Ok, anyone interested in my BeOS 5 PE image please e-mail me and I'll give you a link to the file. Not sure what kind of copyright issues surround this, but in the end, it's just a hacked up PE install and since PE is free...
Anyway, here's where things stand:
-The install should fit on a 32 meg CF card (card must already be DOS bootable). There's 3 megs free, which should be maintained as much as possible. I noticed a tendency for the drive to get locked up when all the space is gone. A small amount of disk space must be necessary for the process of emptying the trash, and if that space isn't there, well, you can't empty trash to free up space... It's set up to create a small RAM drive for use as a browser cache, which saves disk space and reduces the read-write cycles to the CF card. The obvious downside is that it uses some of the precious 32 megs of system memory, and you loose the cache every time you reboot.
-To get the system down to it's current size, I had to delete everything but the bare minimum. The terminal is there, however all but the most necessary commands have been deleted. It makes a fine web / e-mail system (although constrained by NetPositives' limited capabilities). It's already set up for the D-Link DSB-650TX adapter and the drive setup and FTP tools are all there and functional. If you want a more functional terminal, just partition the internal CF card and FTP the full set of terminal commands in from another BeOS install somewhere on your network (I included the unzip command so you can transfer all the commands in a single zip archive). Keeping them on the internal card and putting symbolic links to them on the external card will allow you to maintain the few megs of headroom for the system.
-While everything seems to work, there are a few caveats. For reasons which I have yet to determine, the browser seems to stall for extended periods (20 to 30 seconds, sometimes longer) when loading pages and some pages aren't displayed correctly even when compared to a full PE install on a normal PC. I assume this is a result from a few key files being deleted, I just haven't been able to find which ones are at fault (I deleted a TONE of files). If anyone can remedy this, I'd love to know. Also, if anyone knows how to change the default location for saving e-mail, please let me know. Ideally, you could set it to store e-mail on the internal card, again, to maintain the headroom on the OS card.
That's about it...
