I agree that
BeOS is a great
operating system. But what I find unnerving is the fact that the
supported hardware is even more limited than it was with
Linux in
the old days of 1.1.12...
A long time BeOS only had two supported NICs. One standard NE2000 and the other was the 3Com Etherlink.
Absolutely no support for 100Mbit networks.
Even cards, such as the Realtek 8029, which are PNP Versions of the NE2000 did not work. The PNP Part of the OS couldn't activate these devices, although there was no problem configuring the SoundBlaster AWE 64...
By now, there is a third-party driver for the Realtek 8139, one of the better 100Mbit NICs.
The saying may be, better late than never, but this time it was one and a half year too late... Maybe I will take again a look at BeOS 6.0, but with 4.5 and 5 I weren't overly impressed. Okay, the desktop looks very nice and it was very stable and the CLI is a stripped down version of BASH thus I'm feeling comfortable but a computer without networking is no computer to me.