BeOS Ramblings

Some months ago, I was trying to force BeOS, or some derivative thereof, on to a somewhat too new for it HP xw4600 workstation It didn't work. Having since dug up some PS/2 peripherals, I've now tried again using a HP dc7600 19" tower - not really high enough spec to call it a workstation, but a business machine none the less.  This came to market in Q2 2005, rather later than Be stopped providing driver updates but well within the community support era. Specs are, as obtained: Pentium D (P4 Dualcore) 2.8Ghz 512MB DDR2 40GB Maxtor SATA hard drive (I think this is a transfer from an older, failed PC it replaced - I'm also surprised to see SATA that small!) Soundblaster Audigy SE PCI sound card Onboard Broadcom 5751 gigabit network card 8x USB2 ports (6 rear, 2 front) Intel HDA audio DVD-ROM (no burner - rare in 2005 but businesses often specced these out for data loss reasons) PS/2 ports Serial port Parallel port Out of the box, well, after telling the BIOS to ignore th...

I obtained some more blank CDs, but I couldn't obtain a wired mouse (of either type - PS2 or USB). This let me burn BeOS Max 4.1, and realise that Haiku B3 is marginally too big for a CD and needs a DVD. I could just have used blank DVDs for the blank CD needs in the first place, something I didn't think of on Friday night From Haiku, with its partition manager that can actually do complicated tasks (Zeta comes with a deliberately crippled Paragon partition manager to let you resize a Windows partition, but do little else); I created specific partitions for Haiku, Zeta and hopefully R5 if I can bodge it in to working. Haiku works well - VESA graphics, but fully working sound, network, USB and so on. Max doesn't boot, even with all safe mode options on - it is definitely using the RAM limiting bootloader; but I'm not sure I've got the right hacked up kernel installed.  I'll get a wired mouse tomorrow (and maybe a PS2 one too); and see if Zeta will work that way.

Lets ignore that Zeta's ever existence was quite odd! I recently recovered a HP xw4600 workstation from the WEEE cage in work (well, I just didn't put it in instead) with the intention of trying to beat BeOS R5 on to it.  This machine is from 2009, which is very new for R5, but many of us were still using R5 in 2006 on contemporary hardware so its not too much of a stretch. But R5 definitely won't work out of the box - SSE2 processors seem to cause some trouble that requires kernel patching, the dual 3Ghz CPUs will cause severe clock problems without a further fiddling; and the 4GB of RAM will stop booting without a hacked bootloader to limit visible RAM. And I sort of need a decently working BeOS system to actually build such an image from in the first place. So, to Zeta. I've got a "legit" - as in its a real CD - copy of this which I was given by magnussoft in return for building VLC for Zeta; but I can't find it. ISOs are not hard to find.  Its from 200...

Retro-Mac Youtuber ActionRetro posted (on Twitter) a picture of his Powerbook 2400c (model released May 1997) on a wireless network, to which I replied about using the same card in my Latitude C600 (model released November 2000) and said it was "marginally newer". Powerbook 2400c browsing the ol' wireless internet pic.twitter.com/MOuKmRLUOE — Action Retro (@ActionRetro1) October 30, 2021 On reflection of the speed at which computing progressed in the late 1990s, it absolutely isn't "marginally newer". Its a good two generations newer. 1Ghz Pentium III Coppermine, 512MB RAM, the option for onboard wifi (I have an Intel 2200 populated, but Windows 98 can't use that), and a (poor) 3D accelerator; versus a 180Mhz 603e, a max 112MB RAM and 2D graphics. The days of PowerPC being vastly more performant than x86 systems had, realistically, gone by then - we had already entered the days of rigged Photoshop filter time demos to claim than better than equivalen...

First reference to BeOS in Irish print media (" Connected " magazine from the Business Post, August 2021) in easily 20 years I'd say.

My vastly more identifiable 10mbit DEC Tulip network card arrived today, a Cogent EM960P released shortly before they were bought by Adaptec. Adaptec themselves have been bought out and that firm sold on a number of times - but they still provide the drivers (for Windows NT on multiple architectures, SCO UnixWare, Netware and similar - but not MacOS) and the brochure on their website.  And - it works! It actually works, although I'm still SOL for MacOS

 As I've mentioned before, I've another BeOS R5 machine on the go - and this one has working WiFi. Four families of cards have drivers - Intersil Prism PCI/PCMCIA/USB, e.g. the ORiNOCO 11mbit cards, Ralink RT2500 54mbit cards, Intel 2100 11mbit cards and Intel 2200 54mbit cards. I have an ORiNOCO PCMCIA for various retro gear, and a mini PCI 2200 in the R5 laptop. Windows 98SE does not support this card - just too new - so I use the ORiNOCO with Odyssey to connect from it  I'm not going to expose my normal cable connection to an open WiFi connection, but I'm also getting rather annoyed having to use tethering on my mobile. So I dug up my old router, and have configured it as such, to allow for antique drivers: 2.4Ghz network, fixed channel, B/G mode, low power (it will always be very near to me), WEP 128bit, client isolation and MAC address filtering, and a 20mbits speed restriction. Admin username and password are both changed to not be the default for the router vendo...