BeOS 5 PE Max Edition is a distribution made using the free version of BeOS 5 (called Personal Edition) with a number of drivers, add-ons, and software. It includes the new development tools from the OpenBeOS team Web site, but you will also be able to select the old tools. It only contains freeware and shareware demos. All the code it contains is legal under the MIT, GPL, or LGPL licenses.
And yes its Athlon XP patched.Check release notes below for details.

Homepage :- http://vasper.net

FAQ :- http://vasper.net/faq.htm

Screenshots:- http://vasper.net/beosScreenShots.htm

Release Notes ( for Version 2) :- http://vasper.net/rnotes2.htm

Download :- http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/crux/BeOS5PEMaxEditionV2.zip?download

Scheduled for release V2.1:

1) All packages are going to be in zipped format to avoid the long time it takes to copy them on your computer. After that, the installation will unpack them. This change will speed up the setup. (This has allready been done.Installation improved from 35 minutes to 12 minutes!!! With unpacking).
2) There will be alternative programs for bone setup, but not bone itself. Also it will include instructions on how to use Max with bone.
3) There will be a Pentium 4 boot disk included.

Will keep posting more details as and when available.

-this Max Edition- 222MB download - can it be installed inside windows like PE, or does one need to burn CD ? don't have CDRW on my winbook XL2 laptop,
and PE works great, 2nt time I installed it in 4 1/2 min- but I wasted a lot of time trying every possible solution to get SOUND card (Maestro 2-EM) and no avail...CD sound works fine .

If it takes burning CD, then it's out -I was willing to forgo the Net part because of winmodem,too bad can't get Opera 6.05 for Be. if I could get Media on BeOS to work...guess might have to get a PC w/o winmodem, and supported sound card, or wait for OBOS for additional hardware support.

I got win98 to boot in 65 sec, and crash a lot less , in part to 3rd party utilities, and numerous Tweaks...if Opera EVER crashes, I can be back in 5 sec. with ALL 30+ tabbed windows reloaded w/o being online- Mozilla is good too, but is slow like an elephant opening Bookmarks on a PII 300- can go back and forth in a blink in Opera as opposed to 5-15 sec in Mozilla to open a forced refresh
meta page...I'll keep waiting for OBOS and would like to install it on several school PC's for kids to enjoy - sure the Media guy would enjoy it , if MS. not prohibiting installing a competing product- I volunteer at school, and spend more time rebooting the darn things- if I learn linux, I might stop doing windows,lol - but would like to have a Media OS for Media dept. in school and I have to do good enough on it personally, before promoting it ...if they would let me have one of them 486's they plan to throw away...I might load them with BeOS, and increase # of PC's school got w/o breaking the budget.

Guess BeOS (one of the reasons for being fast ) might be for having tiny size appl's as opposed to bloatware.

I look forward to the day when I can use the Media potential of this promising OS (heck is got 3 years newer tech than win98....)