When I began BeHive 16 months ago, the BeOS was seen largely as a replacement or complement to the MacOS, while I was running BeOS exclusively on a BeBox. Knowing what I did of BeOS' portability, I figured there was a good chance of BeOS eventually making it to Intel. But the concept of a cross-platform OS still seemed a little strange to some, and so this site became a subsection of ZDNet's Mac channel.

Here we are, just over a year later, and the BeOS is now running on its fourth hardware platform (including the original Hobbit processor). I'm writing this in Pe for BeOS/Intel Release 3 (R3) on a dual-300 Pentium II, and the BeHive has moved to its new home (please update your bookmarks) in ZDNet's Products channel alongside a bunch of other OSs. It makes perfect sense: Be wants a little corner of your hard drive, alongside your other operating systems, just as this site always wanted to live in a little corner of ZDNet's OSUser. Also in keeping with this evolution, this column has been renamed from BeBox Journal to BeOS Journal.

As you might expect, one of Be's biggest challenges (aside from the fact that they're a small company and their legions of fans want every feature in the universe implemented on BeOS yesterday), is the huge array of hardware to be supported in the Intel world. The same open, competitive marketplace that has resulted in x86 hardware's superior bus and i/o speeds has also yielded a Pandora's box of video, disk, motherboard, and other chipsets begging for Be support. Be is working as hard as they can to deliver on as much x86 hardware as possible as soon as possible, but it's going to take time to develop the same kind of support that the Linux or Windows worlds have evolved (you can help by writing to your favorite hardware and software vendors asking them to support BeOS from their end). For now, Be tackles the most popular hardware first.

Unfortunately, my main machine was unlucky in this respect. I didn't own almost any of the hardware listed in the Be Intel FAQs, and I wasn't willing to sit on my thumbs waiting. Besides, it was time for a new box, I was ready to move to dual processors, and the prices listed for those Ming Specials seemed hard to pass up. The Ming Specials are Intel machines guaranteed to run BeOS for Intel right now, since they're the same x86 boxes Be has been working with all along. I went for broke and ordered a dual 300.

How long does it take you to install Windows, MacOS, or Linux? Not just to install the OS, but to get the right video and sound driver installed, get your ISDN connection set up, and all that other blah blah woof woof? It took me 90 minutes to get to that point with Win95 on this machine. Guess how long it took with BeOS? 13 minutes, total. No lie. And that includes creating a BFS partition on my hard drive. Here's how it worked:

1. Boot to 95 and install the bundled PartitionMagic software. Fire it up and you're in the partitioner. Establish a partition size (I chose 1500MB, but 400MB and 800MB partitions are also options) and let it do its thing. All very user friendly. When done, it prompts you to insert the included boot floppy and restart.
2. Machine boots from the floppy and begins the BeOS installer. I chose the full install with all the optional media files and goodies. Prompted to reboot with the floppy still in the drive.
3. The next time I booted from floppy, it found a BFS partition on my hard drive and took off running. BeOS was up and ready to operate eight seconds later. I kid you not.
4. That's 13 minutes, right there. The rest is gravy:
5. To eliminate the boot floppy from the process, copy the BeLaunch folder from the CD to your hard drive (from within DOS or Windows). This gives you an icon you can click from Windows to launch BeOS. Even better, you get a .bat file you can launch from DOS, so you can skip the agony of ever watching the Win95 flag flying over sickly blue skies ever again (okay, okay, you may still find some good reasons to boot into Windows for a while to come, but you get the idea). Configure your 95 boot menu to give you the option of booting straight to BeOS. I've put tips for tweaking this menu, as well as instructions for NT users, on the BeOS Tip Server.

So installation turned out to be even easier than I had hoped. But what I experienced next I liked even more: I'm having trouble finding anything to do in BeOS that takes long enough to watch it actually start. That includes selecting six movies at once, hitting Enter, and watching them all spring to life simultaneously. I can turn off one processor and the six movies just begin to tax the remaining processor. NetPositive launches an HTML doc (on hard drive) in 1 second. StyledEdit blinks open. Terminal blinks open. Everything blinks open. It's awesome.

