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."

Comments

I still think SuSE is better

[gotr00t]

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.

Re:Who is Eugenia, and why do we care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

BeOS was cute

[GnuVince]

It had a very nice GUI, it was fast and responsive, it was very light. I liked its design and feel, but I sticked to Debian due to the eternal problems that plague most new OSes:

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.

First look?

[DeathPenguin]

Hardly. Below are two links that have video coverage of Zeta at CeBit2003:
http://ddanneels.free.fr/Zeta-CeBIT200 3.avi
http://gravity24hr.com/mirror/zeta/BeOS-Zet a-Prese ntation-CeBIT2003.avi

Re:Looks interesting...

[mirko]

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")

Re:Looks interesting...

[dr_dank]

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.

links

[Anonymous Coward]

• BeOS5-PersonalEdition.exe (45 MB) - BeOS which installs its filesystem virtual into one file on your Windows partition. No partitioning required, no risk involved! Ideal for trying it out.
• BeOS4Linux.tar.gz (41 MB) - same thing, but installs into a Linux ext2 partition. Needs a bootdisk here, though.
• dano_51d0.zip (68,4 MB) - Never released "next generation" BeOS. If link is buggered, paste this without spaces into emule/lmule/xmule: ed2k://|file|dano_51d0.zip|71802854|30CA778C7F8E1B 5A94557E5CD8923B93|/
• DeveloperEdition-1-1-boot-and-main.zip (188 MB) - Needs own partition. Great distro, about as much fun as a Linux desktop of two years ago.
• BeOS-Zeta-Presentation-CeBIT2003.avi (67 MB)
• OpenBeOS recreates the OS in open source

Re:OpenBeos

[teamhasnoi]

Zeta's not fully open because much of the code is licenced from Palm, especially network and backend gui code. What this means for OBeOS people is all good (as soon as it's released).

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.

Re:Who *EXACTLY* are "yellowTAB"?

[no reason to be here]

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.

Re:France

[qubex]

As a matter of fact BeOS' only connection with france was the nationality of Be Inc's founder, one Jean-Louis Gassé. However the OS (and the beautiful BeBox) was entirely developed in the USA. It is true that Be Inc later opened its european regional offices in Paris, but this is a far cry from "being born in europe".

As for why old systems "go to europe to die", as a european, I guess it is down to a general appreciation of solid stuff that works as opposed to newfangled stuff driven by the corporate sphere... or maybe that's just me...