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BeOS Ready for a Comeback as Zeta OS
Anil Kandangath writes "BeOS, the operating system that could have been the foundation for Mac OS X, but almost died, instead has returned as Zeta OS -- which is supposed to be fast, stable, media centric and boot within 15 seconds. Zeta is being released by yellowTAB of Germany and has applications such as an office suite and the Firefox browser bundled with it. Most BeOS applications will also run as-is. Screenshots are available." According to the NewsForge story linked there, the release could be as soon as next month.
Windows boots in 15 seconds, too, on a supercomputer.
Zeta OS? Now what are they going to call the next version? It's like Apple calling their OS, OS Infinity.
Which would have been technically better as Apple's new OS - the nextstep based OSX, or a BeOS based OS?
Shouldn't that be ZomBe OS?
Starsucks
Think of how much better the world would be if Apple chose BeOS over Jobs. I'm happy to see something coming our way from its legacy. It kicked some ass in its time.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
"the operating system that could have been the foundation for Mac OS X"
Where did this come from? AFAIK, OSX has always been based on nextstep and BSD. Why would Apple have even bothered with BeOS? This sounds like misinformation to me.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I had a friend about a month ago who told me he was learning C.
Why was he learning C? Because BeOS was coming back, and they were gonna need people to port applications. And porting was easier if you knew C. And BeOS was gonna be the next big thing so they needed to have lots of apps ported to it.
...and that's all there is to it.
You can get BeOS 5 Max free. It's moderately recent, and it's a nice way to take a look at what BeOS is all about if you aren't in the loop. It even boots as a Live CD if you're so inclined, although you can't do much besides click on stuff if you boot it that way.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
One of the most appealing facets of BeOS, IIRC, is the fact that it was FREE. At ~$100+tax, I don't see this flying off store shelves. Furthermore, I didn't read anything about it supporting RISC architecture (did I miss it)?
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
I looked over their site and couldn't find hardware requirements documented.
One thing I love about open source operating systems is that the system requirements are right there, up front -- or at least you don't have to look hard to find them.
It claims to boot in 15 seconds, which I don't doubt. It would be great to use on a laptop for that very reason. However, will my poor little laptop be able to handle it? I'd love to know before I get my hopes up.
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
Seems like the Unix base for OS X worked out pretty damn well for them... I don't think the boom Apple is going through right now could have been any more significant with a BeOS-based OS.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
To BeOS, or not to BeOS: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
This looks like a copy of OS X that's been brainwashed by pre-XP Windows. Or maybe just fell into a bad crowd.
The business model of Be was never to be an independent OS. All the main Be people were ex-Apple, and the the idea was to be purchased out by Apple. Be wasn't originally an Intel-based OS -- it was originally a PowerPC OS. Of course, this was before Jobs was brought back. After that happened, Be tried to reinvent itself as an alternative OS for Intel, and failed.
hardware support is want makes or breaks an os commercially. sure sysadmins and geeks don't mind loading that kernel module in order to make something work, but anyone buying an apple wants to just plug in shit and go, at worst put in a cd and click through some simple wizards. this crap about beOS coming back is all FUD, it doesn't support jack shit hardware.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Linux can boot in 10 seconds on a dual-WD Raptor raid array. It can also boot in over a minute on an old 4500rpm drive.
Yes,
just what the world needs, another OS for personal computers...
AmigaOS, OS2, BeOS were all going to challenge Windows dominance... *yawn*
Whether you like it or not, WinXX will remain the dominant OS for as far as the eye can see. Linux variants will have traction in some areas, but it will always be very secondary to WinXX.
Until there's a huge shift in the computing paradigm, nothing will change. Today all PC OS's are interactive; you type something in, and it does something for you.
The next significant step in computing will be an OS that becomes much more proactive; it watches and learns what you like to do, and over time it will perform tasks on your behalf without being instructed to..
That'll be an opportunity for a new type of OS, and a new way of thinking about applications and services..
Until then, it's a windows world...
Not to be a dick, but this is old news. I have a pirated ISO of the OS, I've been aware of it for a while, and I'm sure many of you guys have too. It is kinda of dissapointed that its finally being slashdotted.
Simple logic here folks, if I can get to work driving my car, why should I ride the bus which is more environmental friendly when it only goes half way to my destination?
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
That's pretty good. Does anyone else know of a fast booting OS? I personally hate waiting for my PC to boot up.
So....does YellowTab have the source code to BeOS yet? Because every time someone asks them, they ignore the question. I would be very careful about buying into a company who is not willing to publicly state if they even have access to or can legally use the code for the software they are developing.
Coral cache
MirrorDot cache
It's hard to be the next OS for the Mac when Apple's CEO actually owns the other major contender.
What can I do with it that I can't do with a free Linux distro, or the Windows that I already have? Tell me why I should drop $100 on this.
Zeta seems to be a symbol used among zoophiles (read: people who like screwing animals). You'd think that this particular Greek letter would be avoided when creating names?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Is Zeta based on BeOS code? Last I heard, BeOS was owned by Palm, and they had no plans to license it. Or is this a reverse engineered clone?
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
and look there is a picture of a BEE on it.
Editors: dost thou have no mercy? From the depths of hell, the server stabs at thee!
I'm bored, waiting for the DST to kick in.. ;-)
and was on it's 4th revision by the time it was shopped around to Apple.
IIRC, BeOS didn't have printing abilities at that time...
Either way, both OS's were leaps beyond Classic (System 7-based) MacOS. That's all that mattered to Apple at the time..
Apple didn't acquire NeXT/Jobs until after Be's founder got greedy and priced himself out of a future.
... sooooo old "news". Isn't there a word for old news? "Olds"? :-))
Sometimes, I really beliebe that a lot of "might-be-geeks" are crawling around here. Zeta OS has been sold on shopping TV here -- several months ago.
