BeOS is the operating system created by the company Be, Inc. The development of this system ceased since the sale of the totality of the intellectual property of Be to Palm. The most recent version of this operating system is the 5.0.3, available in version PRO Edition or PE.
Several projects exist, of which the goal is to carry out an operating system which takes again the philosophy and the principles of BeOS.
Haiku is for me the most interesting project.
Right from the start, one of the principal problems encountered by BeOS was to offer a broad support of the existing hardware.
This problem became even more crucial since the end of the activity of the Be company. The modern hardware is managed little or badly.
I will simply give like example the lack of support of Hyperthreading, USB 2.0 or Serial ATA.
When I bought a Dell Inspiron 8200 in 2002, I of course installed BeOS.
Result, no network, no modem and display in VESA not accelerated mode.
This is why I decided by way of exercise and for my personal need to write a driver to handle my 3Com 3C920 network adapter. As soon as the driver reached a sufficient level of quality, I decided to publish it on Bebits. Since, I also wrote a driver for wireless IEEE 802.11b network card and other projects are under development.
For my Inspiron, the situation improved well since 2002. The network card works and especially, the Haiku unified nVidia TNT/GF driver written by Rudolf Cornelissen handles perfectly my GeForce 4 Go 440. It is now a true pleasure of using BeOS on this machine.
