BeOS Release Notes

BeOS Preview Release
For Power Macintosh and BeBox Computers

This document lists some known glitches and problems in the BeOS Preview Release, which were discovered after the printing of the BeOS User's Guide.

For the most complete and current list, use NetPositive or another web browser to visit the Preview Release support section of the Be web site:

Be sure to visit the Be web site from time to time, to receive notice of any BeOS updates when they are released.

• Be patient when installing. The BeOS boots faster than the CD-ROM disk spins up and comes on line. You may need to rescan for the CD multiple times before it becomes available in the BeOS boot screen.

• Partitioning IDE drives with FWB's Hard Drive Toolkit software can render your Macintosh hardware unbootable. Do not attempt to create more than a single partition on the following IDE drives: Seagate ST31267A, Seagate ST5250A, Seagate ST36450A, Western Digital Cabo AL22500. Your system will be unable to boot if one of these drives is attached and has been partitioned into more than one volume using certain versions of the Hard Drive Toolkit.

  While this is a problem with the FWB Hard Drive Toolkit, rather than with the BeOS, the Hard Drive Toolkit is bundled with a number of Power Macintosh compatible systems, including those from Power Computing and Motorola. Because partitioning your hard drive is something you may need to do to install the BeOS, we want all of our customers to be aware of the issue.

  You should contact FWB or your computer vendor for a software update which corrects this problem.

• When using the FWB Hard Drive Toolkit, make sure to choose to leave the BeOS Installer CD in on restart, otherwise when trying to boot the BeOS off the BeOS Installer CD, you will have problems.

• When using the BeOS on Power Macintosh hardware, we recommend you use Mac OS system software version 7.6.

• On some Macintosh systems, there are a number of extensions which can conflict with the BeOS when trying to launch the BeOS from the Mac OS:

  • 68K library
  • OpenTransport 1.1.2
  • QuickTime 2.5
  • MP support library
  • FWB TurboBoot

  You may need to disable these extensions to install the BeOS (but you'll need your CD-ROM driver to access the CD!).

  If you experience difficulties with the BeOS and have any of these extensions installed, try rebooting your Mac OS system with extensions off (by holding down the Shift key during boot), and then launch the BeOS using the BeOS Launcher application.

• If you are using an IBM DORS 32160 SCSI drive, you may encounter problems running the BeOS. To check and see if you have this drive use your favorite disk utility such as FWB Toolkit or SCSI Probe.

• The BeOS does not currently support Adaptec SCSI adapter cards in any system, including the Power Center Pros. On a Power Center Pro, any hard drive connected to the Adaptec card SCSI interface will be invisible to the BeOS. You can reconnect those drives to the internal SCSI connector (the cable is already in your system) to use them with the BeOS.

• Removing ejectable/removable media during copies, mounting disks, or running files can result in corrupt data on the removable media or crashes in the BeOS.

• Unmounting volumes during the boot process will crash the system.

• The BeOS does not support fixed sync monitors at this time. You must use a multisync monitor with the BeOS.

• Graphics drivers do not save your monitor settings.

• It is possible to permanently hose your screen refresh rate, and make your screen unreadable, by using the slider control and moving the refresh rate to an obscene level. If you do this, Command-Shift-Option-F12 should reset your screen refresh rate to the default.

• On Power Macintosh hardware, the BeOS does not eject an inserted floppy disk on restart or shutdown.

• Formatting floppy disks does not work on Power Macintosh hardware. Format floppies under the Mac OS, and then initialize them in the BeOS.

• Some Kensington 4-button mice only allow use of the main button, while others work fine (though there is no way to make use of the fourth button).

• If you close the PPP window while PPP is disconnecting, you will hang the net server, which will require you to reboot the BeOS to re-establish network connectivity.

• Do not rename or move the /boot/beos/ folder or anything in it. The BeOS will not boot if you do so, and you will have to re-install the BeOS.

• If you drag the /boot/beos/ folder to the Trash and delete it, you will not get a warning and you will not be able to boot the BeOS. You will have to re-install the BeOS to boot into the BeOS.

• If you drag the /boot/beos/ folder to the Desktop you will not be able to boot the BeOS.

• If you decide to keep a copy of DR8 of the BeOS (on a separate disk from the Preview Release), you can use the boot selection screen to switch between the two releases when you boot the BeOS.

  However, if your DR8 database becomes damaged, you can't use the current versions of the BeOS Launcher, OS Chooser, or BeBox Boot ROM to rebuild the database -- you'll have to downgrade to the DR8 versions to have the "Rebuild databases" option in the boot selection screen, and then you'll need to upgrade to the current version(s) again to be able to boot the Preview Release of the BeOS.