It was back in 2002 at the CeBIT show in Germany that the people from YellowTAB gave me a "late beta" of Zeta for reviewing purposes. "Only a few problems left to fix", they said.
Turned out the entire GUI crashed all the time and tons of drivers where missing. Then came a big upgrade, then another beta and then... nothing.
Now it's 2005, and it's now "ready for a release next month". I suggest they bury it instead. For good, or turn the whole thing over to the OpenBeOS people.
-- http://z80.org - all opinions, all the time --
IMHO the hardware was always more interesting. I really wish their hacker-oriented hardware caught on, but I'm sure content to see the OS die.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
i boot xp in 9 sec flat. Not too bad on a 2.6 p4 1gb ddr.
Slashdot. No one cares about your not-free non-oss garbage.
From power-on to login prompt, most modern PC's will take no longer then 10 seconds to boot into Windows XP on a clean install. If you add lots of software that starts up at boot time, it can take a lot longer - other factors like fragmentation and such can play a big part too.
I personally don't mind loading stuff in the background when I login. I don't find it particularly annoying - and you can just wait a few more seconds before you login if you want to be a masocist like that.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
100 bucks seems a bit steep. I would love to at least play around with it and give it a go, but not for 100.00. Hopefully they'll either come out with a LiveCD or come to their senses and drop the price to something more reasonable.
"Well, I am mad, and I'm a crazy fucka when it comes to tea"
One of the most appealing facets of BeOS, IIRC, is the fact that it was FREE.
No, it wasn't.
Have they made any major improvements since Be went under, or have they just slapped some make up on the last version and are trying to sell that?
...I don't think BeOS could come back as BeOS at this point.
BeOS/Zeta still can't even boot on a machine with a gig or more memory. As the world upgrades to more modern machines, BeOS loses more and more potential users.
To bad... It was nice in its day.
My laptop's Linux takes about 30 seconds to boot up, counting from the bootloader, when resuming from a suspend. This could be tuned a LOT, though -- if I forced it to clean out more memory and write fewer caches, and repeated this on my desktop (which takes 30 seconds for a normal boot, so it'd be much faster from suspend), I might get 15 seconds.
Maybe that's cheating. My desktop linux takes about a minute, including time spent launching an X and a couple of needed programs.
But seriously, people, this is really just problem of bootscripts and choice of desktop. That means that I can make my OS boot in 30 seconds merely by switching to a lightweight window manager, doing a little bash programming, and cleaning out the init scripts I don't need.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Apple would have a real multitasking and multimedia OS several years earlier.
NeXTstep was production quality before BeOS.
What held up Openstep/Rhapsody/OSX was Adobe. They refused to port Photoshop to the Opensteop API (Yellowbox, what became Cocoa) and so Apple went back to the drawing board and produced Carbon and turned the Bluebox environment into Classic. If Apple had come up with some BeOS environment using Sheepshaver for compatibility, Adobe would have done the same thing... and they'd have taken just as long to come out with a product.
Will it run on AMD Athlons XPs, Intel's P4s,
Via C3/C5 (??), Transmeta Efficieon, etc.. ??
and including Virtual PC and bochs ???
How compatible is it with the old BeOS??
Oh yea, How much is it in US dollars ($) ??
Yet another has been OS is back again.. only to be has been again. Yaaaaawn...
There still seems to be no definite answer to that question.
Has Zeta made an official announcement in regards to the kernel source?
During my one week of playing around with various BeOS flavors I heard that the kernel is pretty modular, but I would presume that can only take you so far.
I think it's only fair to their customers to make a definitive statement one way or the other.
In Germay ZetaOS is sold on HomeShopping for over 1 year now.
:
I don't know what a Home-Shopping Buyer does with Zeta, but they sell it as
"Has everything you need, you don't ever need to buy any other Software"
Sure, pay $100 for an OS that does not run the latest Windows applications, hardly has any applications it runs natively, has limited driver support, and it is an effort to revive an OS that already killed at least one other company. How can you go wrong?
On the plus side, it should have no malware available for it.
I think Mac support for BeOS was killed when Apple refused to release info on the G3 Macs to Be, Inc. Therefore Be targeted the X86 market, hoping to save the company that way, because that is what NeXT did. Only NeXT tanked and got saved by Apple, yet Be, Inc. tanked and nobody saved it, and Palm bought out the corpse and buried it, until this Zeta Zombie rose from the dead.
I think I'll take my chances with Linux, KNOPPIX/KANOITX seems to be stable enough, boots from a live CD, and has an option to be installed on a hard drive.
I mean unless most of the major OSS projects are being converted to ZetaOS/BeOS, I think you can forget convicing enough people to buy a copy to make it worth their while.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Its APIs were so beautiful, it hurt me to even look at WinAPI again. Cocoa is far less elegant. Plus I think all the "lickable" bullshit looks worse than BeOS UI elements. It had its quirks, yes, but it had a very, very good "feel" to it. You kinda felt you were born and raised on it after 5 minutes of using their UI.
To me all this looks suspiciously like the long drawn out but failing efforts to revive the Amiga OS.
I am all for work, research and development of alternative OS technologies, but it should be obvious by now that there is no way a new OS can can become successful in this day and age unless it is based on open source.
Even SUN had to learn this lesson the hard way. If they couldn't make Solaris take off against Windows in the x86 space, how much chance do companies like Yellow Tab or Hyperion (AmigaOS) have?
Wouldn't it be better to support the open source Haiku OS project and then make money on something built on top of that?
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
Check out the groovy help desk. Nico- and Twiggy-bots are lounging on orange and pink beanbag chairs off to the right.
*brrrrrring*
dude: "Dude! so what's up with your operating system?"
caller: "I don't think I like it very much."
dude: "Duuuuude."
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
no mac in the friggen world boots in 17 seconds. i love my macs, but i'm not that delusional.
I do work for a small German company called "zeta software".
