yab: BASIC for BeOS
0033 - March 1st, 2007
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Archive for 2007
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Spotted over on OSNews, The Register has chosen to celebrate the release of Windows Vista by publishing an article on the history of BeOS (yes, the connection escapes me as well). There’s nothing in the article that should be news to most BeOS users (and certainly not to anyone who owns a copy of the BeOS Bible) – but it has sparked a fairly lively discussion in the OSNews comments. There are some great comments from folks like Ynop Talton, the mmu_man, Jonas Kirilla, and quite a few others. All-in-all, some interesting conversation and opinions from some of the BeOS’ community’s most dedicated developers/users – along with my usual smartass ramblings, of course.
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned recently having upgraded my trusty R5 box to an AthlonXP – after running BeOS on a P3 450 and a dual P3 1Ghz system, this is downright modern hardware for me. Thanks to a bootable CD of the BeOS Max distribution, it only took a few minutes to edit my existing kernel with diskprobe and get it booting. What took longer, surprisingly, was obtaining an audio driver for the new motherboard – which contains the AC97 audio chipset. There is a driver listed on BeBits, courtesy of Marcus Overhagen, but the download section only contains the following text:
Fortunately, a helpful user mentioned in the BeBits comments for the driver that the file itself is still available under the original download URL ( http://www.bebits.com/bob/13123/ich_ac97_1.4.zip ) – it’s just the links that have been removed from the BeBits entry (as well as the ability to add a third-party download link). Finding the file was a minor inconvenience for me in this instance – but it’s a bit disturbing that R5 users have to jump through hoops now to obtain a driver for one of the most common audio chipsets in existence. Especially when the reasons for unavailability aren’t really clear. To paraphrase the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld: what is the deal with these disappearing drivers? Or, to paraphrase the slightly less-immortal (but significantly more vulgar) words of Sarah Silverman: what the (rooster) is up with that (excrement)?
…sort of. This is just a quick post to apologize for the long absence of new content and to relay a quick update. The hardware in my normally-faithful BeOS PC finally gave up the ghost 2 weeks ago, after threatening to for some time. Dealing with some nutty deadlines at work, I hadn’t had time to properly deal with the problems and just crossed my fingers, hoping things would keep running just a *little bit longer* – no such luck. On the plus side, I’m now back up and running sweet, sweet R5 again (nothing makes me appreciate it as much as being such with Windows and OS X for two weeks), my beloved dual P3 having been replaced with an AthlonXP. It’s actually been something of a step backwards in terms of responsiveness/”teh snappy(tm),” but the extra heat will be nice this time of year. Stay tuned for a return to something (hopefully) resembling regular updates!
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The Be operating system is written mostly in C++ and C and so is almost every application. For lot’s of tasks C++ is very nice language, powerful and readable.