  Please note that Be no longer recommends using DR8, and cannot support ongoing usage of this earlier developer release of the BeOS.

• Links in the BeOS are POSIX-style symlinks. Links created by the Tracker can be moved around but if you move or rename the item they point to, the link will break.

• Error reporting when trying to launch applications or open documents is not very good. The error dialogs are typically not very helpful in explaining the problem (e.g. couldn't find the application, use application X to open this type of file, application is out of date, etc.). We are working on improving this...

• There is no way to cancel a shutdown/restart. Clicking "Cancel" in the Save panel of some application will not cancel the shutdown.

• Shutdown and restart do not work while any printing-related panel is open.

• In the Tracker's copy dialog, the "Stop" button doesn't work during the early stages of a copy (while the dialog shows the "preparing..." message). Wait until the copy starts to click the Stop button.

• The Tracker doesn't display a file's new icon after you change its type in the File Types preferences app. It will be updated after you reboot your BeOS system.

• The Tracker's Find panel only works on volumes or partitions that contain the Be File System.

• If you misspell an attribute name when using the "By Formula" method in the Tracker's Find panel, you will suck up lots of CPU cycles.

• The Tracker does not display Desktop pictures.

• The Time preferences application does not contain all cities.

• The Workspaces preferences application at this time has no menu of any kind, so there's no way to configure it (to use fewer or more workspaces, for example). You can still use it to change workspaces, and move applications from one workspace to another.

• BeMail is generating MIME that confuses other mail programs.

• CD Player cannot play Sony MultiMedia CDs.

• If you type a title into the text field in the CD Player and press Enter, it scrolls instead of accepting your input.

• CD Player's "shuffle mode" button will work only on CD-ROM drives that we support; see the BeOS User's Guide for details.

• CD Player's "track info" button does nothing.

• If there's no CD in the CD-ROM drive, CD Player will not let you click the Eject button to open the drawer. The CD Player Eject button dims when you eject a CD.

• Software MIDI reverses the left and right sound channels.

• The Kaleidoscope demonstration application doesn't resize its drawing area when you resize the window.

• Terminal doesn't set the type of its preferences files correctly

• In the Flight application, quitting the second player kills the first player. If you're the second player, this is a good way to avoid losing...

• The programmer's font, ProFont, is missing bar and right-bracket glyphs.

• Font lists (such as in menus, etc.) generally are not sorted.

• NetPositive cannot display all possible HTML pages. Some pages will have display glitches or extra characters. Some pages can cause NetPositive to crash.

• NetPositive does support proxy http but not proxy ftp (in spite of its presence in the Preferences panel).

• NetPositive cannot print, and the Print menu item does not work.

• If you fill out a form in NetPositive and submit it, and then Go Back to the form, NetPositive forgets the form field data (the fields will be blank). The Be Webmaster hates this...

• The index in the HTML version of the electronic BeOS User's Guide does not work. The index in the PDF (Acrobat) version works fine. There is no index in the current printed BeOS User's Guide.

• To get the debugger to pop up when a process crashes, instead of the user-friendly dialog, export an environment variable named BEDEBUG to something other than 0 or false. BEDEBUG should go into /home/config/boot/UserSetupEnvironment like this:

  export BEDEBUG=true

• Using Control-C to break out of an application while it is launching may leave the application's resources in a corrupt state.

• Randomly killing OS threads is not a good idea.

• If application A calls load_add_on("A"), it will crash.

• Running a second copy of any BeOS server (e.g., by launching it in Terminal) is bad. You will crash.

• Currently ASSERT and the debugger are broken -- you drop into the debugger at a pc in the debugger library code instead of the location where you called ASSERT from. More seriously, stack crawl does not work.

• To build a driver, make a copy of the kernel named _KERNEL_ and link against that file.

• There's a memory leak in BAppFileInfo::SetTo(). Calling this function results in the leak of a BResources object. If the underlying file was opened for writing, this results in the actual file being left in a state. Trying to open that file (for reading or writing) will result in a "file is busy" error. So if possible, avoid recycling BAppFileInfo objects using the SetTo call if you're opening the file for writing.

  POSIX layer issues:

• The unmask is not properly inherited (so you can set it in the shell but it doesn't affect the programs you run).

• Some of the uses of get/seteuid don't work properly.

• File permissions can be set properly with chmod, etc., but user/group id setting doesn't work very well at the moment.

• system(0) should return non-zero but instead it returns 0.

• ttyname() is faked and /dev/tty does not really exist.

• select() only works on sockets, not file descriptors.