OK, so Be 4.5 was an impulse buy.
First thing I did was nuke the Linux partitions I'd created and had yet to bother to install Linux on. Then I found out I had to have a Windows 9x installation so I could install the PartitionMagic "Special Edition" thingy that creates BeOS partitions. Good thing I have a Win9x partition. (I probably could have done it some other way, but there are no instructions for any other way included.)
I put the boot floppy and the CD in and gave the three-finger salute. Everything went on very smoothly! I was hopeful. Quite a snazzy boot screen and everything.
Then it booted to this atrocious 640x480 screen in four shades of gray. This is NOT the BeOS I've seen on websites and on the box! I was prepared for the system to not support my video card (It says so on the box) but I was NOT prepared for this horrible, hard-to-look-at default. And it's even slower than Windows 3.1!
No problem, I thought, I'll just check be.com for drivers and updates. However, when I try to configure my modem for dialup, I find that BeOS refuses to notice my modem because it's on COM2, and BeOS only supports modems on COM3 and COM4. Why the heck does it CARE which COM port my modem uses?! I'm not about to crack my case and change my modem, not just physically but in software on both OS/2 and Win95, just to play with this ugly operating system.
So I boot back to OS/2, go back to be.com, and download the update to 4.5 to bring it up to 4.5.2. Website says there are new drivers and bugfixes in there. Maybe, I figure, maybe there's support for my video card and a fix for that stupid modem thing.
I got the whole file and reboot back into Be. Then I go to mount my HPFS partitions (which the BeOS claims to be able to do) and Be refuses to mount the HPFS partitions. It also refuses to mount the FAT partition I use to share data between my OS/2 and Win95 installs. It mounts just fine the Windows 95 install partition, which should be invisible.
I'm annoyed. Be makes great claims for the capabilities of their operating systems, not the least of which is the version number. To me, this is not version 4.5, it's version .45. BeOS is not ready for the left side of the decimal point. Any OS company that knows its video device driver support is limited should spend some time on generic SVGA support so it can at least provide 640x480x256 color that won't hog up to 50% of the CPU time. Any OS company that is writing an OS from scratch has no business hard-coding a limitation on which serial port can use a modem. And either it can mount a HPFS or FAT partition or it can't, OK?
And let's not talk about the nearly non-existent support for printing... I didn't get that far. Let's just say you probably don't own a printer this operating system supports.
If this operating system ever lives up to its claims, it's going to be an awesome thing. The idea is a fine one: what if the computer, as it is right now, was just invented today? What would an OS need to do? No support for legacy software; a 64-bit journaling filesystem that can support files several times larger than the largest known hard drive; hardware-platform-agnosticism; heavy on the multimedia; still works hard when work needs to be done; no reboots to install drivers; pre-emptive multitasking; pervasive multithreading; and the list goes on. I want to run this OS... eventually, that is, when it is finally "Be" and not just "WannaBe."
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