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First Look at YellowTAB's Zeta
Gentu writes "Great news for the BeOS fans. After Be sold its IP to Palm, many said that the BeOS was no more, but a new startup company from Germany, YellowTAB, was able to get hold of Be's source code and form the future of the never-released BeOS 6 ('Dano'), under the name 'Zeta'. YellowTAB added a lot of new goodies to the OS and brought it up to speed. OSNews features the first ever preview of Zeta with a lot of good information, along with some screenshots."
Mandrake may be "user friendly" but I think that compared to SuSE 8.0, it is much less robust in features and hardware support. SuSE has much better support for most of the hardware that I use than Mandrake 9.0, which actually took me a while to configure my ISA sound card. I hope that this distribution will change that.
Eugenia used to write reviews on BeOS. Since it was such a small community, she rose to the top quickly. Then she started installing a bunch of different OS's (btw, none are as good as the BeOS), and started OSNews. She got some help with the noninstall stuff, and got a popular site up.
Then, when she was in charge, she'd lash out at her readers (look at her webpage). She was the editor, but didn't speak good english, so she had many spelling and grammar mistakes. But don't correct her, that'd just make her superpissed.
Basically, Eugenia is a self absorbed angry woman that got popular through the BeOS community, and now we can't get rid of her.
Lack of 3rd party apps
Lack of drivers
Lack of documentation
Lack of some useful features (multi-user for example)
This Zeta looks nice, but it won't be successful as long as it carries these problems.
Hardly. Below are two links that have video coverage of Zeta at CeBit2003:0 3.avit a-Prese ntation-CeBIT2003.avi
http://ddanneels.free.fr/Zeta-CeBIT20
http://gravity24hr.com/mirror/zeta/BeOS-Ze
So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?
I used to code for BeOS : the API was stunningly easy to learn.
I only found such pleasure with the Zaurus Qt API... a long, long time later.
(BTW, I've also heard that AtheOS was similarly "coder-friendly")
Trolling using another account since 2005.
So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?
BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper.
He yanked the plug on the box.
Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened.
Damn.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
IIRC, BeOS originally came from France. (Old Europe at work here...) So it rather returns.
That has its pluses and minuses, the biggest plus/minus being Steve Jobs of course...
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
There will be more interest, apps and support for BeOS. Right now the community consists of people who use it, and people who want to. Zeta will bring modern driver support, networking, and to BeOS, and that is something that has improved greatly in the last year. BeBits (in my sig) is somewhat like a sourceforge for BeOS, and the number of drivers written recently are all posted there.
You can also try BeOS out on most modern hardware by grabbing BeOS max (link in my journal), a distribution with most necessary included.
BeOS has always been about instant reaction to the user, no matter what else was going on. Although most programs (with the exception of Mozilla/Phoenix) load too quickly to be intercepted...
If BeOS stays true to it's roots as a media OS - musicians, video artists, animators and their ilk would switch from the ever more bloated, less free(DRM) windows. BeOS needs media, like media needs BeOS.
So BeOS has better scheduling than O(1)?
>>>>>
Algorithmically, I would be surprised if it was even O(1). Probably O(n) give that it puttered out at about 400 threads system-wide. However, the scheduling for a high-thread count server load is very different from scheduling for a medium-thread count desktop. Basically, desktop use requires the scheduler to be able to give best service to the applications the user is working on at the moment. This is something of a black art, and BeOS did it better than anyone.
Multi-user support was, and is, lacking. So it had the power of a Mac, combined with the simplicity of a Mac (before OS X).
