OpenBeOS is just now being ported to PowerPC. The port's being done on a Pegasos, by the way. But even on x86 it's not useable yet. The NewOS author, Travis Geiselbrecht, and Axel Dörfler, who coded OpenBFS and is doing the Pegasos port, are both Phoenix Developer Consortium members via their work with the Pegasos. Also, the
18 Oct 2003 OpenBeOS newsletter mentions discussions between Genesi and OBOS about OpenBeOS on the Pegasos.
For Macs and Mac clones, if you can get ahold of an earlier version, like BeOS 4.5, it'd do the trick. But, as mentioned, it requires a cpu earlier than G3.
In the year or so after BeOS was ported to x86, there was a slow decline in applications being written for PPC BeOS. The problem wasn't that Be didn't support PowerPC anymore, just that very quickly the majority of BeOS developers were on x86 and didn't even have a Mac or BeBox around to test their code on. So now, as mentioned, there isn't much software to run on a PPC BeOS.
The question would be what the computer would be used for. If it's just to have fun with, then it'd be fine with limited apps. Actually BeOS on a Mac boots from within the Mac environment so it's easy to have a dual-platform machine. Just put BeOS on a separate drive, if possible. When I started with BeOS, I ran it from a Zip disk plugged into the external SCSI port.
-- gary_c