Currently, yellowTab is selling the ZetaOS through multiple German home-order-TV shows to computer-illiterate persons. Of course most of them fail to successfully install ZetaOS on their supermarket-bought PCs.
A daily average of two or there of them call us (not yellowTab!) and ask what they can do, now that they crashed both their Windows installation and their ZetaOS.
Even the hints beside every phone number on our website that we have absolutely nothing to do with that ZetaOS did not help much.
yellowTab seems to be aware of the problem that many many customers seems to be very discontented with ZetaOS and additionally call all companies that seem to have the Word "zeta" in their name (which are quite a few), because yellowTab hired a marketing agency (or how you call that in English) that called us some time ago on the phone.
This agency seemed to have the task to call all those zeta-named companies and apologize for the "idiots" (= ZetaOS customers) calling them. The agency further asked us what the average questions of the ZetaOS customers was. You could call that "Indirect surveying" ;-).
I really whish myself and all zeta-named companies that yellowTab runs out of venture-capital really soon and that they disappear and never ever return again *sigh*.
-- Watch me working: www.magerquark.de
dot com era companies releasing software/services that had no real market. Even us geeky people it seems are generally unimpressed, and there certainly isn't room for yet another operating system that costs money to enter the market. If people are going to pay money they will almost without exception buy Windows because of compatibility, regardless of what open source revolutionists may preach to them.
Reading at high threshold levels is group-think.
Ok i appreciate the effort of this company, but BeOS? It has been a dream for many but i doubt this will take off. This system was advanced years ago, now is just behind the others. Hardware support seems also a critical problem. Kudos to YellowTab anyway for their effort...hope them good luck.
Nice... That way he can port "Hello World" to BeOS. Nothing wrong with that, every platform needs it ;)
Here's your answer: Nothing, absolutely nothing. BeOS proponents and their marketing team make lots of claims, NONE of which have been substantiated. The multimedia support is complete bunk. It takes an army of developers to keep up good multimedia support for all the graphics cards and nothing comes close to touching Windows in that regard since vendors write their own drivers. FACT: BeOS sucks for multimedia support. Its driver support is very limited. I've actually tried running multimedia software on it and it performed WORSE than on windows and linux significantly. Are we to believe that the BeOS dvelopers managed to surpass every single expert in the entire world and developer SUPER SECRET ULTRA-FAST audio/mpeg decoding algorithms that are orders of magnitude faster than existing ones? FACT: BeOS only boots faster because it has a lot of basic stuff taken out. One can easily trim down windows or linux to make it boot just as fast or faster, but that means removing a lot of functionality. FACT: BeOS is behind the times in the OS world. Are we to honestly believe that a small team of developers has managed to create a revolutionary OS that's beat out what numerous developers on Windows, Linux and many other OSes have created and spent many many more man hours on? Of course not. Their file system is utter crap. They have a 1GB memory limitation that was just recently fixed. Talk about poor design. All the "graet new features" that it actually has are features that major OSes have had for many years now. BeOS is VERY inferior and is barely catching up. Conclusion: It's all completely unsubstantiated snake oil. Notice how BeOS relies 100% on anecdotal evidence and unbiased persons who use the OS manage to remain totally unimpressed. Why do you think there are ZERO benchmarks for BeOS? Why do you think they don't list all the UNSUPPORTED hardware on their site? Because their OS truly does suck.
[Sorry, I reposted this with proper formatting.] Here's your answer: Nothing, absolutely nothing. BeOS proponents and their marketing team make lots of claims, NONE of which have been substantiated. The multimedia support is complete bunk. It takes an army of developers to keep up good multimedia support for all the graphics cards and nothing comes close to touching Windows in that regard since vendors write their own drivers. FACT: BeOS sucks for multimedia support. Its driver support is very limited. I've actually tried running multimedia software on it and it performed WORSE than on windows and linux significantly. Are we to believe that the BeOS dvelopers managed to surpass every single expert in the entire world and developer SUPER SECRET ULTRA-FAST audio/mpeg decoding algorithms that are orders of magnitude faster than existing ones? FACT: BeOS only boots faster because it has a lot of basic stuff taken out. One can easily trim down windows or linux to make it boot just as fast or faster, but that means removing a lot of functionality. FACT: BeOS is behind the times in the OS world. Are we to honestly believe that a small team of developers has managed to create a revolutionary OS that's beat out what numerous developers on Windows, Linux and many other OSes have created and spent many many more man hours on? Of course not. Their file system is utter crap. They have a 1GB memory limitation that was just recently fixed. Talk about poor design. All the "graet new features" that it actually has are features that major OSes have had for many years now. BeOS is VERY inferior and is barely catching up. Conclusion: It's all completely unsubstantiated snake oil. Notice how BeOS relies 100% on anecdotal evidence and unbiased persons who use the OS manage to remain totally unimpressed. Why do you think there are ZERO benchmarks for BeOS? Why do you think they don't list all the UNSUPPORTED hardware on their site? Because their OS truly does suck.
openbeos, aka haiku, is going to give us a beos clone - open source.
Zeta OS --> lets throw some hacks together over top of R5.03 [proprietary] and pretend we are skilled coders!
Just in time for Eugenia to dump GNOME!
I know Germany is not a common law country, so I am not sure if the following applies there, but in common law countries (mostly the anglo-saxon world) you could get an injunction against Yellow Tab forcing them to change the name due to the fact that there are two kinds of trademarks: common law trademarks and registered trademarks.
A registered trademark is quite obviously something you have to register with the trademark registry.
A common law trademark is established through using a mark persistently. You don't have to register it.
Needless to say, registered trademarks are easier to enforce, but common law trademarks are just as valid.
Another important fact about trademarks is that there are 40+ different categories. Two companies can hold the same trademark for their products in the same country as long as they are in different categories. Since you are a software company and Yellow Tab's ZetaOS is a software product, there can be no doubt that both companies' products fall into the same category, the one for computer software.
