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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."
Redhat announced tday it would skip the 9.0 release and go right to 9.1
If it's a Eugenia Loli-Queru review it can be boiled down to this: "It's not BeOS. It sucks."
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
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.
Who are these people to review anything, if their review consists of skimming the surface and focusing on their pet peeves? Thats how flamewars start - bickering over window managers. Let's talk REAL functionality, things like auto-detection of hardware, capabilities of the install kernel, etc.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
All my friends and family use Linux 9.0, and now, Linux 9.1 is even better!
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.
I am frankly sick of her crap. She has become the Jon Katz of interface design analysis. If Slashdot insists on licking her ass every week, they should make an icon of her, so I can put the topic on my ignore list.
...and /.
We have upgraded our webspace from 500MB to 1000MB and traffic allowance from 25GB to 50GB. This is the largest package that our host provides. In order to be able to add more features and functions to our site (especially for developers) we will soon have our very own server.
I think you might need to up your traffic allowance once again.. BAM!
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.
As the Amiga has been dead MUCH longer then BeOS, I would counter that the Amiga guys are much more fanatical. How else do you explain dropping 2G's on 10 year old hardware? :)
Amiga at least was something sometime.
BeOS still is a "never has been".
You're telling me I have to pay for my operating system??
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
I don't run proprietary closed source operating systems.
Whoop-de-fucking-doo...
Go back to using Linux then! Most people are comfortable using closed-source operating systems & applications.
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
SCO declares that YellowTABs OS "BeOS" is infringing on SCOs IP. According to SCOs CEO Darl McBride: "We ran the BeOS through a machine code debugger and found sections of 10-15 instructions that are the same as those used in our product." SCO says that people need to stop using the new BeOS or face lawsuits.
Darl McBride also said that if YellowTAB were to buy a larger license, like the Entire-SCO-Company "license", the problem may disappear. When asked how a fledgling startup company like YellowTAB could buy SCO, McBride replied: "Right now even a few dollars is better than a counter lawsuit, besides I have my golden parchute. Hahah. Wait, is that tape still recodi...."
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
at let it be conceived first.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Why do the old systems go to Europe to die? Arn't the Germans responcible for keeping the Amiga alive?
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
You just look at the screen shots it looks like a highly Configurable fax machine
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
Oh "understanding what a replicant is" is easy once you administer the Voit Kamph test...
And which dead replicants show up, anyhow? Zora and Priss?
This particular Amiga zealot disagrees! Amiga's were one of the most Incredible Machines ever available on the market. If you never used one, you'll never understand.
The GUI which was interesting 5 years ago no longer is unique - it's now a commodity in the days of KDE/GNOME. So what market is this OS appealing to? Businesses? No apps. Home users? They won't pay. Embedded Systems designers? Possibly, although Linux is free. I'm not trolling - any idea?
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.
They didn't invent a new computer to run this, no. Be already made that mistake once.
...
As you can tell from the nick, I was a BeOS user back in the day. Technically, it was way ahead of anything at the time:
1) The kernel was extremely low latency, and the scheduler was superbly designed for user responsiveness. This was at a time when the low-latency and preempt kernels simply didn't exist, and we were putting up with the 100ms+ second latencies of kernel 2.2. While Linux today has caught up with and surpassed the latency targets, it (even in 2.5) still hasn't managed to reach the same quality in the scheduler.
2) The GUI was very fast and responsive. The theme I use today (dotNET on KDE) is probably similarly complex to Be's native look, but BeOS was still faster, even though I ran it on a lowly 300MHz PII, and I run KDE on my 2GHz P4. It was heavily multithreaded, which made a world of difference for a machine under heavy load. In BeOS, an app's GUI would never freeze up while the app did some background task. This was at a time when GTK 1.2.x and Qt 2.x weren't even thread-safe! Even today, KDE and GNOME have yet to make use of multitheading as effectively as BeOS did half a decade ago.
3) It had a very fast journaled filesystem, with attributes and live queries and everything. This was at a time when ext2 would nuke your installation after a bad crash.
4) It was pretty. It was simple, without being austere, and had a colorful asthetic. It had fully-antialiased fonts back when we had Win9x's "font smoothing" and Linux user's were just happy to be finally able to use TrueType fonts.
5) Long before OS X came around, BeOS had the power of Unix with the simplicity of a Mac. The shell was extremely well integrated with the GUI, and you could even script GUI events from the command line.
6) The API was awesome. It was simple, well designed, and well documented. This was back when GTK+' s documentation consisted of source code.
