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BeFree is an implementation of the BeOS servers and kits.
It uses all the SystemV and POSIX APIs such as shared memory, semaphores, threads and message queue.
It is developed under FreeBSD 5 (currently 5.1-BETA) because it has pthread and the UFS2 file system has extended attributes like BeOS.
BeFree was born to be X11/XFree indipendent, the first display driver will use Xlib functions because XFree supports a lot of graphic cards, but in the future will be written other drivers for libvgl, DirectFB and whatever.

http://befree.berlios.de/

This looks good.

[Strangedisk]

Awesome! Ever since I saw BeOS for the first time, I knew this was going to be the OS to replace AmigaOS for me. It even had a lot of Amiga-like features that I liked -- things like Classes (Translators I think BeOS calls them), a small, fast, light, responsive GUI, a shell integrated into the OS from day one, so it belongs there (unfortunately it's Unix -- which means -- case sensitivity and innane command names, but I suppose it also inherits quite a lot of power from that base as well), and a focus on multimedia. In fact I think BeOS beats AmigaOS in a lot of ways as well, obviously, in all ways that have to do with "keeping up" (dealing with large harddrives, memory protection, understanding (some) modern multimedia file types and so on). I remember they even had a floppy demo as well at one point, for the Intel version, it could boot, get to the GUI, and run both a web server and simple web browser from there! That puts it right on par with the Amiga in terms of space efficiency (or perhaps ahead -- can you fit the AmigaOS ROM, (possibly stripped down) Workbench disk, a simple web browser (say Voyager) and a web server and a TCP/IP stack in 1.4megs? Not sure, anyone know?)

The more I see this the more I feel this is the way to go, with both Amiga and BeOS, I mean, open source projects. There are a lot of BeOS themed open source projects (Blue Eyed OS, OpenBeOS, BeFree) and some components of the original BeOS were open sourced (Tracker and Desktop I think) plus of course it was built with the most common open source development toolchain (gcc and friends). I think it will survive and flourish, with or without Be and whether or not Palm wants to be helpful. Similiarily, AROS. I took a look at this thing just last night! Wow! It boots and runs on my machine, and is very fast. It looks Amiga-y and they've recompiled some older Amiga software which runs now just from a recompile. Of course it runs very fast! And they have some new demos showing off their scheduler, which looks very good, don't know how to compare it with the old one though since you can't do a fair comparison -- since the new scheduler in AROS will not run (yet) on old Amiga hardware nor will the AmigaOS 3.x scheduler run on an Intel, so can't compare. Even so, they've designed AROS with a hardware abstraction layer and are being careful about architechture portability, so that it should eventually port to PPC, 68K. I'm looking into perhaps helping but not sure where to start, I need to get it building first I suppose, and am of course very tempted to move in the BeOS direction anyway.

Erik

Strangedisk quote
"I remember they even had a floppy demo as well at one point, for the Intel version, it could boot, get to the GUI, and run both a web server and simple web browser from there! "

Your thinking of the QNX floppy demo, I didn't see a d/l link anymore.

http://www.qnx.com/eval/
l
Byron

[Strangedisk]

No, I'm not thinking of QNX. I am aware of QNX's one floppy boot. However, both BeOS and QNX have that ability. Mind you I've never actually seen it however, so take it with an appropriate grain of salt. But I was told this by a Be engineer in 1998, during the March BeDev conference in California.

Erik

[the_leander]

No current distros run off of a boot floppy - the kernel alone takes up about 600K.

That said, the basic BeOS R5 is only 50Mb's and contains most of the basics you would expect an OS to come with these days, web browser, email, ftp client, telnet client, media player etc. Though tbh you would be better off getting a complete package distro like BeOS Max Edition and save yourself months of downloading. OR just wait a while and buy Zeta when it comes out...

I must admit I am intreged by this freebe idea. As I'm looking to get into BSD for use as a server/NAT, I think that it may have become a whole lot easier with this!