Support for the SoundBlaster 64 is built in -- I didn't have to do anything special, it just worked automatically. And it even sounds better than the BeBox' sound card did.

Support for the Matrox Millenium II is built in -- didn't have to specify video drivers or anything. For the first time, I'm using BeOS in 1024x768 (and higher), true color. Makes a huge difference over the 800x600 at which I was running the BeBox.

My Bitsurfr Pro ISDN terminal adapter is right there on the modems list in the Network preferences panel. Not only did it work right the first time, but it connects far more quickly than the same TA with the same initialization string under NT. Go figure. I was surfing and checking mail at 120K just minutes after booting for the first time. There is a bug, however, with disconnects: if I get timed out by my ISP before disconnecting manually, I have to click the Restart Networking button in the prefs panel (gee, what a novel idea -- restarting network services without rebooting -- you'd think Microsoft could learn a little lesson there). Keep in mind that I'm using a pre-release version of R3, and this kind of thing may be cleared up before the public release is handed out at the Be Developers' Conference later this month.

There are several new movies included in the /optional folder of people (Be employees?) strutting around with a flame thrower. Blowing up a computer with dynamite. Turning the flamethrower on a loser computer. There must have been a lot of tension in Menlo Park over the past few months.

In general, the R3 UI looks pretty much like PR2's did, with a few differences (details well-documented in the HTML docs). There are some really nice functional differences, like the "Open With" option on the right-click menus that let you send any file to any related application. There are some nice Tracker enhancements, and some much-needed keyboard improvements. Some of the prefs panels are improved. There's a new DiskProbe application that gives you a view onto your disks that only a programmer could love. Stability is great, speed is great (and I hear they haven't optimized the code for Intel yet, which means that future releases will be even faster), and responsiveness is great. But it's clear that most of Be's energy has gone into porting to Intel over the past few months. The important thing is that, yes, the user experience here is exactly the same as it was on the BeBox, only a jilllion times faster. Otherwise, there's no way to tell whether you're using a BeBox, PowerMac, or Intel machine. BeOS is BeOS wherever it runs.

I'm one broke geek, but saved a ton over what comparable hardware would have cost elsewhere, and I'm running BeOS on one of the fastest Intel consumer machines on the planet -- a machine that will last me several years easily. It feels awesome. Windows has never seemed so distasteful as when it shares a hard drive with BeOS.

Since it only takes a few tweaks and a recompile to make BeOS/PPC apps run on Intel, it's only a matter of time before the ever-growing software library at BeWare is ported to Intel. For now, and especially before next week's DevCon, I'm limited to the apps bundled with the OS and the early Intel apps trickled out to me by Be developers around the world. Every indication is that DevCon is going to see a flood of exciting announcements for new and important BeOS software that runs equally well on PowerPC and Intel hardware.

If you're excited to get BeOS running on your Intel box soon, there are a few things to keep in mind:

- Make sure your hardware is supported before committing to a partition. Check the BeOS Intel FAQs and the BeOS Ready List. If you want a 100% guarantee of having a machine that will boot BeOS out of the box, pick up one of the Ming Specials recommended there.
- As with any operation that involves creating partitions on your hard disk, back up your system before beginning. I found the install routine for my supported hardware painless and safe, but a pound of prevention...
- Because Be has not yet optimized for Intel (as of 3/13/98), your machine may not show the astounding performance I'm seeing here. That will be rectified.
- It's likely that you'll fall in love at first sight. That's a good thing, but don't overinflate expectations of deleting your existing operating systems just yet. BeOS is out of beta now, but it's also just been born. Have some patience, let it simmer on your hard disk alongside your other OSs, and enjoy it. Let the coming tractor apps emerge from the shadows. You'll probably have to reboot to Mac or Windows to do some things for a little while to come. Be realistic.