Of course, these days, Linux has come a long long way from what it was then. It's got a kernel much better than BeOS ever did, KDE and GNOME are catching up in the GUI department, XFree86 has fully accelerated OpenGL, and is getting nifty features like XRender and Xr, FreeType/Xft has some of the nicest looking antialiased fonts out there, etc. But BeOS has stagnated for years, and is much the same now as it was then. It's still quite impressive, but not as shiny as it was in its heyday.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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?
The failure of BeOS as a mainstream operating system is attributable to 2 missing pieces:
- a superior package management tool, such as apt-get.
- visual basic, an essential requirement for any serious fortune 500 company.
it could also be argued that jean-louis basse as a leader was seriously at a loss to compete with the likes of the uncompromisingly ambitious bill gates, the eccentric marketing genius of steve jobs, or the laughable irrelevance and sheer disregard for personal hygiene of richard stallman.
Looks like they haven't revived the powerPC port that Be once had. I tried out the first couple of preview releases on my old PowerComputing mac clone, and i'd really hoped to see a decent final release. Be was awesome of that machine (210 mHz), and even though it was incomplete (couldn't print at the time), the number of new ideas there were amazing.
IIRC, BeOS originally came from France. (Old Europe at work here...) So it rather returns.
Still trying to figure out why you'd use BeOS.
The multimedia capabilities of BeOS are excellent, and the hardware requirements are a lot lower than you would expect. Install BeOS on your Mini-ITX based box, and you will have yourself the beginnings of a Home Theater PC.
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
All of the ex-Be-Developers and management? Just a few?
Did "Be" basically buy it's OS back?
What is going on here?
-... ---
She's not English .. she's Greek, if I recall correctly.
Good to see that Sinclair Research has made another comeback with the Zeta. I wonder if they will port it to the QL or to tricycles?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Without the GPL or, say, a Win32 emulation thingy, it doesn't seem viable.
It would have lots of advantages: use the drivers, packages for Linux, the best GUI for users and programs, no X.
Disadvantages: not open source, doesn't really belong in either world.
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.
More important, what does this mean to the BeBox users out there?
:)
C'mon, don't make me run Plan9 on my BeBox... I wanna play with Zeta too!!!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Oops... attributed her with an excuse she didn't have.
Guess she's just dense.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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. --
It's Eugenia Loli-Queru! For years now, new distributions have been reviewed on OSNews, a story gets posted to Slashdot, and one of the first comments is that 'Eugenia hates anything that isn't BeOS'. But now we have an official BeOS, or as close as possible, reviewed on her site and she still runs through a long list of complaints. Which seems to demonstrate that she's not that biased after all.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
What about zeta tau alpha? Or more commonly known as Zeta? My gf is zeta and wouldn't care (she loves AOL *sigh*) but it's interesting.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
i found this a bit of an odd request...
6. No fix for the numlock bug which makes BeOS to not remember if the NumLock was set to ON in the previous booting. Sounds trivial and stupid but really annoys a lot of people.
now i don't know about you, but i generally don't know the state of Num/Caps/Scroll lock every time i reboot my computer. the behaviour i DO care about is that they are consistant every time. numlock status is a CMOS-level (its been there for YEARS!) consistant feature.
so i read the whole review with a pinch of salt if somebody wants their numlock status to persist after reboot, really...
I've got an AthlonXP 1800+, and I've never ever ever ever had an mp3 skip (both windows and linux) unless the mp3 file was actually corrupted itself. Hell, even when I was using my old pentium 233 I only rarely had a skip. I can even have my CPU usage run up to 100% compiling stuff and mp3's still don't skip. I'm just not sure I buy this.
Project Steve
"Non rectangular window support."
Now that would be interesting, round windows. Would be difficult to read text in lol.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
Yeah, but it was a pretty sweet piece of hardware for the time. IMHO the magic of Be was the BeBox, not the user interface. Gotta love that geek port! I was really hoping it'd become the next Amiga.
Instead, it just skipped the "success" stage and went straight to Amiga's "defunct" stage. *sigh*
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
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
Ever heard of the Edirol - Roland UA100, the iZ Tech - RADAR 24 & the SX-1 Integrated Audio Production Station? They all use BeOS
If you weren't such a moron, you would realize the reviewer is a she.
I know!
AmigaOS! That OS is the poster-child for zombie OS'es! And now BeOS will join it. A few people will attempt to drag it's lifeless corpse around in hopes of reviving it but not have the drive, skill or money to make it happen. It'll keep going on and on in limbo.
