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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."
I sent this request to the Mandrake developers at 8.0. As of 9.0, this feature was still not available. Probably won't be there for 9.1, but I can hope.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
I'm glad that a common theme between KDE and GNOME was also implemented by Mandrake. Competing and incompatible desktops is going to really hurt Linux for a while, especially if a user cannot switch between computers and get work done easily. Things such as the Start Menu, Control Panel, background, screensaver, and System Properties have been somewhat standardized in the Windows world. Even newbie users can get these things done on a Windows 95/98/ME/2000 and even XP desktop easily. They are different by close enough to make it a smooth transition. Linux is still not there with competing Bluecurve/Galaxy + KDE/GNOME camps. While the core should still be as configurable like the hacker wants, work should be done to have a standard interface (which can be changed) and standard "desktop configuration" utilities across the major distributions/desktop environments. We have the GNOME control panel, KDE control panel, Red Hat utilites, Mandrake utilities, etc... (include almost every major distribution out there) for everything! Everything is different and everything has a slightly different interface for the same tasks. I even get annoyed sometimes when it takes me a couple extra tens of seconds to find an app due to different menu layouts. And I know lots of other users that really get messed up even with simple things like changing the background or GDM/KDE icons on Linux.
But I have to ask the question:
Who still cares about BeOS?
This is not a troll or anything. I am just curious.
I was never able to use BeOS on my 'puters, since none of my graphics were supported, and, once I started using Linux and *BSD, I never looked back.
So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
What does this mean for open beos people?? I would hope the YellowTAB people could keep their source somewhat in the open ala OSX at least.
Because, if you read the article, it was actually a detailed review by someone who is familiar enough with the subject to peer into the nooks 'n' crannies, yet critical enough not to tout it.
In a day when 4 out of 5 dentists surveyed said reviews are merely ads in disguise, this is a breath of fresh air.
Still trying to figure out why you'd use BeOS. Is there any security value in running, say, a web server, on a niche OS, so that the would-be cracker makes an ignorant blunder and exposes himself?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It's the people who you describe as zealots who are on the verge of transforming the IT industry and thus our world - who but a zealot would write their own operating system after all?
Maybe BeOS hackers don't have the same transformative potential and Linux kernel hackers, but don't knock it, one of these days you could be running a bit of software they helped devise.
It's amazing how every single story about something on OSNews is submitted by Gentu.
/. people, but I am pretty sure it isn't the quality of her writing, or her tolerance for dissenting views.
I have no idea how Eugenia got a free pass with the
Seriously.. this is ridiculous. Save for one story submitted by "Worried" on April 19th, I had to scroll back to March 28th to find one not by "Gentu." And even back that far, the Gentu thing is still the name on almost all of the stories. Its just stupid. Anonymity in story submission only works if you don't choose the same handle each time, sweetie.
I looked all over their site and cannot find anything about a PPC version, this is rather disappointing. Anyone know if they plan on continuing it as well?
Without the GPL or, say, a Win32 emulation thingy, it doesn't seem viable.
I think the coolest thing that wowed me about BeOS was when I loaded the GL-Teapot demo, watched it spin, then kept adding more and more and watched as they each *gradually* spun slower and slower. There was no locking up, none of them stopped, and the gui still responded just as fast. I didn't know a whole lot about programming back then, but I was impressed with how the whole system *scaled* usage.
Actually, you have a women who is pissed off that it doesn't work on her old hardware. You also can't even read the text you pasted, as she is complaining that the OS runs fine on that sort of hardware, yet the only useful browser runs like a pig due to the various limitations of the OS (Only 192 threads per process) and a poor port (Due to a lack of developers for it). She is saying that Zeta should sink some development time into helping out the BeZilla developers so that they have a decent browser to show off with their OS.
No fair. I wanna play with Zeta on my Bebox too.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
RH 9 has a woefully sucky kernel, and it WILL cause skipping under consistent IO load.
So don't count it out yet - there are a lot of tireless crazies out there who are working hard to make BeOS into the next Linux (only better)...
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.
You know what, I like a lot of things about the BeOS, and I think that Linux could learn a lot from them. But I never understood this argument about BeOS's responsiveness and the claim that it is a "multimedia OS."
Yes, I found it responsive, useful, and user-friendly. There were even many free-as-in-beer (and as in speech in some cases) applications. But none of them seemed to be multimedia applications; neither did I see any for sale.
Maybe it is a Multimedia OS by 1990 standards, where pictures+sound with a CD drive means multimedia. But nowadays I would see a multimedia OS as a viable platform for creating and recording music, editing video, etc. I never saw a single application that would do these things. There is no animation software for BeOS, either.
So if the BeOS is really popular with multimedia firms, what in hell do they run on it? NetPositive?
This is not meant to be a troll. I really and truly would like to know because I want to like the BeOS, but I think it would be more useful with some applications that actually take advantage of the capabilities inherent in the OS. Unfortunately everyone who advocates the BeOS says it is great for multimedia creation, and neglects to mention a single application with which one could create multimedia which runs on the OS. AFAIK there are not any.