Logging what I’m doing.

Clicked on New in “Virtual PC List”, selected “Other” for OS. Basically, this just lets us boot from a CD in a vanilla PC and install to a simple file on our Mac.

Downloaded BeOS Max Ed from here. Make sure to put the CD in, let it spin up and then click Start Up in Virtual PC. Otherwise, it just says Boot Failed over and over again while letting you select a or c. This drove me nuts and cost me a few CDRs.

The installer was black and white although this isn’t a huge deal according to someone else on the web. It should reboot in full color.
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In addition, I could not type on the keyboard otherwise the installer would freeze. Strange.

It took a long time, an hour and more. The Max edition certainly adds a lot of packages to the base BeOS install.

The GUI and most components were considerably slow during the installer (1.33ghz powerbook). Like a Pentium II 350mhz or something. Reminds me of the good old days before lighting quick video acceleration, OpenGL/DirectX interface components (Windows 2000). The mouse was very jerky, like the difference between a USB mouse and a PS2 mouse.

There was constant CD->Hard Disk activity. The powerbook fan would spin up every once and a while. It was hot and working hard. There is no progress bar in the BeOS installer.

Just go get some coffee :)

Virtual PC has a little IO bar at the bottom of the window. This was particularly useful to watch disk/cdrom activity like IDE lights on the front of a real PC to make sure everything wasn’t locked up. Orange lights mean writes and green lights mean reads.