Too bad. This was a clever OS (Amiga and Be).
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?
You know how everyone seems to be clamoring for Apple to release Mac OS for intel? Well, that's basically what BeOS is/was.
Hey, it's Eugenia Loli-Queru!When you see an article by her, you should expect what you ae going to see! Ofcourse I really liked one part of her story: "I have a BeOS machine around, but I don't use it much anymore". haha! poor gal, she has suffered more than anyone in the world because of demise of BeOS.
--
Dude, if I had some mod points right now you'd be getting a plus 1, Funny. "the poster child for zombie OS'es" is priceless and soooo true.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
She is not a professional writer, and English is not her native language.
I was able to understand the points she was trying to make, and the information that was provided. Even if it was not up to your standards of writing, it was still informative.
I am not a professional writer either, so if you have a problem with my writing skills, get over it, because I don't care.
But 'not techical' people are exactly the target market of Linux desktop distributions or BeOS-Lazarus or Mac OS X. I think OSNews does a good job of pointing out things that people don't want to hear - that often, things are broken or unintuitive out of the box, and that saying 'just run vi and edit this file in /etc' isn't an acceptable answer.
For real end-user testing you need people a lot less technical and a lot more stupid than the average developer.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I will continue post only positive things about BeOS until I can afford a Macintosh with OS X! Damn your eyes!
- I don't use BeOS much anymore, but I do have a good grasp of its excellence in some points and its suckiness in others, so please forgive me for being opinionated.
Come on, Eugenia... tell us how you really feel.It takes about 15 minutes to install Zeta and it is not difficult at all. However, it is more involved than Be's original Installer and in my opinion, it shouldn't have been.
YellowTAB should have concentrated on fixing this limitation of BeOS' Drive Setup instead of adding useless features like "Stings", application selection and "GCC version choice" that only bloat the installation and do not follow the paradigm that Be had and everyone loved: "keep it simple".
However, what is immediately disappointing is that Zeta takes 23 whole seconds to load on this machine (a machine which has had BeOS 5 on it forever and loads it between 9 and 10 seconds).
First and foremost, Zeta comes with some 400 fonts. Personally, I find this ridiculous.
It takes about 15 minutes to install Zeta and it is not difficult at all. However, it is more involved than Be's original Installer and in my opinion, it shouldn't have been.
Don't you guys steal enough from others already? Every damned GUI I see for Linux always wants to look like something else with Windows XP and OS/X being the top two cloned interfaces.
I remember when Be Inc. went under. The largest reaction in the OSS/Linux arena was "so what?", the second was "Will they release the OS under GPL so we can rape and pillage their IP?"
This isn't a troll, this is a serious concern of mine. Don't copy BeOS, don't copy Windows XP, don't copy Mac OS/X! Do something ORIGINAL! Do something new that is Linix/OSS from the ground up. Stop playing catch up and take the lead for once!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Other than that, the first boot in this beta version of Zeta greets you with two dead replicants Good to see Decker is still taking out the trash.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Be tried to sell BeOS, it failed miserably, then gave it away for free in a last ditch effort to increase interest in the platform, and while extremely neat, the commercial interest remained weak.
Now, it is in the hands of another company trying to sell it again. At the same time, so many groups have extended in very good ways the free edition of BeOS5, and thus this somewhat improved commercial BeOS faces very similar, yet free competition.
I really don't see much hope in this, but it would be interesting to see how they fare.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Does it play Ogg?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
What! no Batman Beyond watchers, and you call yourselves geeks!
A woman wrote the review...
Anyway, for all we know, her faster computer didn't have DMA. And, I do get skipping sometimes in RH9, but I don't have that problem in Mandrake 9.1 (on an Athlon XP 2100+).
That said, BeOS is -very- fast on older hardware, I think that is the point she was trying to make.
I love any company that manages things like this.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
You are correct but still a biased fuckwit.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
Europeans seem to make much better use of their machines than people in the U.S. This is not just a difference in how they treat hardware, but how they feel about software, too. Many people in the rest of the world don't have the budgets at work or home to have "current" tech, and they just have better sense in realising that learning to use your tools effectively makes you more productive in general.
Maybe it's because they are taxed to poverty.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
Another great thing that I love about the Dano/EXP codebase -- now found at Zeta -- is the "smooth window dragging", which is explained here better (only visible on CRT monitors, LCDs won't feel the difference). MacOSX is the only other OS that has this feature
This feature as it is explained at the link is also present in windows. So Windows, MacOSX and Beos all have the same feature.. its not really worth talking about in a review unless you are making fun of pre X macos.
