BeOS R5 is the final version of
BeOS from
Be Inc.. It was
released in
March 2000, and came in two
varieties: Professional and Personal.
R5 was the 4th major release of BeOS for a public audience, and the
6th since it left developer-only stages. It changed only slightly
from the previous release, BeOS R4.5, and was even seeded to
developers as "R4.6". Improved
POSIX
compliance, particularly in the area of
networking, was provided. The OS in general
was moved towards the new modular media kit over the former
audio-only sound subsystem. For end-users, new logos and some new
icons were the only major differences.
R5 was the first release of BeOS for x86 to have a freely
downloadable version which could be fully installed on a user's
hard drive; previous versions had a free
Live
CD download, which could not be installed. R5 was also to be
the last version to support the
PowerPC
architecture which BeOS had originated on, including the companies
own
BeBox hardware. According to Be's
marketing, it was the first OS to ship with
legal MP3 encoding and decoding support.
Versions
Personal Edition
Personal Edition, a 48MB download, was the most commonly used
version of R5. Stripped of developer tools (though these were later
made available as a separate download),
mp3 and
Indeo encoders, and
RealPlayer. It was installed into a 500MB
"hardfile" through Windows or Linux, and could be booted either
directly from
Windows 9x or
DOS, or using a boot floppy. Once booted, it could be
installed to a real hard drive or partition, and the
Be Bootloader could be installed to allow
dual-booting. This bootloader uses only the
MBR of the hard disk, and will continue
to function even if the BeOS is uninstalled.
Professional Edition
Professional Edition was only available commercially, and for the
first time in BeOS's history, could not be purchased from the
company unless you were a developer. Instead, a number of regional
resellers sold it -
Gobe Software in
the United States,
Apacabar and
Koch in Europe, and
Hitachi in Asia. These resellers were
responsible for all packaging of the OS, from localisation to CD
labelling and packaging. As a result, some variations exist between
packaged R5 Professional discs, with some being slipstream updated
to the newest patches, and most notably, the inclusion of
commercial
printer drivers with
Gobe releases, and
French
translations of the user documentation on Apacabar.
The CD shipped with an
ISO9660/
HFS hybrid partition, containing
documentation, GPL licenced source code, the Personal Edition
installer (with the aim of you circulating the installer to
friends), a copy of
Partition Magic
for Windows, and the Mac OS boot-loading code for the PowerPC
version. Two separate
BFS partitions
existed, one for x86, one for PowerPC, and the x86 one is directly
bootable from CD.
In addition to all the features of Personal Edition, Professional
Edition includes the full developers tools, including a rebranded
CodeWarrior,
RealPlayer G2,
Fraunhofer MP3 encoders, and support for both
encoding
Indeo video, and playback/encoding of
Indeo Real Time.
Additional media on the CD varied by
supplier, but always included some sample multimedia files,
including two songs composed by Be staff (" 5038" and "
virtual
(void)") as well as a video of Be staff pushing computer
monitors off the roof of their building in Menlo
Park
.
Updates
Three updates for R5 were released during 2000.
R5.01
R5.01 was mainly a stability fix for R5 Professional, fixing some
deadlocks in drivers and critical servers. However, additional
POSIX support was again added for networking, although the update
neglected to include the newer headers to use some of these
functions - they were only available in an updated Developer Tools
for Personal Edition download.
R5.02
R5.02 (marked as R5.01 on personal) contained all of R5.01's
updates, as well as some enhanced drivers, and more stability
fixes.
R5.03
R5.03 was solely a security fix, and fixed a remote-access bug in
the system's
ftpd. The update, however, made a
change to the
core C library to
do this, and in doing so, updated the version of
glibc it was based on, again providing slightly more
POSIX compatibility.
Succession
Following the failure of
BeIA, Be's
Internet Appliance venture, the company
ceased operations, and R5 was the last official release. A widely
leaked version of BeOS that had been seeded to developers,
codenamed
Dano, carried many new
features, and a build ID indicating it was BeOS R5.1.0.
Another extremely widely leaked update is a new, fully POSIX
compliant, kernel-land networking stack, known internally in Be as
BONE. While officially alpha, this brings higher stability to R5,
as well as opening up the application base available. The updater
for BONE Alpha 7 increases the system version number to
R5.04.
A new commercial venture,
ZETA, is
an operating system that appears to be based on the Dano codebase,
and has been accepted by some BeOS users as a successor to R5.
However, at least during its protracted
release candidate stage, it was dogged
with problems that have left some people using R5, and in some
cases, looking to
Haiku for
the future of their OS.
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