode. (As long as your card is compatible with the VESA 2.0 standard)

[ 25 April 2001: Message edited by: drakeuser ]

[TaeShadow]

Originally posted by bobtcowboy:
<STRONG>BeOS is nice n all, but it doesn't support my video card (2 bit color sucks. :( )
</STRONG>

You have to admit, though, it's kind of cool that they can show everything in only two colors.

[S0larfluX]

There's a bootloader called osbs that will boot any just about any i386/OS known to man...
http://www.freebird.org/sw-map/bootmanager.html

I got it to boot between OpenBSD and NetBSD, 'cause OpenBSD doesn't come with a bootselector...

Enjoy.

[ 25 April 2001: Message edited by: S0larfluX ]

[bobtcowboy]

Originally posted by TaeShadow:
<STRONG>You have to admit, though, it's kind of cool that they can show everything in only two colors.</STRONG>

:(