YellowTAB comes by default with a number of useful Tracker add-ons, including a brand new one named "Fax these files", which loads a new FAX-It application created by YTAB+friends especially for Zeta.
Because one often needs to fax files to someone, it is important to have an easy way to do so.
Agreed!
.jpg or anything other then it's own standard.
I often times hear complaints about AmigaOS by todays standards, for example the lack of virtual memory. Simple responce, "the fucking thing didn't need it". Most applications were designed to operate on a 720k floppy disk, and what you couldn't do in a floppy, you could shove in a ram disk.
The Amiga was remarkable for the time period as it had "multi-media" before it was coined as a phrase. I got into it a touch late my self, I was operating a 386 along side of an amiga.
My PC was running ms-dos 4 with desqview and the amiga was well just running it's native OS. As an all purpose machine, the amiga's multi-tasking ability was far suprior to even desqview, not to speak of windows 3.1. I could access an online resource via dialup modem, and run a somewhat decent WYSISYG word processor, and run a game at the same time. Windows 3.1, forget it.. desqview, well I could but users of my BBS would notice it.
And not to speak of the fact that most monitors supported video input, both standard and chroma luma (SVHS video). People were just blown away by flicking that switch in the back and getting TV on your computer monitor... a feature that today is buggy at best.
I could live with the fact that main stream applications never came my way, nor my ability to find x-server software that wasn't cost prohibitive. What I couldn't live with was the fact the best a stock amiga offered was 8bit aga graphics, though with a few tricks could do above and beyond 256 colors, but not for a
I couldn't live with the fact that trivial upgrades cost an arm and a leg, while you could use a serial mouse via 2rd party support, it was pretty cost prohibitive to get a 2nd serial card. The whole VGA monitor thing, while there were a few models that an amiga could use, it's not like your modern 15 inch would work, just doesn't sync down to that level. Now if you know where to get a replacement monitor for the amiga, let me know, mine blew up.
I think I was using mine as late as 1992 or so before I gave up and said, "it was dead jim".
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I must have done something wrong, but: The copy I had was a store-bought 5.0 version . It was too elite to do any drive formatting . When I gave it a Windows partion to chomp on, it cheerfully accepted it, and then accused me of not having the correct files on the distribution CD. . It came with a big honkin' book which dedicated the first 100 pages to the praises of some leader, including a story of how some programmer screwed up his leg big-time on a retreat, just to show dedication. I do not mean to troll here. I had a bad experience with BeOS. Maybe one of you can help me salvage it by telling me where I might have gone wrong.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Why do all people talk crap about X when they mean Xfree? Have you ever tried a commercial X server?
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Hey you fuck! There is no law anywhere that says anyone has the right to take my money or time away from me for their own benefit
Unfortunately there is... it's called taxes...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
OSes are becoming a comodity, they will not ve sold to the general user (specially once Linux and other FLOSS OSes triumph) but will be available for anybody to install them and then add up products and services on top.
This BeOS clone is swimming against the current.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Are you KIDDING? KDE is absolutely godawful in terms of performance, opening Konqueror takes over five seconds on my 1.4GHz Athlon! BeOS file manager opened in under one second on my 500 MHz K6-2. Also, be didn't have for hunderd-bazillion options in every menu, it was CLEAN. I swear, if I had the know-how to rip out the unneeded menu options in KDE I would. A real feat would be to have KDE 'learn' what sets of features you want to use and remove the others.
I know that every option was added because SOMEBODY needed it and had the know-how to put it there, but really, KDE is total overkill.
When I drag a file from one window to another, I don't want it to pop up a menu EVERY TIME, just friggin' MOVE the file, or COPY it if it's on a different physical drive, when I select multiple items and click one to move them, why on earth does KDE de-select all but the one I clicked on? KDE can do it all, but it seems to do everything in the most obfuscated non-intuitive way possible. Linux Human Interface coders should talk to some old-school MacOS users, the MacOS has hands-down the most sensical handling of file management and drag-and-drop on the market, amd has since the debut of Mac System 7.
I don't have much experience with GNOME, as I never really liked what I saw and switched to WindowMaker and Krusader.
You obviously haven't played with BeOS enough, or you don't have an appreciation for simplicity and 'less is more' computing. I think BeOS is what the Mac would have evolved into if apple decided to ditch their Classic environment five years earlier.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Delayed response... I don't live on slashdot you know, I have a life.
Your benefits are optional. Taxes are not.
I think that pretty much takes care of your argument...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth