BeOS: An Alternative Operating System

This month, Martin Russ turns traitor and investigates an alternative to the MacOS.

Over‑confidence is a terrible thing. Mix it with assumptions and you have a dangerous combination. I'm ashamed to have to admit that I finally cured the problems that I was having with installing BeOS last month. The source of the trouble was not the Macintosh hardware, nor the operating system. Nope, it was something which has always worked so perfectly for me that it came as a complete surprise to be tripped up by it: SCSI, the Small Computer System Interface used by the Mac to connect to peripheral devices such as hard disks and CD‑ROMs.

I've seen, heard and read about people having problems with their SCSI connections, and always felt smug because it had never happened to me, secure in the knowledge that whilst PC users seemed to have considerable problems, Mac users didn't. Oops.

Troubleshooting

As I've mentioned several times before, when you have problems with your setup, the number one rule is to be suspicious of anything non‑Apple which sits in your System Folder. Conflicts with extensions, INITs, startup items, screen‑savers, and more, are all waiting for the unwary.

Then there's the hard disk itself. Checking and defragmenting it with something like Norton Utilities should not only speed up operation, but it should also catch and repair all of those files with minor quirks which seem to infest every disk after a while.

BeOS looks like some mutated offspring of a marriage between the MacOS, Windows 95, X‑Windows and several other GUIs.

After that there's the clean install of the operating system, followed by a search through the current cover CD of a Mac magazine to see if there are any recent system updates. Finally, there's always Micromat TechTool's 'Analyse' button, which looks for anything wrong with your system files. (TechTool can be bought from many Mac suppliers). These strategems tend to catch most problems, and the problem can then usually be isolated by doing incremental re‑installs of all those extra goodies.

So, faced with a clean, Apple software‑only Mac which crashed doing the most mundane of tasks, what should you do next?

It turns out that the standard answer is to power down the Mac hardware, disconnect the SCSI plug (thereby isolating the Mac from the peripherals) and power up again. If the Mac still crashes, the problem is somewhere inside (software or hardware), but if it no longer crashes mysteriously, the SCSI connections are suspect. And guess what? Yep, my problem went away when I removed the SCSI stuff, and re‑appeared when I reconnected it. 'Fascinating, Captain', as Mr Spock would say.

At this point, there are two alternatives. Either you consult the many guides on SCSI, which point out marginally useful but ever so slightly obvious things like...

• Always power things down before changing cable connections.
• Always use the shortest SCSI cables you can.
• Keep the total cable length to less than 6 metres.
• Always put a terminator on the end of the SCSI chain.
• Use the same type of SCSI cables for all connections.

... or else you work with the alternative recommendations from the pragmatic school of 'trust no‑one, and assume nothing':

• Unplug all the cables, then connect them back again.
• Connect first one peripheral, then another, and so on.
• Try removing the terminator, and using a long SCSI cable at the end of the chain of peripherals instead.
• Use the thickest SCSI cables you can find.
• Throw away any all‑plastic SCSI connectors and replace them with those with a solid metal D‑shaped bit.

As you might guess, I tried both. Curiously, it turned out that just reconnecting the cables worked remarkably well, so the suspicion would seem to be that one of the many connections in the SCSI cables was sub‑optimal. I wasn't able to make the problem re‑appear.

Beos Revisited

With my new 'much less prone to crashing' computer system, installing BeOS worked like a dream, after a few minutes of frantic CD‑ROM and hard disk activity whilst it copied across the files, and then a reboot. Just after the usual Macintosh welcome screen I now got an Operating System selector dialogue box, which gave me the choice of either MacOS or BeOS, although it remembers the last one you used as the default, of course.

When the screen came up in BeOS it was quite a shock to me, mainly because it defaulted to 640 x 480 pixels, which looks slightly wild on a 17‑inch monitor! But a few judicious mouse‑clicks gave me a cool 1152 x 832 pixels again, and all was well.

BeOS looks like some mutated offspring of a marriage between the MacOS, Windows 95, X‑Windows and several other GUIs [Graphical User Interfaces] , but the transition for a Mac user is not that traumatic, and I was soon clicking around and doing things without having to think too hard. Being a suspicious so‑and‑so, the next thing I did was to choose the 'Restart' option and select the MacOS in the OS selector — just to check that the MacOS was still there and working. It was, of course. I now had two machines in one. Merely by restarting, I could choose between either of two operating systems. Cynics might like to wallow in self‑congratulation here by reminding everyone that this was always touted as being one of the advantages of the PowerPC chip, but for some reason Windows NT never quite made it across the porting process...

Apart from being smooth and clean, and having one or two little extras, like being able to do several things apparently simultaneously, there's one major goodie in BeOS that I've always wanted on the Mac: a command line. Now that you've gasped in shock, let me explain that there are some occasions when repeated clicking of the mouse is a little tedious, and where a simple typed command to copy only specific files from one place to another would be much easier. But the BeOS command line is capable of rather more than that: in fact it's an enhanced version of one of the standard UNIX shells (its parent was the Bourne shell, for any interested UNIX gurus) and so is capable of some remarkably sophisticated scripting.

BeOS is available from Computer Warehouse/TSC, although it is possible to buy it over the net too — but mine took over a week to arrive, so I'd definitely recommend the significantly faster Computer Warehouse mail‑order method for UK readers. Contact Computer Warehouse on 0181 400 1234 or TSC on 0181 400 9400, or on the web head for www.tsc@mcm.co.uk or www.computerwarehouse.co.uk.

You may remember from last month's Apple Notes that I started this whole process of BeOS installation because I wanted to run a program which had been specially written for BeOS. Well, now I could finally read the Audio Elements CD‑ROM I'd been itching to try (Audio Elements does not run on non‑BeOS‑equipped Macs) and after more copying onto my BeOS hard disk partition, I had the long‑awaited software running.

Audio Elements

About 10 years ago, Digidesign had an application for the Macintosh called TurboSynth. It was a software synthesizer, sample player and manipulator, and out of its concepts have grown many of the sample editors and software synthesizers that we have today. Adamation's Audio Elements is a bit like a modern reworking of some of the same ideas. It can be a sophisticated 'modular' software synthesizer, or an AIFF sample‑based S+S synthesizer/processor, but there are two major pluses: it works in real time, and you can extend what it does by writing your own processing bits in C++.

Audio Elements provides a 'drag‑and drop' method to place the various processing elements onto the workspace, and then uses the 'point‑and‑click' technique to connect them togther. Once you've assembled an 8‑operator FM synth, for example, all you do is click on the play button and you hear the sound. Alternatively, you could use MIDI to trigger the same sound, or you could have FM plus an S+S synthesizer, or even a classic dual‑VCO monosynth. Not all of the elements that you would expect to find in a modular synthesizer are present, but after all this is version 1.0 of an application which runs in the second Preview (did someone say 'just beyond a beta'?) of a new Operating System. Overall, though, I was impressed, and I look forward to seeing this one grow and grow.

The Internet is a good way to find out about Adamation and Audio Elements. You can also buy it from the company direct: $95 plus $13.50 shipping gets you delivery in two or three weeks; pricier shipping gets it to you faster.