BeOS MacWorld Preview Release
Remember when it seemed like the future of Apple was with BeOS and Jean-Louis Gassée, and not NeXT and Steve Jobs?
Yeah, that was an interesting time. This CD is from the first preview release in 1997.
This CD lets you install the preview onto certain 603/604 PowerPC machines.
Note: The CD image may have two sessions. It was created from a bin/toc and has not been examined for anything but the presence of the BeOS release.
From Wikipedia:
BeOS is an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing modular I/O bandwidth, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and a custom 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS. The BeOS GUI was developed on the principles of clarity and a clean, uncluttered design. The API was written in C++ for ease of programming. It has POSIX compatibility and access to a command-line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system.
See Also: BeOS Preview Release 230105 | BeOS Preview Release 2
CompatibilityArchitecture: PPC
Comments
I've got 2 laptops that are pcs. A dell c840 and a (screenless)dell inspirion. I'll try it and report back
@nmz502 - it comes to about 400MB compressed. I had the most success with Zeta, although BeOSMax came close after many patches/installs. Zeta is available from the green demon, and other p2p places. Almost all of the software I have is freely downloadable on the internet, with nothing rare, or special. You would be best off trying to download Zeta and seeing how it runs on your machine. You may need a boot floppy/CD to restrict RAM to 768MB - there are Intel and AMD boot disk images for this.
Probably best to dedicate an entire disc drive to BeOS/Zeta, just for safety.
I'd be interested in that software, as i don't have a ppc mac capable of running BeOS. If you could, could you please upload and share
? Thanks 
Yeah the 100mb image is about the same size. Once most of the OS image is empty it compresses down to practically nothing. All the extra stuff was in the seperate downloads mentioned in the readme.
I must apologise, after checking my backups, I have very little PPC BeOS software - I have a crapload of x86 BeOS/Zeta software backed up - but that helps no-one on this forum.
I also discovered my BeOS DR2 installer is only 6.3MB compressed (for a 200MB image). This is some pretty fine compression...
I assume there is next to no software at all in the image. I believe BeBits still has all the PPC builds of BeOS software. I used to own a PowerMac 7200/180, and I believe that this may have run BeOS. Pity I sold it to upgrade to this x86 PC
@Lance666:
ugh, another bug
This would be a lot easier to follow if all of you would stop quoting each other unless necessary. This forum doesn't show what is a quote and what is your words. If you can't force yourself to stop quoting, at least identify the quote, such as Quoting Mr. Hobbs: "Blah blah..."
That's the md5 of the cd. But your disc has two tracks/sessions. The toc/cue contains the data for these. If I burn just the iso I have a disc with a single track/session. What did you make the ISO on? You can create a toc or cue on just about any OS (apart from classic MacOS).
Something I can't do right away. I'm not near a Mac that runs OS X, nor do I have Firestarter FX installed on it when I can get to it. I can do both at some stage but not right now.
The original CD, the .iso and the CD I burned the .iso to all have the same MD5 checksum:
Device MD5: f0a03359610f6485f563e6392fbef363 <-- the original CD
Image MD5: f0a03359610f6485f563e6392fbef363 <-- the .iso
Device MD5: f0a03359610f6485f563e6392fbef363 <-- the burned copy
There is no difference between the 3 of them. So you shouldn't find it a problem burning to CD.
Just so I don't burn a coaster (my 5400 can't read RWs) could you create a toc file with Firestarter FX? If the iso you created is a straight raw copy then it should be equivalent to a bin. The toc contains the session info.
Well it appears to have done the right thing. All the data is intact going from the .iso to hard copy. The Mac partition mounts correctly and there's still a good 500+ MBs of Be data hiding there somewhere
Pity I hadn't kept my old 6360 to test fully. This PR used to fly on that
Cheers
Thanks Mike. I'll download it and give it a try tomorrow but I wonder if it'll work.
Iso can't handle multisession properly. That's why I suggested those two apps. The disc really needs to be imaged as bin/toc or bin/cue to be a proper copy.
Same here. I also live out in the sticks ... It was a rare occurrence
I've made a ".iso" dump of the Preview Release and put it up as a zip archive.
MD5 checksums and download link are as follows:
BeOS Preview Release (PPC)
The downloaded zip archive:
3891abb9de11ec2dfd37ed8e816b4ac9 *Be_pr.zip
and uncompressed, the enclosed .iso is:
f0a03359610f6485f563e6392fbef363 *Be_pr.iso
Too bad my 6320 can't run it, I'd like to try it too. Glad to see it kicked off some chatter!
For those of us who can't run it though, Kaleidoscope has a neat BeBox theme (and a bunch of other great ones)
http://www.kaleidoscope.net/What_is_Kaleidoscope.html
Nice score! Unfortunately for me I live out in the sticks where finding Macs is an extremely rare occurance. But the Be support seems broad enough if you can get any PPC Mac from that period.
Could you image your copy of the PR? It would be nice to have both versions available. You could use Firestarter FX or SimplyBurns (both use the same engine, though I like SimplyBurns more) to make a bin/toc.
That is an excellent list. Thanks very much for posting the link. I was surprised to see the names of those Mac clones (I'd almost forgotten they existed). I did inherit a Power Computing PowerWave once which I kept for a while, I found it too noisy to use for long periods.
