OSUser: BeOS Journal #1 - Setting up the BeBox

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BeOS Journal #1: Setting up the BeBox Scot Hacker, ZDNet 11/20/96 Greetings, and welcome to BeOS Journal -- the chronicle of an end user making his way on a newborn platform. My mission: to stop using Windows 95 and the Mac OS and to turn the BeBox into my primary work and play machine, a process I expect could take from six months to a year. I'll report on the pleasures and problems of using the BeBox, the BeOS, and (once they exist) its applications. I'll note what works, what doesn't, and what should work better. I want to make one thing clear from the start: I'm not a programmer -- I'm a layman and a geek. I love messing with operating systems, and I'm excited by the potential of the BeOS. And although developers have (until recently) been the only people who could get their hands on a BeBox, the sphere of BeOS users won't be composed solely of programmers for much longer. Although Be may be aiming at a technically savvy audience, the BeOS must find its way onto millions of desktops to be successful. Meanwhile, think of me as an early adopter: Joe User reporting from ground zero on the evolution of a brand-new platform -- from the end user's perspective. One more thing: Although most of the press surrounding Be has been generated by Macintosh-related publications, I'll be running the BeOS solely on a BeBox. The exact relationship between Apple and Be is still somewhat nebulous, but if or when Apple brings components of the BeOS into the Mac OS, I'll still be running the "purist's version" on genuine Be hardware -- at least for the foreseeable future. November 16, 1996 The BeBox box arrived today. I had read the starry-eyed overviews, drooled over the early performance indicators, seen the mind-blowing demos, and generally worked myself up into a tizzy of anticipation. I knew there weren't any commercial applications available and that the OS itself was still a little green, but I was ready to be satisfied with whatever came. What came was a blue box with dual 133-MHz PowerPC 603 processors, 16 MB of RAM (I'll have to pump that up soon), a 1.2-GB SCSI drive, a SCSI CD-ROM, sound and video cards, and an Ethernet adapter. The chintzy mouse and keyboard were a bit disappointing, but I figured they'd serve until I could get something better. Because Be is using mostly Wintel-standard components, I knew I could get a new keyboard and mouse from anywhere and not worry about whether it would work or not. I supplied the monitor, a MAG InnoVision DX17. When you flip the switch on the back (Hello, Be? Note number 1: Why is the switch on the back? I thought those days were behind us.), the first thing you see is a swarm of blue and red particles zooming in from the edges of the screen to form the Be logo -- this is in ROM, prior to disk access. Cool. Within seconds, the screen snaps to a classic 640-x-480-pixel blue desktop, and the application dock stacks up along the left side of the screen. Total boot time: less than 20 seconds. As with any new machine, the first thing I did was track down the screen properties in the /Preferences folder and pump up the resolution to 800-x-600-pixel, 32-bit color. There isn't a 16-bit-color option yet, so I can't get my preferred resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels at 16-bit. Oh well, I'm sure that'll be available soon enough. MacUser's January '97 cover story Plan Be provides an excellent walk-through of the BeOS' basic interface elements, so I won't bother with a blow-by-blow description of the look and feel. Basically, it looks like a marriage of the Mac OS and X-Windows, with some mutant NeXTStep genes thrown in. This combination makes sense, since Be's goal is to create a system with UNIX-like power and Mac-like ease of use. Despite its eclectic origins, however, I was still struck by the number of OS niceties I'd come to take for granted that simply don't exist yet on Be. For instance, you can't put anything on the desktop, an idiosyncrasy that forces one to shift mental gears in a hurry. The desktop is now a central metaphor of every major operating system, and I can't imagine that this feature will be absent for long -- we'll keep an eye on this one. But in general, the interface isn't as ground-breaking as the guts of the OS are. I expect that both will be cleaned up and polished a lot in the near future. For now, though, the interface doesn't bear a whole lot of gushing over. Anyway, I was anxious to start making those processors do some chugging, so I opened up the Apps folder and did a quick scan. Right away I noticed a port of fractint, the venerable UNIX fractal generator. Basic operation of fractint is a no-brainer -- you get a window with a full-frame Mandelbrot set. Use the mouse to drag out any area of the fractal, and the machine zooms in to fill your full window with a more detailed view of that area. When I run this utility on my Linux box (a P100), each zoom takes almost ten seconds. On the BeBox, the same calculation finishes in about three seconds. Watching the LED load indicators pulse up the front bezel, registering the calculation load, is gratifying. It gives you this sense that the machine is really doing some work. Next I tried a home-brewed multithreading test I had been dying to perform -- I wanted to watch the relationship between the command line and the GUI in real time. The idea was to open a folder and then navigate to the same folder from the shell. Once I had two windows open to the same location, one in GUI and one in text mode, I would create a new folder from the command line to see how long it took for the GUI view to update itself. I had tried this experiment on my Win95 machine (the same P100) earlier in the day, and it took almost two full seconds for the GUI to realize that a new folder had been created within its view. When I did the same test with the Be, all changes were registered instantaneously. What's interesting about this benchmark is that it measures not processor speed but the efficiency of the of the operating system's multithreading. So far, the BeBox was kicking butt over my other systems. Speaking of that command line, the Terminal app is exactly what I expected: a pretty straight port of the UNIX bash shell, with many of the utilities you'd expect for daily functionality -- grep (but no find), du, ls, cp, mv, make, cat, less (but not more), and hundreds of others I haven't yet dug into. Man pages are included, but only in HTML format, which is nice except that they're not there on the command line where you really need them. You can, however, type command --help to get a terse description of all available option flags for that command. Although there's a version of UNIX's vi text editor (called ve), I did my editing in the GUI editor, which provides only basic text-editing functions -- it's far from the full-featured word processor that Be will soon need. You can easily change the default window and text colors of the shell from pull-down menus, but I also wanted the prompt to report the current working directory. There's a text file in the /System folder called "profile," where I found the line that specifies the prompt. I edited it to read: `PS1='$PWD> '` which completed the Terminal picture for me. I find myself wondering how access to a full-featured command line will change the way Mac users work when they stick that BeOS CD into their Power Computing boxes. Will they take one look and say "no thanks" or try a few power moves and realize what they've been missing all these years? (No flames, please <g>.) Truthfully, though, the command line really is a powerful tool, and I'm happy to see it welded so seamlessly to the GUI. |
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