Now, assuming that German trademark law does acknowlegde common law trademarks, then you have established such a common law trademark by trading as Zeta Software. If you can show that you have been trading for longer than Yellow Tab has been marketing ZetaOS, then you stand a very good chance that you can get an injunction to force them to change the name. The fact that you have those errant calls will actually help you to go after them.
Even if German trademark law doesn't help you, I am sure that German company law will have various clauses that protect a registered company's name from other companies in the same sector using the name.
Don't have pity for them. They should have done their homework before launching their OS. They should have never picked that name in the first place. A simple check with the company registry would have revealed that you guys exist.
On the other hand, if your company has been founded after Yellow Tab have started to market their OS under the Zeta name, then the blame would go to you guys.
In any event, you should get some legal advice from a lawyer dealing in such matters and see what your options are.
Good luck.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
Too bad it looks like my Mac circa 1999. http://oncee.blogspot.com/
First check BeOS!
.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010521150816/www.bene ws.com/beos/
to learn the root of the OS.
BeOS was originally developed for BeBOX(custom ppc based smp box) and later started supporting 60x lines of PPC based Apple's Macintosh computers and power computing(Taiwan's mac licensed manufactural).
With version 3.0 x86 versions started shipping.
There were 3.0, 4.0, 4.5 then 5.0 Personal Edition and 5.0 Professional Edition.
I personally believe that BeOS doomed itself with expensive public relations fund spend heavily on BeOS Preview release 2(Remember those BeOS preview release shipped with Mac related magazines for free?) and decision to start selling x86 version. They started offering free version for 5.0 called 5.0 Personal edition, which were bit late(developers have migrated to linux world then...). So company were bought out by Palm.
However, right before they were bought out by Palm, there were two main project which disappeared all together.
BeIA with SONY eVilla project and Dano(BeOS 5.5 release). BeIA pretty much slipped away when Be had office equipment auction when they closed down the building along with some handheld devices(tablet computers loaded with BeIA).
I've heard rumors that after Sony seeing the utter failure of QNX based iOpner(which was immediately followed by another QNX based 3com'saudrey), axed eVilla and destroyed all produced units, so only surviving units are the ones that were auctioned off with BE office closing in CA(developer's machine?).
After BE was sold to Palm...however, BE source along with Dano was leaked over Beshare(beos centric p2p software).
So Dano(considered as unofficial release ver 5.1d0)
OpenBeOS movement started around this time.
Now OpenBeOS has changed its name to Haiku-OS.
http://www.haiku-os.org/.
And soon people started BeOS Developer's Edition
at http://www.beosonline.com/.
And other people started BeOS http://freshmeat.net/projects/beos-max/
http://www.beos-max.org/.
Both BeOS Developer's Edition and BeOS Max revolves around Be's latest official release BeOS Personal Edition 5.0 + 5.0.3 upates and many new improvement which were contributed by a user community developed opensource softwares & drivers.
However, there versions which includes some unofficial released stuffs(stuffs from Dano and some controversial stuffs)
http://phosphuros.tk/
You can read the article by OSnews here.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6948
Here are some screen shots provided by Korean BeOS UserGroup.
http://www.bekrage.net/gallery/view_album.php?set_ albumName=screen
BeOS is nice because Localization stuffs were incorporated into GUI nicer than most other OS, making easier to support different language than English, especially where language isn't based on phonetic latin based alphabet languages such as Korean/Chinese/Japanese. Thier alphabet is 8bit(or even 16bit) character based.
Currently, Haiku-OS programmers are plugging away diligently where OS is almost ready, where most of the bread and butter applications were already worked out! This is a nicer situation where applications are already there when OS still hasn't shipped, due to special current circumstances of BeOS.
ZetaOS is heavily based on BeOS R5.0.3 + Bone network(Dano style) + lots of improvement borrowed from drivers found on BeBits(opensource community of BeOS) + Haiku-OS(OpenBeOS).
ZetaOS, there are RC1, RC2, RC3, Zeta Neo(considered as RC4) a
The need for more operating systems is always there. A real growing industry, it is!
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
heh heh. Debian WOODY. Heh heh. Huh huh.
I'm only slashdot's second biggest Monkey spanker
Every shot of BeOS had the DeskBar and Tracker displayed in multiple ways, you'd think they'd want to show this off.
Plus Palm owns BeOS.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
...did they consider they might be accidentially associated, i.e. with Zeta Creations?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Why can't they go after a market where it is needed? For instance, there are more and more ATMs popping up running windows and misbehaving in ways that you didn't think was possible for such a critical system.
Obviously BeOS, or whatever the marketroids call it this week, is stable, lean, fast, and seems to support media processing well. Why not go for the upscale embedded market? Why not go for set-top boxes, portable media players etc?
No business is going to jump ship and switch from Windows, OSX, Linux or whatever they run, to BeOS as their primary desktop OS. Come on.
Maybe its been updated more recently, but I've never even got it to install properly. I love different OS'es and the first thing I did when I heard about Zeta making a commercial (and polished) release of the BeOS I went immediately to their website.
Aside from the install issues I've had, is it just me or is the idea of playing money for a OS you cant test out first crazy? I mean *if* I had paid good money for the (beta 3 I believe at the time) and it didn't work I'd be pretty pissed.
I think its an interesting idea and some die-hard BeOS fans are happy about it, but their business models sucks. Make a live disk or something...
Personally I'd rather throw my money away on the Internet Urinal or something with tangible benefits. Zeta looks like an overpriced novelty (and I'm NOT saying it is, but from where I'm standing its hard to get a good look at it).
As a side note: how is this news? Zeta's been around for years now hasn't it? I mean if they'd finally released a demo THAT would be news. This is just free advertising for a dodgy products targeted apparently at die-hard BeOS fans (who would probably be using something like BeOS Max anyway).
Go figure. Wake me up when they have a demo copy I can test out on my system.
Quack, quack.
And i'm not sure why.
