Slashdot Mirror
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.
...and /.
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.
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.
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.
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
> Who still cares about BeOS?
:)
I for one, since I was lucky enough to have it run on a couple of computers.
The problem with Linux and *BSD is that I just don't the time to config them. (Allthough it's cool that the Linux router "just works" -- has been for years.) Win2K is "OK" (would be good if it wasn't for the dam memory leaks), and I *hate* the Mac. GUI (pre OSX). BeOS is "sexy", blazingly fast, VERY well designed, and I really liked that it felt like a great blend of the Win32 and Mac. GUI, but designed by a person with REAL concern for users -- newbies and power uers alike. The only problem is that BeOS never gained "critical mass" like Linux. KDE 3 looks REAL sweet, but I have a dual 550 box just for Be.
Nice clean interface - in fact, it has the only Drag'nDrop GUI I've ever seen that I would be willing to call uncluttered. Amazing API (if you program). All sorts of tiny little details that you can't really put your finger on
I like BeOS because, in my opinion, it is well-concieved. It has all sorts of problems with drivers and application support, but then again that's how every OS starts out. BeOS had something that can't be added later - generally well-thought-out design. You can't add that in as an afterthought.
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...
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?
I used to code for BeOS : the API was stunningly easy to learn.
... And not without humour. I remember a function named isProcessorOnFire(). There was a quite detailed description of when it would return true in the API-reference. Apparantly, smoke coming from the processor was not enough to warrant a return-value of true. :)
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
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...
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
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.