Robert Poole
In mid 1996, Robert Poole posted his first impressions of his BeBox (after
spending 2 weeks trying to get it to work properly). His post identifies the
exact hardware he ended up using in his BeBox, hardware he had problems with,
and his thoughts on some of the (early revision) software.
From: Robert Poole (lionlad@netzone.com)
Subject: First week with my BeBox -- first impressions
Newsgroups: comp.sys.be
Date: 1996/06/17
Well, after getting my BeBox working to my degree of satisfaction, I
thought I would post my impressions, my trials and tribulations, and my
triumphs. :-) It's actually been more like 2 weeks since I got the
machine, but getting it to work right has been troublesome.
Hardware that I got to work in the box, ultimately:
(1) Diamond Stealth 64 Video 2201 (PCI). Good card, has 2 megs of EDO
DRAM on-board and the S3 Trio64 chip.
(2) Novell NE2000 Ethernet card. Yeah, one of the original cards, back
when Novell actually made networking hardware. The thing is chock full
of chips, and probably sucks quite a bit of power, but it works just
fine. I'm using a thinnet network currently, and I'm connected to a
Pentium box at the moment.
(3) NEC 6Xi CD-ROM drive. Nice 6-spin SCSI CD drive, has front-panel
controls for audio CD's (no CD-player applet intervention required) and
a funky rolling dust-door which doubles as an eject button. Uses
CD-caddies, so some may dislike the drive.
(4) LaCie 2.16 GB SCSI hard drive. The mechanism is actually IBM made.
Very solid performer. I like it. Installing the BeOS to it was a pain
-- I needed a floppy-based kernel patch to be able to properly
initialize the drive and install to it.
(5) Logitech Trackman -- the one with the polka-dotted red trackball.
It not only looks good, but it feels good. Very ergonomic, excellent
pointing device. I'd use one on my PC (except that I am using a Cirque
Glidepoint on it). It is correctly recognized as a 3-button mouse by
the OS.
(6) Generic keyboard -- the only stand-out feature is that it was the
only one I could find that has decent feedback on the keys, so I bought
it used for under $10.
I got a couple 8-meg 72-pin SIMMs from a local reseller for $65 each.
(These are 60 ns, non-parity.) Not bad. Prices are going down still,
tho... I plan to buy another two soon.
Parts I tried that failed to work right:
(1) STB Nitro 1.3 card with 1 meg of DRAM. Apparently, this version of
the Nitro PCI won't work right with the BeBox. Plus, the BeOS seems to
prefer cards with 2 megs of RAM. No big loss.
(2) The Panasonic PD/CD drive that can read CD's and read/write
Phasewriter media. I could not get the BeBox to format the PD media to
save my life. Then the drive went south on me, so I'll never know if
the drive's defects were what caused problems recognizing the PD media,
or if it simply wasn't doing kosher SCSI.
Random comments: The SCSI cable included with the machine had a slight
flaw in one of the connectors. Fortunately, a trip to CableTronics
solved that -- they repaired the strain relief on one of the connectors,
and salvaged the cable, at no cost to me.
The choice of CD-audio connectors on the BeBox's I/O daughter card is
truly annoying. I had to track down a special "do it all" CD audio
cable that would correctly connect the NEC CD drive to the daughter
card. CompUSA stocks them, although initially they couldn't even find
the damned thing in the computer -- it was intuitively referenced under
"MPC II CD ROM cable" instead of "CD audio cable."
The lack of labels on the ports is a headache. Having to refer to a
manual to check which port is which is tedious. Fortunately, I didn't
have to do it that much.
Altec Lansing speakers sound REALLY good with the BeBox. :-) I got the
new ACS300.1 speakers. They are almost identical to the ACS300's that a
friend showed me, except the power supply is integrated with the
subwoofer now. Using the 1/8" audio-out jack on the back of the BeBox
with the speakers works well.