[preface this by saying I own 4 iMacs, 2 PB's, and a handful of older stuff]
Why is it that Mac guys are always tell people that Macs are "fast enough"?
If you point out that the Powerbook line is really slow compared to contemporary Windows laptops, their response is always "its fast enough for me".
Here, we're talking about how quicky stuff boots....and its clear that 0 seconds would be ideal, and every second that it takes is another second further for perfection, and once again, the Fanboi's say "Well, its fast enough for me".
I don't get it why they defend their Macs against every perceived threat.
Heh, that's the equivalent of weaking a "kick me" piece of paper on your back in high school when it comes to the /. effect.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
BeOS was insanely great, with some innovations that were entirely ahead of its time. But do they really have that much going for them now? Microsoft, Apple and several Linux groups already have highly GPU-integrated window managers going, for example, and work's being done on more metadata-rich filesystem-based platforms - WinFS and Spotlight both sit on top of NTFS and HFS+ respectively.
I wouldn't be surprised if it'd take them a few months or years to catch up to the current state of technology, because it's been maintained by enthusiasts ever since the company maintaining it dropped it. Even for something that was ahead of its time, it has catching up to do, both when it comes to technology and killer apps, and I guess what I'm asking is... is it worth it?
I don't really think a singleuser system is suited for modern computing. but aapart from that it sound great.
My new blog
never know how long my linux takes to boot, or if it ever survive next boot, but least i can get nice graphs about what it is doing each time with Bootchart and another cool thing is this video camera from samsung powered with ucLinux which can boot to shell in 80msek.
BeOS was only available for the PowerPC up to the 604 series. Apple refused to give Be the G3 information, and because of that BeOS could never run on any newer Mac.
But will it run on my undead Amiga?
Considering the fact that Gassee apparently wanted $400 million in the end, I think it was a wise move.
Not only that, but the NeXT system had a significant userbase, and, more importantly, software. There was a large amount of software that was available on NeXT, some of which is still being added to OSX now (Apple's Pages software, for example, was once a NeXT app called, wait for it, Pages). Also, Next had the advantage of being used in research institutions (The WWW was developed on a NeXT by Tim Berners-Lee) and was one of the very first systems to offer a fully fledged web application server (WebObjects). The fact that NeXT also had the advantage of some 8 or 9 years of experience and development behind it didn't hurt its chances either.
Possibly, one of the additional factors in Apple's decision was the fact that basing the next Apple OS on BeOS would have meant using a completely untested system. Untested in the market, I mean. Given that Apple really was in dire straights at the time (1995-1996), I think Apple made a wise decision.
But who knows, perhaps BeOS would have made apple become the absolute killer in the OS world.
BeOS is single-user, NeXT was multiuser from the beginning and had a far better POSIX implementation. I say Apple did it right. There would have been no quick ports from linux to BeOS
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
welcome our new Amiga overlords...
oh, I mean BeOS...
Some personal boot times, from power-up to "I can click and the machine will do":
:-)
Compaq 486SX, 8MB RAM, Win3.11: 20s
Same machine, I installed Win95b+MSWorks95: 20s
Wife's "white box", AMD k6-2 450, 300MB RAM, Win98SE: 40s
Work's Itautec (good biz brand down here) Celeron 900, 256MB RAM, Win98SE: 55s
Home double server/desktop, AthlonXP1800, 1GB RAM, k-Hoary: 90s
Transmeta 5600 laptop (on it now) 300MG RAM, k-Hoary: 45s
The last two benefited greatly from the last change (k)ubuntu did to the startup scripts... it shaved some 20s which were specially more annoying on the laptop.
And my home machine has some serious problem with hotplug or usb (takes forever to get ahold of the mouse), but I haven't got the time to look into it yet...
HTH
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
...I don't see this little O/S going anywhere. It does not offer anything radically fresh that will make people use it.
Why doesn't the Open Source world think about radically new ways of doing software? open source, not driven by economics, should be the pioneer of software development.
And some people are attacking it just now...
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Is Zeta OS using NTFS as the default file system? In the screenshots, the main drive is named Untitled_NTFS_Volume.
HD Trailers
If all of that works...I know a big "if"...there shouldn't any shortage of software.
Them: Zeta beta?
Me: Late-ah (later)
*ducks*
Moving to a BSD(unix) based system breathed new life into the MAC with a world of software possibilities and its ability to place nice with other systems. MAC has proven that unix can be used for a friendly and powerful desk top system. In a way it also proven that it is very hard to make it as a third party alternative sandwiched in between the Nix * Windows world. This reincarnation of BeOS sounds interesting enough for me to buy a copy, but I wonder about its potential to survive in niche that is similar to one that MAC decided was not a good place to be. Maybe the 2 keys this time around is that it is starting off in Europe away from Bill Gates' home market and that microsoft may be distracted with linux as a challenger to the point of not trying to crush this new version of beOS
I am wondering if the ZetaOS is even open source. They don't say anything explicitely on their website so that seems rather suspicious to me.
Is zeta going to continue to use a 4+ year old kernel? Look at the last screenshot.
Who cares how fast it boots. It is ugly as sin. Just like every Windows and lookalike nix desktop. So 1990's-ish.
I've been upgraded to "bad"!
You can get a PC in the supermarket in Germany?
Yes. But they are mostly "special offers" which are not available continuously.
Are these like Uber-Walmarts (giant department store) or like the A&P (larger than usual grocery store)?
They are discounters, but the most successful ones in Germany are quite the contrary of Walmart - they have a rather limited selection of products. It seems to me that Walmart offers about anything you can imagine.
Frankly. Steve Jobs is nothing but a business man. It does absolutely no jusstice to call a business man as Mac's father and Apple's savior.
Without Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs is nothing. Jobs could be a begger on the side of street for all we know if Woz didn't invent the first Apple personal computer.