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Multi-user support is hardly the defining feature of Unix, especially a UNIX intended for the desktop. BeOS had a UNIX-y filesystem layout, was reasonably POSIX complient, and had a whole lot of ported UNIX software, like gcc, vi, X11, emacs, etc. I can hardly use the terminal in Windows, because Cygwin is too laggy (on small apps) for my taste, and the Windows FS layout is hardly amenable to CLI navigation. In BeOS (when I used it) and KDE (now) I use terminals for most of my code editing and file management.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
BeOS had no *hardware* 3D support. It had a nice software OpenGL layer though. I dunno about the numbers, but I do know that BeOS was strikingly fast in its day, and very good for multiple apps. I don't doubt that it could run a fair number of MP3s, MPEGS, etc at the same time because I used to do that to mess around on it. They could very well have been demoing on a Daystar Mac clone, available with 4 processors...I could see that doing what he said.
The lack of programs is the problem. What he needs is:
A office-like collection of programs (word, excell, etc)
Like Gobe Productive?
I'm not sure, but I think it's part of Zeta.
Mozilla :)
http://www.bezilla.org/ or http://www.bebits.com/app/2715. Shipped with Zeta.
A image-editor like Gimp
OMG, hopefully not. GIMP's UI sucks. BeOS/Zeta has Refraction (closed source), ArtPaint (open source) and a few others. At least shipped with Zeta Deluxe - not sure about ''plain'' Zeta.
YellowTAB are a German group, completely separate from the original Be, Inc. Before Be went belly up, but after it had become obvious that they had put all their eggs in the Internet Appliance basket, yellowTAB approached them about licensing BeOS so they (YT) could distribute it. The nature of the contract between the two apparently made it still valid, even after Be, Inc.'s sale to Palm.
my pet machine
Your wish was already granted. Take a look at Blue Eyed OS, a relatively new take on BeOS. It uses the Linux kernel with BeOS APIs. BeOS apps will run on it, so long as they are re-compiled. It combines the best of both worlds... Linux's stability, network capabilities, and far better device driver support, and BeOS's user interface, among other things. A bootable CD was recently released a month or two ago. You can get it from the web site if you want to try it out.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
BeOS has the unusual ability to embed one application inside another, these embedded applications are called "replicants". If you shut down the parent ("container") application, the replicants stay running, and even persist over reboot (think of it as "fork off and die" on steroids). In this case, I guess two replicant applications present themselves but are DOA for some reason.
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
The UA100 is an ordinary USB Audio device, the hint is in the initials "UA". Rather than installing BeOS (for which there is limited support), I'd suggest getting Linux or OS X for use with this toy.
The RADAR24 and SX-1 use BeIA (ie just the kernel from Be, with custom software). Arguing that the existence of BeIA audio mixers implies BeOS is good at audio mixing would rather suggest that Windows Server 2003 ought to run well on PDAs, after all, doesn't Windows PocketPC run on PDAs? And that's got the same name, so logically....
All nonsense, unlike software manufacturers, who bailed out as soon as they realised Be Inc weren't serious, the hardware people were stuck with BeIA in their existing products. You won't see them rushing to make new products based on Zeta after such a bad experience.
yeah, if the computer was on fire, it returned the temperature of the motherboard, otherwise it returned a random value.
Not to be forgotten was the mighty is_computer_on()
which returned 1 if the computer was on, otherwise the returned value was undefined.
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
How is BeOS cleaner than KDE or GNOME? That's an easy one.
A) EVERYthing is multi-threaded, so the BeOS GUI remains responsive at ALL times. Xfree, on the other hand, runs in a single process, and all X apps running must share a timeslice with X, which is neither guaranteed nor, in my experience, acceptable - hence the nasty GUI latencies of X. This is one of the biggest things keeping me away from Linux right now. Of course, unless you've used BeOS, you're probably not even aware that you're being killed with the death of a thousand cuts.
B) There's no X server!! Bonuses here include low latency, low overhead (yes, X is a pig) and no window manager process running on top of X running on top of the kernel. In my experience Linux is like a chain of dominoes - just about anything can crash X, so all the programs vanish too, and I've lost my work. Whoops. BeOS isn't so fragile.
C)BeOS boots in less time than KDE or GNOME take to load. On my laptop, it takes less than half that time.