Entry

How easy is it to install BeOS 5 Personal Edition?

Mar 15th, 2001 06:37
Dennis Costea Jr., http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/

A: Very easy.

The latest version of BeOS for Intel x86 platforms can be installed 
without creating a separate partition on your hard drive.  BeOS R5 
Personal Edition is a free 43 Mb download and install as a single 500 Mb 
 file under Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT.

At 43 Mb keep in mind that a Broadband internet connection is the best 
way to get BeOS R5 Personal Edition.

One step you will want to take before downloading OR installing is 
ScanDisk and Defrag of whatever drive on which this software will be 
installed.  This potentially insures that your download, installation 
and operation of BeOS will perform as well as possible (NOTE: the 
underlying architecture of your computer plays a role in this as well, 
but BeOS is optimized for multimedia applications and has good 
performance even on slower hardware).

I followed the installation instructions with the download and had this 
alternative OS installed in under 12 minutes.  The final installed file 
is 512 Mb (megabyte) in size so be sure you have at least this much free 
room on whatever disk you use.  Also, keep in mind that many versions of 
Microsoft's operating systems use a "swap file" for "virtual memory" and 
you should know the size of yours before begining a BeOS installation.

Here are some swap file sizes for example:

Windows 98: 53 Mb
Windows NT 4.0 workstation: 168 Mb

These large files are created each time you boot your Microsoft Windows 
operating system computer, so remember to ADD the size of your swap file 
to the 512 Mb required for BeOS.  In addition to this most technical 
support people will tell you that Windows needs a minimum of 10% of your 
hard drive in order to operate properly, so please add 1/10th of your 
hard drive size to the combined BeOS/swap file total.  Here is an 
example:

512 Mb (BeOS) + 168 Mb (NT swap) = 680 Mb
If you have a 20 Gb (gigabyte) hard drive, the total becomes:

680 Mb + 2 Gb (or 2,000 Mb) for a total of 2,680 Mb

(NOTE: With today's larger hard drive sizes the "10% rule" isn't as 
important as it used to be)

If all you have at home is a 56k modem connection, consider downloading 
BeOS R5 at the office and putting the 42.6 Mb file on a Zip brand disk 
or other portable media.  Something you can connect to both the home and 
office computers without significant problems.

If no high bandwidth connection is available, a CD-ROM with BeOS may be 
order from several third party vendors.  BestBuy.com and Gigabuys (Dell) 
have BeOS R5 Professional Edition available, but remember you can always 
try the Personal Edition for FREE!

Good luck trying an alternative operating system which IS relatively 
easy to install!  Your co-workers, friends and neighbors will be 
impressed when you tell them, "I'm no longer a 1 operating system 
person".