Be didn't become the base for OS X but did get scooped up by PalmSource for OS 5 (Cobalt). I had odd deja vu ohhing and aweing at the Cobalt demo last year much in the same way I ohhed and awed at my friends Be box (yes he actually had one if those strange blue cubes with the blinky lights) many moons ago. At that time I thought "Kewl... let's just hope that the curse of Be does not follow it to this new incarnation."
A year later and on the verge of PalmOne releasing yet another OS 4.x (sorry 'Garnet') device. I know that the curse is alive and well. (And now PalmSource is chasing that which is Linux and shiney)
Don't get me wrong. I think Be was way ahead of it's time and love seeing it everytime it pops up. It's just not ment to be folks.
Why on earth would someone want to use a system in 2005 that lacks multiple users (if only for the security aspects) and network file systems? This looks great for an embedded appliance that doesn't need to talk to anything else.
I don't think it will catch on. It will most likely die off in about few years.
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!
Please note all systems are partial support and require duplicate systems to operate. ---Well that is what the Zeta web page says !
I remember when BeOS looked really revolutionary and awesome, but looking at those screenshots it is really showing its age. It just doesn't look like it could keep up with modern desktops (osx, gnome 2.10, longhorn).
It is funny and somewhat interesting in its funnyness but this value is totally irrelevant, your Linux, configured the same way as my Linux won't have the same result because the user is different and a lot of the reboots one experiences is directly linked to the usage he makes of his computer. I like to fiddle in my machine, I'm learning trough curiosity, I have a lot more chance to crash, hang or whatever and have to reboot than someone who's running the same server day in day out.
My last Mac on osX has been maybe rebooted 4-5 time because of something else than upgrades in its 5 years usage. However, since I'm now trying to make it an extension of my PC by integrating both computer togheter via networking stuff like VNC, DAVE et al. so they look like one machine to me, I've been rebooting it alot...
Same machine, same OS, same user, different results...
So I guess what I'm asking is don't MOD someone up just because he pulls a half decent joke about Windows unstability and Linux stability, what he said simply is irrevelant.
The mixer GUI lets you individually set volume/mute on each application. Hope this makes it into ALSA someday...
Now, can I trade in my BeOS Professional CD for ZetaOS 1.0? (I think I'm one of the 11 people who bought it...
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Is Be/ZetaOS a true multi-user system now? From what I understand, despite having a semi-compatible POSIX layer, there was no type of privilege system on BeOS, and no such thing as multiple logins, even at the command line level (being that the command line level has really always been above the GUI level in BeOS.)
I realize the OS is being targeted at people who don't think they care about such features, but without them, (and I don't care how cool your kernel and associated API is) it makes it extremely difficult to have a secure system.
Does anyone know the real deal on this, I'm forced to assume it isn't the case, since I don't see anyone talking about it.
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
Adding to ThunderRiver's post above...
The Mac's father was Jef Raskin. In the early stages of that project, Jobs tried to terminate the Mac project. (In favor of the command-line Lisa machine which later received the GUI from the Mac.) Later on, when Lisa truned out to be too expensive to sell well, he grabbed the Mac project to himself and eventually smoked Raskin out of Apple.
And PARC fans: Raskin published on ergonomic computer interfaces before PARC was founded... his original work interleaves the Xerox stuff.
What is with bringing back this OS from the dead? Sure, BeOS had some nifty features for its day, but nowadays, a jorunaling file system and OpenGL support are not things to write home about. BeOS died because, amoung other reasons, the complete lack of compatable applications. Renaming it does not change that. I think we should invest more energy into fixing the major problems with Linux.
/. moderation has devolved into valuing content into the digital equivalent of FunnyPages for Geeks.
Funny thing about all the noise about boot up times. Linux boots slower than Windows. You know, Diesle engines take longer to start too. But once they do they can run a lot longer and farther while doing a lot more work. Just sayin.
MadOgre.com
.. wake me up when you can run it on this.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Anyone know if it can be run in a virtual machine, such as Virtual PC or VMWare?
Chip H.
I am using Zeta all day here and it works fine for me, it's the only OS for the x86 platform that gives me no headache. Windows is crap and we all know that, full of malware and stuff. Linux is cool but the GUI experience of linux sucks big time, it's improving, yes, but it is not ready. Now Zeta allows me to have fun with computing using my spare pentium machine, I can see the media I want, listen to music, do my office stuff, use the net with not a single problem, the system is responsive and not trying to make you a moron. I am coding some apps for Zeta, all I miss is a good high level language now so that the entry point of zeta development was easier. I see many here complaining about Zeta and others talking FUD about YellowTAB and Be/Palm/Haiku relation. Now, How many here used Zeta RC3 or Neo or Ventura? How many here saw the new kernel? not the old betas, the new stable release candidates... how many here looked without "the prejudice of the geek elite" to it and tested it with an open mind... sometimes /. folks are just barkers after all...
-- Por mais que eu ande no vale das trevas e da morte, meu PowerMac G4 Não Travará!!!
You're a LITTLE LATE guys, this news is years old. We read all about Zeta more than two years ago.
In other news, MS Server 2003 has been released. AFTER Zeta.
I can't believe how clueless you are.
"The BIOS screen alone on a typical motherboard takes at least 20 seconds, longer if it has SCSI and SATA"
I don't know what decade you're living in, but I don't even see the BIOS screen on my current desktop, because it goes by so fast the monitor doesn't have enough time to switch modes. Sometimes I might see a little glimpse of the SATA Raid controller showing the logical volume, but other then that, it's pretty much Power > Windows XP loading screen within 3 seconds.
Maybe you aren't realizing how long 20 seconds is. Stare at the clock for 20 seconds, and count with it. You'll realize this is a ridiculous claim.
"Now, Windows XP also does a lot of operations when first starting up that make it nearly useless until they complete"
Not useless. But I did say LOGIN SCREEN, not DESKTOP. Read, boy, READ next time!
