So i was wondering if i could stick BeOS on a 486 machine. how much space will it take up? do i need to install an OS before it? where do i find the prog??? all i can find is the 46meg file to load on windows. isn't there another? thanks

David, Sorry. BeOS won't run on 486-based systems. If you've got an ix86-type machine, you'll need a Pentium, Pentium II, Celeron, Pentium III, Pentium 4, Duron, Athlon, or equivalent.

To answer your other questions: BeOS probably needs at least 400MB, but this depends and may vary, although BeOS Personal Edition (PE) exists within a virtual filesystem (an image) and requires more. I'd recommend from 800MB to 2GB depending on what you're doing. You don't need to install another OS before installing BeOS; BeOS is a complete, self-contained operating system, although the Personal Edition (PE) does require an extant installation of Windows (32-bit) or Linux. (Well, there are ways to get around this I suppose, but I'm trying to keep this reasonably simple.) The 46MB file for Windows is probably BeOS Personal Edition. The stand-alone version of BeOS R5 is BeOS Pro. As far as where to get the latter, eBay is probably your best bet these days. Gobe no longer sells it, Yellow Tab stopped distributing it, and I'm not personally aware of anyone else still selling it. There is also a leaked beta version (BeOS 5.1d0, also referred to as "Dano"), but... you might want to get your hands on BeOS Pro 5.0 instead if you can. If not, BeOS PE can get you off to a start using BeOS. Having used both PE and Pro versions, I've found that both work, but the PE version is limited in some ways and it did seem to be *slightly* flaky (although still not nearly as flaky as Windows 9x!) in ways that the Pro version wasn't. I hope this helps!

So what do you think is like the minimum processor speed and memory i should have???

I think a 300mhz will work fine just to play with. Get the latest and see BeOS smoke the wires out of it. You might be able to go to a resale/thrift shop or paper ads and get a 300mhz box for $50. Check Frizbe.net for known hardware or reported to work hardware.

Processor speed should not be that much of an issue (a P-60 is fast enough for very basic operation) unless you're planning on doing real-time audio processing, video stuff, etc. I'd personally recommend a Pentium 133 as a minimum. If you're doing lots of graphics work or playing back video, a faster processor will certainly deliver a better user experience. If you're doing things like real-time synthesis using ObjektSynth, you'll probably want a 1.2GHz Athlon to get a decent amount of polyphony. For some OpenGL apps, however, the fastest processors currently available might not be fast enough. (Official support for hardware accelerated OpenGL doesn't exist in BeOS R5; it's all handled in software. (OpenGL support was going through a re-write at Be, and sadly, it didn't get finished before Palm bought most of Be's IP.) For example, GLTron has been ported to BeOS, but you'd probably need a quad 2GHz Athlon MP system to get decent performance! I've run BeOS R4.5 on a 200MHz Pentium MMX-based machine and performance was great. Later, I ran R5 on a 350MHz AMD K6/2. Digital audio performance--with real-time effects—and video playback was smooth as silk. When I switched to a 550MHz K6/2, I couldn't tell any improvement in performance except in cases in which I was putting a pretty heavy load on the system. I have run BeOS R5 on a 1.2GHz Athlon system and it SCREAMED. Incredible performance! As far as amount of RAM you need, that depends on several factors as well. If you have very little disk space or a very slow hard drive and want to minimize the amount of virtual memory, you'll obviously want more RAM. If you're working with enormous multimedia files, you'll want more RAM. For basic functionality, you need surprisingly little. 32MB should be sufficient for basic functionality, 64MB should be plenty if all you want to do is surf the 'net, send and receive e-mail, and do some light gaming. 128MB is plenty for just about everything unless you're working with really, really huge audio or video files, in which case you might need more. Sorry to be so vague, but it really depends on what you'll be doing. With CPU, memory, and system board prices being as ridiculously low as they are, you shouldn't have much trouble getting the power to do whatever you need to do with BeOS. Everything I have done under BeOS requires far less CPU power and system RAM than under Windows or even Linux or Solaris. (Although Linux, using a light modular 2.4 kernel with latency patches and without some godawful desktop environment to bog it down, can give it quite a run for the money.)

Just a point of interest... I have a 120 MHz Pentium and 48 MB RAM, and BeOS runs quite nicely. ...but I'd stick with Jefro's suggestion.