First of all I want to declare that I only worked with BeOS personal edition which it was free to download.

In BeOs I think they were having a meeting and suddenly someone said : "....what if we gave the license to users to use BeOS for free, in a way of a very well working demo, and then stimulate their appetite for power selling them the Pro edition ? Wouldn't it worked just like Linux/GNU ?...."

Probably it is a very good offer. You download a big .exe file, execute it under windows or Linux and then you have a filesystem that it gives you the full idea of BeOS. It even recognized the most of my hardware at a glance. I don't have a network card to use it with my laptop/desktop PC but a friend of mine told me it works fine. So.....

It (of course ) found the partitions I use with windows fat32 and in Linux. It found SB PCI128 (but not the midi) as ES1371 (the same way as linux does). The serial mouse. My external Diamond SupraExpress modem (it can even recognize some winmodems >>>"...linux stared with terror the new competitor ...."). But ...

It could not initialise S3 trio64+ not even in VESA2 way, and the drivers I found in Be were only working with BeOS 4.5. Also I don't know why a company says "media os" but can't print in my HP deskjet 690c. I could not print until I downloaded a kind of driver (every other os can print out of the "box"). Finally I had to buy a new graphics card (cheap SiS) to see BeOS in color.

The solution to "The midi part of sound" finally was given by the shareware version of Doom !!!!! It installed some kind of driver and now I can hear midi.

Later I installed BeOS personal edition in My HP Omnibook XE2 notebook, and with the help of a VESA2 driver I could see color, recognize Synaptics Touchpad, a usb mouse and of course the filesystems. I couldn't hear anything becouse I am deaf or it can't find Maestro-3 combo with a winmodem.

The claim it is a media os is really true. It plays videos and mp3s faster than windows, but it needs more software. A good link is BeBits (www.bebits.com).

A good trick if you didn't find it yet .......

How to install BeOS Personal in its own partition and with its own Boot manager ?

Email me. It's free.......

Beos and Greek.

It can read greek characters in the web browser as ttf. Just mount (right click >mount >windows_partition_1_....) the windows partition in which you have the windows directory, find fonts subdirectory, copy to BeOS fonts directory and then change the encoding and then associate the ttf fonts you copied with some system fonts. Also mail me if you have problems.

I'll be back....