SoftwareValet

SoftwareValet is a software installer for

BeOS BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users a ...

, originally developed by Starcode Software. It has been included with

since 1998, when

Be Inc. Be Inc. was an American computer company founded in 1990. It is best known for the development and release of BeOS, and the BeBox personal computer. Be was founded by former Apple Computer executive Jean-Louis Gassée with capital from Seymour Cra ...

purchased Starcode's assets. It was originally developed for web deployment of applications, where a user would click on an 'Install with SoftwareValet' link on a website, and the BeOS web browser at the time,

NetPositive NetPositive (often called Net+) is the default web browser for the discontinued Be Operating System (BeOS). It includes partial support for JavaScript, but no CSS support. It was originally developed as a stop-gap measure because no browsers had ...

, would launch SoftwareValet. It also handled product registration and software updates through a (now defunct) centralised server, BeDepot (bedepot.com). SoftwareValet applications could also be distributed in non-web delivered upkg files, which are non-self executing, encapsulated installer files. Installation is based on direct file locations and shell scripts, and has very little chance of user manipulation; although a

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

break in BeOS R4.5 allowed package makers to use non-direct paths, as a preparation for making the OS multi-user. The compression format is known to be based on

zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. zlib is also a ...

, but no tools other than SoftwareValet exist for manipulating packages. A companion application, PackageBuilder was also bundled with the BeOS developer tools, and was used for creating packages, or editing existing ones. BeOS software {{install-software-stub