Playback of sound files is smooth and sounds rich, but the audio levels
are a bit low. I'm going to have to tweak the settings in the audio
preferences panel. (BTW, the mixing board metaphor is extremely well
executed -- and I was amazed that the "mute" check-boxes actually worked
the way they should.)
PPP via modem is a bit flaky. Granted, this was before I patched the
ROM and untarred the DR7 update into /boot. For the record, I
temporarily used my US Robotics Courier with the BeBox. It connected
fine to my ISP (except when the ISP decided to go down spontaneously --
they're having problems), but FTPing was a hit-or-miss affair.
Networking via ethernet is wonderful! I have no problems thus far, and
plan on perhaps setting up my Pentium box as a gateway to the outside
world, so I can do internet stuff with the BeBox without relying on a
modem. (Any suggestions on how to do this under Win95, NT, or Linux
would be appreciated.) If only UNIX were this easy to set up...
24-bit color support isn't any noticeably slower than 8-bit color,
except when the system is really resource-loaded. Another 16 megs of
RAM should cure some of that. I've only managed to get the machine to
"thrash" once, and I wouldn't have even noticed it except for the
warning dialog that the BeBox popped up telling me to close some apps to
stop the thrashing. :-)
Updating the ROMs is a piece of cake, as long as you remember the system
makes extensive use of Drag-n-Drop. I would prefer a status display of
some kind, though, so I'm not left wondering if the flash-upgrade worked
or not.
The NEC CD-ROM drive seems to not like the CD Player and Mini Player
apps much. I can't change tracks on an audio CD from the apps, only
from the front panel of the CD-ROM drive. Sometimes, I can't get either
app to even get the CD to play. At least they update their displays
correctly when I do things on the CD-ROM drive's front panel. The CD
eject feature works well. :-) (This is especially useful for ejecting
a mounted CD-ROM volume that won't correctly unmount.)
It appears that the OS doesn't always unmount a CD-ROM volume
completely. The drive winds up still thinking that the CD is in use,
and continues spinning the disc, making it difficult to eject the CD.
(The NEC 6Xi uses a caddy, and so it has control over whether a CD
gets ejected or not.) This problems isn't as bad since I installed the
DR7 update patches.
Thank goodness for the MTools port! I used MTools to sneakernet one
component of the DR7 update, because I was having problems getting PPP
to work.
Someone should take the time to at least fix the bugs in Orb (the Be web
browser), even if no new features are added.
I managed to corrupt the database badly enough once that I couldn't
force the database to rebuild no matter what I did. I decided to
reinstall the OS, but this proved problematic because of the floppy/CD
combo boot required to correctly install to large hard disks. The
solution was weird -- I had to boot with just the CD to "initialize" the
hard drive, thereby mangling it so it no longer contained a valid BeOS
volume (since the CD has the old kernel on it that doesn't recognize
drives bigger than 2.14 GB). Then I rebooted with the floppy and the CD
and reinstalled to the hard drive. I haven't had any database problems
since.
I am astounded how fast the Mandelbrot application draws, even when
zoomed in deep. I'm also astounded how deep I can zoom a region of the
Mandelbrot set. :-)
The FTP server on the BeBox didn't seem to want to accept connections
until after I deleted the PPP interface I had set up via the network
preferences app. (I was attempting to FTP from my Pentium box to the
BeBox via ethernet.)
Overall impressions:
The BeBox is remarkably fast, and the OS is clever. However, some of
the kinks definitely need to be worked out. I also still have some
nagging problems with power cycling. (I still need to leave the box off
for a considerable length of time before I can power it up again.) I
think that right now, applications are sorely needed, and Be is right to
have such an open developer program. The BeBox isn't quite ready for
prime time. (Yes, maybe I'm belaboring the obvious.)
All in all, I'm more enthusiastic now than I was when I first heard of
the machine. :-)
Now, for more apps to demo the machine... Is there a decent repository
I can go to to grab a bunch of apps to try out?
Rob Poole
lionlad@netzone.com
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