Kevin Fenzi
Kevin Fenzi posted his impressions of 'playing with his be' in early 1996. His
comments focus on packaging and software more than the BeBox itself, but they
are still an interesting contemporary view of the buzz surrounding the BeBox.
From: Kevin Fenzi (kevin@scrye.com)
Subject: got my be -- comments/impressions
Newsgroups: comp.sys.be
Date: 1996/02/02
well, my be just came in yesterday. Yea!
I can see why we haven't seen very many postings for people who just
got their be in, it's damm hard to go and post to usenet when you can
be playing with your be. ;)
Overcoming that...here are my impressions:
Packing was very professional, and everything arrived intact.
Got evernthing setup in short order, all the cards were installed and
ready to go, only had to plug in mouse (3 button), monitor, and
ethernet (and power).
had to run all the eye-candy like video mail and sounds samples.
Seemed to go fine. Compiled the hellow world same program. Worked
fine. Even launched off an excessive amount of stuff...got it all to
run, although I slipped into swaping and things slowed down.
Some things I have noticed in the days play I have had:
1. There is no "busy" cursor when you double click an
application. Granted, this might not be approprate on a multitasking
machine like the be, but there should be some indication that you have
launched the application. I got several copies of the same video mail
this way, thinking I had missed clicking on the icon. Haven't looked
at the bebook much yet (been busy playing), does beos support a "busy"
cursor?
2. Three button mouse. The box shipped with a three button mouse, but
as far as I can tell only the left and right buttons do anything. How
can the middle button be accessed? new drivers needed?
3. terminal shell. A number of questions/concerns:
a. pet peave: no 'clear' capibility. I like being able to clear the
screen before a make so I can tell everything in the current screen is
due to that make...
b. 'exit' from the shell freezes it up, but doesn't close the window.
c. command line editing...if this is based on bash how hard would it
be to port the command line editing features of bash? ie, being able
to cntrl-p and edit your previous line. (yes, I am a unix junkie).
d. if you launch a command from the shell, and want to quit it from
the shell, how do you do that? cntrl-c doesn't do
anything. cntrl-break seems to bring up the debugger.
e. Is there any way to name terminals? If I have several up, and I
want to switch between them, they are all called terminal and I need
to hunt for the one I want.
4. switching back to the browser when you have a lot of stuff up on
the screen only gives you the root partition. Shouldn't it bring all
the browser windows to the top?
Thats my first impressions/bug report. ;)
I'm pretty impressed with the stability considering how early the OS
is. It probibly crashes less than windoze. ;)
back to playing...
kevin
--
Kevin Fenzi | Alternative Collegiate |acca@acca.nmsu.edu
kevin@scrye.com | Computing Association |pgp2.6.2 key by request
WWW -> http://scrye.com/~kevin/
kfenzi@uswest.com
bob@acca.nmsu.edu
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