" such as its indexing of the hard drive"
Huh? I don't know what kind of screwy shit you got going on but windows doesn't have to index my hard disk when it boots - the operation takes several hours on my machine (900GB volume) and it does it at night. But even if I told it to index all the time, the indexing service puts itself in a low priority and shouldn't interfere with operation of the computer (besides the disk cache being flushed out continuously.)
"So you get a login prompt, but it's a smaller lie."
Once you get the login screen, all essential software is loaded - video drivers, sound, network subsystem, etc. Even while the machine is finishing up loading other services, the computer is operable. You CAN login. Sure, it's not as fast as if you waited a few moments, but you can begin logging in instead of waiting until each and every little service is started.
"The system isn't really ready to operate for some noticeably longer period until those boot operations complete,"
It's perfectly ready to operate. Just because the desktop is a little slower loading up doesn't mean it's not ready. As I stated earlier, all essential software is loaded and the system is ready to go.
"This is typical Microsoft behavior, "
What is? Letting you login while background operations are happening? Damn you microsoft!
"deliver the usable stuff later when you get around to it and the custoomer has already bought in"
Ahh, a fair and balanced arguement.
"Linux, like other UNIX descendants, does its boot time setups in serial fashion. "
Yes, and because of this, you have to wait longer to begin using the computer.
"They can be heavily parrelized, which has led to some interesting optimization tools for exactly this purpose,"
This is what Windows does. It loads as many services as it can in parallel. Once it gets the basics done (as described earlier) it allows for user interaction ala the login prompt - while the rest of the stuff loads in the background.
"but it's been left serial on the grounds that it's much easier to code for and maintain and debug."
You speak for the Linux community?
Look - I'd rather be given the choice. You can simply wait longer before logging in, and let everything load if you want to. I prefer to begin using the computer, and have the desktop be slightly slower for a few moments while the background tasks are finishing up. Maybe your computer is ass and it can't handle the multitasking, or your disk subsystem is slow as shit and brings the computer down to a halt when loading.
Don't be blinded by your faith in Linux. I love Linux, and most of my machines are Linux. But I also don't dismiss everything else just because it's NOT Linux, or spread lies and/or FUD about other things. Linux is great, and this is NOT A FUCKING COMPARISON OF MICROSOFT TO LINUX.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
There's nothing BeOS about PalmOS except the people that wrote it.
it's running in VMWare.
Zeta creates volumes as BFS by default.
Currently, Zeta costs 99EUR or 127.70USD..
That's WAY too expensive.
I'm all for buying software. I'll be buying MacOS X Tiger when it comes out. And the price for Tiger will be $129 ($99 at Amazon after a rebate).
But, Tiger will be worth that kind of money. It's a major OS supported by lots of Apps.
Zeta needs to sell for around $49.95US without Gobe Productive bundled in. Gobe Productive ought to be offered for another $19.95US for those of us who don't already own it.
Zeta needs to get a lot of installations out there. At the current pricing, what will happen is that there will be a lot of piracy and darn few sales.
Selling it for $50US won't eliminate the piracy, but it should increase the sales of the OS quite a bit.
I would like to own it and use it. But, $127 is too much money for an OS I'm only going to play with.
Zeta looks nice. It's a shame it's going to be priced so high, that I can't justify buying it.
and the Mac's father and Apple's savior, Steve Jobs.
Eeeewww.
It's funny that it says Zeta "Neo" and the kernel is almost 4 years old! See here: http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?re lease=223&slide=114
Soon to be followed by ZZ (Double-Zeta) OS. And then, the ReOSZ (Refined OS Zeta), which of course will never be mass produced, due to excessive cost.
Bet this
Eugenia Loli-Queru, the former editor of the old BeOS news site BeNews.com (and current editor-in-chief of OSnews.com), says, "Zeta is in a very interesting position to actively develop a non-Unix/Linux operating system that's both more lightweight and multimedia-driven than any Linux distribution out there that opts for the desktop. If yellowTAB manages to develop truly powerful and stable versions of much-needed applications (for example, a powerful mail client, and a faster, stabler Firefox port), it has a good chance of grabbing a good portion of the geek alternative OS market."
... well, nobody cares what she says any more."
I half expected them to say "Eugenia says
(Free? No. Open-source? No. Apps? Fewer than Linux. Sure, I'll buy it!)
I remember when The Screen Savers on ZDTV always promoted BeOS. That, and Linux. I doubt they'll promote Zeta.
Yeah, this is offtopic and I'll be modded down, but I'll just let you know for the sake of bettering humanity... there is no need to reboot a linux box just to login as root. Just issue the "su" command at any terminal, and you're root. There aren't really many times when you need to fully reboot, unless you are recompiling the kernel or you have to test some hardware whose driver can't be loaded as a module... and maybe a few other rare cases.
So where could i find a copy for a 604e processor? Is there a PPC BeOS for download that is respectably up-to-date? I think the last PPC might have been v3 but here's hoping.
> Steve Jobs is nothing but a business man. It does absolutely no jusstice to call a business man as Mac's father and Apple's savior.
>
> Without Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs is nothing. Jobs could be a begger on the side of street for all we know if Woz didn't invent the first Apple personal computer.
Woz is certainly the father of the Apple II, but it never would have gotten to market if Steve Jobs hadn't made it marketable.
I don't think you're giving Jobs enough credit for his industrial design abilities. Even Andy Hertzfeld expressed admiration for Steve's aesthetic sense when they were creating the Mac. Andy wrote "I was impressed with Steve's passion for elegance in the industrial design and his powers of discrimination continually amazed me as the design took shape... Steve was always critical and decisive, saying he loved or hated a detail that I could barely perceive."
Some of us can't afford to have a 150W+ machine running 24/7. Mine has 4 fans, and a 380W power supply in it. Mandrake 10.0 doesn't seem to support low power mode on my AMD64.
If I had a Mac I would just put it to sleep like I do with my ibook. Mmmm Mac...
