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This ubuntu spin is poorly put together by Roberto Dohnert, who many of you may remember for his staunch defense of SCO in these forums.

There is nothing BEOS about what he is doing either. It's simply Ubuntu with XFCE and a BEOS imitation of the window decoration.

Not very interesting. I would love to hear what does make it interesting. Finally, most one-man projects such as this one are bound to fail, particularly when they are put together by people whose only contribution to Linux has been to spread FUD on behalf of SCO.

Edited 2008-07-15 17:26 UTC

A heck of a lot more made BeOS what it was, for good and for bad, but this is just plain silly and trying to grab attention. Go away, please, just go away.

This won't work any better than Ubuntu Studio, and it's sure a lot uglier.

Looks butt-ugly in general, and the pseudo tracker and pseudo pulse too.

Thanks but no thanks.

http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p...

This is a blatant ripoff of ZevenOS (all allowed due to the gpl ofcourse). Even uses their theme for the window decorations. And ZevenOS used to use Xfce too but nowdays the IceWM, have a BeOS deskbar and many other interesting features from the BeOS. look it up zevenos.com (used to be ZeBuntu)

Edited 2008-07-15 18:46 UTC

This reminds me of the VP debate between Senator Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen when DQ compares his own lack lustre career to that of Jack Kennedy to which LB comes back with

"Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy: I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

PC/OS, I used and still use BeOS, its my best and niftiest OS, PC/OS you are no BeOS.

This is rather annoying, the name Tracker was taken by another project for extracting meta data and was then renamed Meta Tracker. The BeOS Tracker has nothing to do with this even though the first bullet implies that BeOS Tracker is used as the desktop causing some confusion, it uses XFCE instead.

Anyway its not that difficult to hack KDE to look BeOS like, been there done that, but it still doesn't begin to compare with the feel of Tracker. I almost wish OpenTracker could have been ported to Linux as a half way step to Haiku.

Still I may just give it a try to see if they got more BeOS'ness then I could.

"You can put a dress on a pig, but it's still a server."

To be fair, Xfce probably is the best place to start building a BeOS lookalike desktop. In fact, this has been my Xubuntu desktop for a couple years: http://xfce-look.org/content/show.php/Haiku-ish+Smooth?content=4224... . (spam warning: my custom theme)

Unfortunately, you still can't really replicate the BeOS Deskbar, so I stick with a simple Win95 layout. The PC/OS Deskbar is a pretty poor attempt.

All of these crappy knockoff OS projects are doomed to failure. If you want to really clone an OS at least do what gnustep did with mac osx/nextSTEP and write a clone of the API. Otherwise you're just going to end up with a mac/beos looking app that works like a crummy linux app. Linux apps should look like linux apps. Beos apps should look/work like beos apps etc. Skins are weak and the novelty wears off quickly.

These "look-alike" OS's really get on my nerves when they mention BeOS because it gets my hopes up, only to dash them when I see what the project really is - Linux with a Be theme.

Anyone who REALLY knew anything about BeOS understood that the interface was only the interface - it was the platform's responsiveness that made it shine. My issues with Linux's performance are similar to my issues with Windows's performance - the sludgy experience. Now I DO like Linux (btw, CompizFusion totally spanks Vista and OSX's "eye candy"), but Linux does lots of mysterious things in the background just like Windows (insert flavor here), Macs, and just about every non-microkernel OS out there (I know BeOS isn't technically a microkernel, but it feels like it is). A few minutes after I've booted the machine, I don't expect it to still be 'thinking' about crap - I have yet to find an OS that was so quiet after booting like BeOS. So throwing together a Be-dupe means nothing if you are just sitting it on the GNU/Lin kernel...

..it just puts a tear in my eye.



A 'Haiku' for the slow boot:

You take forever,
yet I've asked nothing of you.
I almost miss DOS.

Edited 2008-07-16 13:51 UTC

" PC/OS is not meant to be a ground up reimplementation of BeOS. I use the BeOS as symbolism. BeOS was a very simple system that was just enough to hit the right spot. I did the same with PC/OS, I hope. I have the BeOS theme and look because basically I loved it as did one of my users when he recommended it and I made a theme for him."

My words. If you want to go knock on someones door and tell them how clueless they are for trying to recreate the BeOS with a Linux kernel, go talk to ZevenOS and tell them how cluessless and stupid they are. You all seem educated, how about you go, learn to read, read the entire site, blog and forums, ask questions instead of shooting off uninformed opinions and hate mail.