🚀 go-pugleaf

As someone who uses both BeOS and Linux regularly, I suppose I should
comment.

"Ivan Smith" <nospam@seesigniture.com> writes:

> In Q1 next year Be Corp (http://www.be.com/) are going to release BeOS for
> Intel: [...]

(For those playing along at home, it's been demoed already, but
developers haven't yet been sent their copies)

> I was wondering, seeing BeOS has a GNU compiler (version unknown) 

It comes with a port of Fred Fish's (of Amiga fame) Geekgadgets, and
is fairly recent.

> and is fully POSIX, 

Hardly.

It's not difficult to rewrite POSIX code so it'll work happily under
BeOS, and while I'm by no means a hardened expert on these matters I
doubt it would be significantly more difficult than your average Unix
to Unix port; but fully POSIX it ain't.

> Multi everything etc

Again, for those playing along at home: it has a team/thread
(process/thread) distinction, threads are very lightweight and share
memory and such like. Another nice thing is that windows automagically
get a separate drawing thread to the program's main processing thread.

> and is UNIX based, 

It has a bash shell; and a number of Unix programs have been ported to
it. Including such things as XF86, even.

It has a Unix/POSIX compatability layer; its underlying makeup isn't
Unix though.

> if anyone else is
> interested in this OS and what is the likelihood of cross compiling any GNU
> C apps for Linux the BeOS? 

gcc doesn't support PEF at the moment due to licensing problems (ie,
Apple won't give it away) and since that's what BeOS for PPC uses, you
won't be able to do any /real/ BeOS programs (ones with windows, or
device drivers, or anything else that would be BeOS specific). Ports
are fine though.

> It has already been demonstrated that BeOS apps
> can be cross compiled for Intel and PPC on either platform and they appear
> and run identically on both platforms.

Only be Be themselves, though, I'll point out.

The programmer still needs to take care of endian issues when
communicating between machines (networking or saving to disk), so
we'll see how well this works out in practice.
 
To answer the question posed by the Subject line however, I find Linux
a beautiful server environment. It's powerful, it's reliable and you
can do whatever you want with it. BeOS, on the other hand is a single
user only system, with a nice interface, with an exceptionally easy
programming API, and a snappy GUI.

I use my Linux box as a router, web server, name server, and so on. I
connect my BeBox to my 17" monitor, and my nice keyboard and do most
of my work and play on it.

Cheers,
aj