More important for me right now is to acquire a Mac capable of running Be
When I think of some of the machines I've dumped in the past
In a recent street clean-up in our area I found an abandoned Centris 660AV in mint condition complete with caddy loading CD drive and fully maxed to 64MB RAM! Woo Hoo
I've seen that happen on a few other posts too. Not sure why it randomly puts newer posts top or bottom.
I found a BeOS 5 ready list for anyone who wants to see if they can install this. Chances are compatibility was pretty much set from the Preview Release onwards.
http://www.tycomsystems.com/beos/ppc_ready.html
I found a copy of BeOS 5 while googling around. Can post a link here if that's OK.
Yeah, I was able to install this onto a 6360 (I think it was supported) but the the 5400 is definitely close enough to that model in almost every sense of the word, "close".
Thanks very much for those links to screenshots of Be releases. Excellent. Yes, I can't understand why they decided to create a 2nd HFS partition here either. Perhaps it was between Be and MacWorld - Be already had their Preview "gold" release and couldn't possibly accomodate? Just speculation about this, only.
Anyway, I'm glad I don't have the MacWorld edition if only for possible duplication issues
Wouldn't mind getting the 4.5 or so release for PPC, tho... erm... or the 5.03 release...
Perhaps somewhat [OT] but how come this particular forum topic's "fresh posts" end up at the top? Usually they seem to end up and the bottom of all previous posts, sometimes pages after the 1st forum topics' submission. Just curious.
My 5400 isn't on the compatible list, but it's close enough to run it. If the installer won't let you install but you think your Mac is up to it, here's the workaround:
(These two files are in the BeOS Mac Tools folder)
Copy the OS Chooser to your Extensions folder.
Copy the BeOS Launcher to anywhere on your hard disk.
Restart and shortly after MacOS starts loading you'll get the OS Chooser screen
Choose BeOS and it will boot the CD into the installer.
Mike that's the regular Preview Release (see here: http://bebox.nu/images/bebox/beos/previewR1.jpg). There's a text file on this one explaining that they wanted to include some press info from their site at the last minute for the MacWorld release. Why they ended up making a copy of the Mac partition just to add an extra folder is a mystery.
There was also a second Preview Release but I only have the downloadable installer from Be. Would love to have the full disc. You can see a visual history here: http://bebox.nu/images.php?s=images/beosversions
Interesting about the two HFS partitions. I have a copy of this CD which came attached to a Mac Magazine years ago (I forget which mag distributed it). This CD had perhaps two differences to the one you have. One is there is no "MacWorld Edition" printed on the CD label. The other is I cannot detect a second HFS partition with this CD. I get the Be OS Mac Tools and Installer software only (and can go ahead and install the BeOS preview).
Your CD screenshot was a little unclear re the production number stamped onto the CD, but on mine it has:
© 1997 Be, Inc. All rights reserved
230105
Otherwise the artwork on the CD label, minus the MacWorld Edition bit, was identical.
I heard a rumour that it does run on some clone G3's, namely Power Computing and Radius (whatever the radius machine was called).
If you do some really serious research on the web, and are CERTAIN you have a compatible machine, then you can run this...
Sad thing is, they hacked BeOS Dano/5.03 Pro, and produced an OS that still runs on my Core2Duo with GeForce 9800GT... Many thanks to Zeta for misusing original BeOS source, and allowing us an alternate OS. I hear that Haiku is getting close to a true Beta release too! with nvidia OpenGL acceleration!!
Thanks for taking the time to re-rip Bob. I burn-tested it and it works perfect. Both HFS partitions are there and it installs just fine on one of my old Macs.
The path in the toc file can be removed entirely (so it just reads "be.bin"). Here's a link to a edited toc and a cue file that I made with toc2cue from cdrdao: http://www.mediafire.com/?oe2bjrp1gociic7
Okay, Firestarter FX using your tip made a large bin/toc that burnt to a CD had both partitions!
The TOC file points to the absolute path on my machine, but it looks like an editable textfile that anyone can edit.
The Bin file, when mounted in Toast, mounts the Press Info partition info. But burning them gets both. Should cover the bases!
Toast 10 made a bin/cue, the bin file was exactly the same size, to the byte, as the .toast file. Sadly, only the Press Info disc mounts. Will try the other link.
That would be great Bob. If you have access to a pre-Panther OS X I think MissingMediaBurner would work best. It won't detect the drive here on Snow.
FireStarter FX works fine in Snow and can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/193p5D Pick Copy from the menu, tick "read-raw" and then "save to disk" Converting .toc to .cue is a little more awkward as the tool needed is part of cdrdao.
Apparently Toast 7 (and higher I guess) can also save a disk image to bin/cue.
Okay, I will attempt a rip to bin/cue and reupload! Thanks for the tech help.
DiskCopy is the reason for so many bad BeOS dumps. It can't read the BFS partition containing the actual OS. The best way to image a BeOS disc is using the raw bin/cue format. In classic this isn't possible, but in OS X you can use cdrdao or a frontend based on it like FireStarter FX or MissingMediaBurner. FireStarter FX writes a toc file instead of cue but these can be converted.
As for hardware support it won't run on G3, G4 etc.
This is really interesting... have you try using DiskCopy 6.3.3? Under MacOS 9, it can capture both individual sessions. It is specific for 603/604 PPCs? Or you can try this in some others?
Nice. I've always been fond of BeOS and these old PPC versions are hard to find. Just a pity Toast shows it's limitations with them as it prevents getting a proper archival copy. Kinda confusing that there's seemingly two copies of the HFS partition. Maybe a last-minute thing to get it out in time for MacWorld.