BeOS projects

Well it has been a while but the source code to my BeOS projects seems to have reappeared. I don’t know how complete they are (I didn’t use version control in 2000-2002) and whether they compile or not, so I am trying them out. I have BeOS working in a QEMU emulator (well just ‘Q’ actually) but without network or colour. Trying to download haiku r1 alpha 1 to see how that goes instead. I will be posting updates to a separate tumblelog at http://kumo-beos.tumblr.com/. I don’t suppose there is a version control that works with bfs attributes is there? I would like to stick the code on github, but that would just strip away the all-important attributes, so not very useful!

Haiku under VMWare Fusion

Interesting times indeed as I am finally able to run Haiku at a decent speed under OSX (does that make it Haiku.app?). The network works too which is very useful if I am ever going to do anything with my projects.

!http://www.kumo.it/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/haiku.png!

I have moved the BeOS open source survey to the “BeOS”:/beos page.

Experiences in emulating BeOS in OSX

A couple of nights ago I decided that it was time to see if I could get BeOS to work on my iBook (it worked but it was very slow). The only way I could get it to work was with emulation. I found the information on various places on the Internet but I forgot to note down where I found it from so I am recreating it here (so that at least I don’t forget how it was done).

For now I am trying to use just the simple BeOS 5 Personal Edition.

• Download the BeOS R5 Personal Edition for Linux from BeBits
• Extract the file that you just downloaded and if you want to, place image.be and floppy.img somewhere
• Install _qemu_ which is a PC emulator. I installed it from http://stegefin.free.fr/qemu/qemu.dmg as suggested on the Haiku Wiki

At this point, you should open up a Terminal window and cd to the location where image.be and floppy.img are. Both files are needed to get BeOS PE to run and so the following should be typed:

qemu -fda floppy.img -hda image.be -boot a -m 128 -user-net

-fda floppy.img

The floppy disk is _floppy.img_

-hda image.be

The hard disk is _image.be_

-boot a

Boot from drive a

-m 128

Provide 128 meg of memory

-user-net

Creates a private network (?)

After a while BeOS will be running in greyscale. Either I would have to enable the safe video mode everytime I booted BeOS or I would have to use one of the pieces of software on BeBits to force the video mode. I couldn’t get the network to work so I was stuck with the problem of how to transfer files to BeOS. I tried to make a dmg but it didn’t work so in the end I made a CD image using the following command:

hdiutil makehybrid -o stuff_for_beos.iso -iso DIRECTORY

At that point the CD image can be passed to qemu by adding -cdrom ISONAME to the qemu command:

qemu -fda floppy.img -hda image.be -cdrom stuff_for_beos.iso -boot a -m 128 -user-net

BeOS apps

I am wondering if I should bother making the source code to my old BeOS applications available… does anyone care at all?

Repliman Desktop Fix

Added new version of repliman. You should download this only if you have problems seeing the Desktop replicants.

Attr Tools Update

Updated the attr_tools, now attributes can be renamed. Page can be found “here”:/beos/attr_tools.

Net Positive Buttons

Buttons are appearing all over the internet so I made my NetPositive compliant button here.

Attr Tools Release

I rewrote some of the *attr commands that ship with BeOS to show more information about the attributes. Page can be found “here”:/pages/beos/attr_tools.