TyCom Systems BeOS, What's New

BeOS 5 Personal Edition

Introducing BeOS 5 Personal Edition, the first version of BeOS that is completely free to use. In keeping with Be's tradition of offering the best operating system designed for broadband digital media, we have taken time and care to greatly improve on Release 4.5, adding numerous improvements, greater ease of use, wider support, new versions of applications, better hardware standards, major software changes, and more! (Oh, and did we mention that it's free?)

BeOS 5 Personal Edition -- What's New

Media-rific
BeOS 5 includes support for 1394 cards - aka FireWire. In other words, yes BeOS supports upload and download of digital video footage from/to digital camcorders via supported FireWire cards.
MP3 decoding is now built into the guts of BeOS 5 via the mp3 codec. Play MP3 files in MediaPlayer or any application using the BeOS translator kit (and if you purchase BeOS 5 Pro Edition, you'll have the first OS with mp3 encoding built-in).
The CDDA filesystem allows you to mount and read an audio CD as if it were a CD-ROM, which means tracks are now available as WAV files and can be read and manipulated by any BeOS application capable of handling WAV files. Save audio tracks as WAV files to your hard drive with a simple drag and drop.
Tap your toes to the all new Beatnik MIDI engine.
GUI Goodness
On the interface front, we've made major improvements to Tracker, with query templates, an improved find panel and X-ray folders that allow for effortless movement of files into nested groups of folders. You'll also find more useful Get Info panels, recent apps, recent documents and recent queries, and safe mode support. Open files by dropping them onto running applications in the Deskbar. Use the Configure Be Menu option to customize the Be menu to your liking.
BeOS 5 Personal Edition includes a new version of NetPositive, everyone's favorite BeOS-native web browser. Besides making NetPositive compatible with many more websites than ever before, we also have improved navigation icons, improved performance, and an all-new download manager that has multiple downloading capabilities, including the ability to stop, start and pause downloads. Surf all day and download while you sleep.

And More
Burn your own data and audio CDs with the included CDBurner application.
Great news for laptop users: BeOS now has experimental PCMCIA IDE support (Compact flash adaptor, memory stick adaptor, Vaio CD-ROM, improved modem support, Linksys DE-660 10-T ethercard, Linksys Network Everywhere(tm) 10-T ethercard).
Access files wherever they might be with NTFS and ext2 support.
But that's not all: There are print server improvements -- with reduced memory and thread usage, the print server is faster and uses less system resources. Nearly 400 PostScript PPD files have been added to enable postscript printing on a huge array of printers. The media kit has matured and the Media Player now includes NetPositive plug-in integration and overlay support, among other things.

BeOS has an improved networks setting panel (now autodetects cards), improved PPP support and USB printing. One of our favorite new and improved offerings is the even better BeMail, which now comes with a button bar (for the iconically inclined), save as draft capability, spell-checking (eliminate tyops) and UI enhancements.

We've also added more graphics drivers (Matrox g400, rage128 pro, i810, Trident MVP 4) and audio drivers. Better support now exists for multiple network cards of the same type, and mouse wheel support for all applications.
BeOS BeOS 5 Personal Edition offers the fastest and easiest installation ever - no repartitioning of your drives is necessary., a consistent and familiar user interface, high performance for broadband digital media and support for a wide variety of industry standards. Its new features and improvements have raised the level of performance and ease-of-use, making this OS the media OS to try -- and get hooked on.