I used BeOS for awhile...it NEVER crashed...it was a little clunky...but it was the most STABLE OS I'VE EVER SEEN. I work in radio and this would be the absolute best OS to build an audio workstation or radio automation system upon
But they wouldn't trademark the greek letter zeta, they would trademark the English (Latin Alphabet) transliteration, "Zeta".
My other first post is car post.
This really is not very well thought out.
Boot times are a combination of hardware and software configurations.
The purmutations are so considerable as to render your proposed benchmark pointless.
You would at least need to know uptime to make the benchmark work.
For instance, if I take an old 486 and pop debian on it, boot once and then switch it off, eventually it will have a great BMPY. One boot of 1 min for the year.
People who boast about uptime, probably use a lot of unessesary electricity.
How about an Eco benchmark, simply the amount of electricity used by the system per day ?
but how are they going to get the dev community on board with this?
Get your torrents...
First, people who call other people asshats are automatically wrong, no matter what they may say. It's like shouting - if you shout, you're wrong, as simple as that.
But even without self-disqualification from civilised discussion, you are still wrong.
Anything can be used as a trademark, as long as it is not already used for any other product falling into the same category including common use by convention.
Thus, if you wanted to trademark the greek letter zeta for a product, then you can do that, as long as there is no other product in the same category which has been marketed using a mark that resembles the greek letter zeta.
No other company would then be allowed to use a symbol in their advertising for a product in the same category which resembles the greek letter zeta.
However, if there was a convention for a certain product that the greek letter zeta is synonym for in the category you apply for, then your application would be rejected. An example of this would be a mark resembling the staff of asclepius, ie. two intertwined snakes, the symbol for medicine if you are a pharmacy, or a hospital or a pharmaceutical company.
But in the absence of any such impediment, there is nothing that stops you from using a glyph of a foreign character set for a trademark.
Keep in mind though that if you have a trademark for the symbol that doesn't mean you also have a trademark for the pronounciation of that symbol.
If you wanted to trademark zeta, the glyph of the greek letter, and Zeta, the latin transliteration as a word, that would be two separate and independent trademarks.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
Keep in mind though that British Telecom would not have been able to defend their Yellow Pages trademark if there had been no overlapping of trademark categories.
For example, if you were a pharmaceutical company and you wanted to market a new drug under the name "Toyota Pills" or "Ford Antiseptic" etc, it would be difficult for the car companies to fight you, that is unless they also filed their marks in the pharma category.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
The answer is: You shouldn't. Zeta is targetted at novice computer users that want to do things like "write and print a text" "save the pictures from my digital camera", "email", "surf the web" and want a reliable, stable machine that does that. They don't even know what an "operating system" is or what it is exactly that they are buying! They just see the promise to get a machine that is easy to use, fast and stable and that's why they are getting it. (I think Zeta will be able to keep that promise - I had a look at it at CeBit, when I bumbed into a sales presentation of by accident.)
Zeta is already being sold on German Shopping Television. They are just showing the applications and the interface and emphasize how easy and fast and stable everything is. There is no talk at all about that it is Linux, that it is an operating system, that you could use other applications than the pre-installed ones... in fact they show that there are "more than 200 applications pre-installed" and argue that "you can do everything because everything is already there - no need to download software".
Zeta is clearly targetted at novices that want to do some things with a computer but don't want to think about the computer itself. They might have experience with windows but probably find it too complicated or are afraid of unstability and insecurity, that is why they look for a "different computer".
I am quite sure that Zeta will be a success. There are millions of people out there that just want to use a computer for some simple things and are happy when it "just works", runs stable and doesn't require much configuration. For us it might seem ridiculous, but I can see how it meets the wishes of many novice computer users.
A G4 I used as a development machine booted Debian 3 (woody) with a 2.2 series kernel in seconds. Usually, I could turn it on in the morning and by the time I had swivelled my chair back to my workstation (a PII running RedHat back then) I could connect via SSH. I found similar experiences on other PPC architectures. Though G3s, of course, are slower, but still under a minute.
That machine is gone, but I expect similar results from my Mac mini which has just arrived. I have a slow, ARM-based linux machine that boots within 30 seconds. I also seem to recall a trick on an Alpha involving linux in the BIOS which allowed booting in 2 or 3 seconds, but wasn't directly involved in using it or setting it up.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Next through in a spare "Steve Jobs" that they had lying around . . .
The reason that Be wasn't bought was that they got a silly idea into their heads about price--something like twice what apple was offering. Apple found that for what Be wanted, they could have Next.
hawk
hawk
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
Technical reasons aside, it seems rather convenient that Apple chose NeXT and The Black Turtleneck's brainchild to form the future of MacOS. From what I understand, Jean-Louis was rather proud of making his OS from the ground up, and claimed that NeXT was based on decades-old technology (what can I say, he was trying to sell his wares).
If you think about it, had Apple purchased Be and not NeXT, they might not Avie Tevanian or any of the amazing brain trust of NeXT.
I wonder if they would have still made the iPod?
BeOS was more modern than NeXTOS, and it didn't suffer from the Unix-like exploits or Unix-like flaws that OSX has.
Besides, Apple already had MkLinux, a Mach Kernel Linux, and didn't need to buy out NeXT or Be. They could have built the OS on MkLinux and then followed the OpenStep guidlines which are available to be public. Carbon could have been developed for MkLinux as well.
The only reason Apple went with NeXT, was to get Steve Jobs back, because Apple lacked in the management department and wanted to get back to its roots.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Here at our engineering college I've been trying to get several vendors that make. Fluent (CFD), Star-CD (CFD), Nastran (FEA), HyperMesh , Abaqus (FEA) to port to Mac OS X. Especially when they support really exotic flavors of Unix. I simply give them a large excel spreadsheet with the numbers for all the engineering departments and point out that Mac OS X population is larger than our Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, AIX, BSDs, QNX population combined. We are shifting to Mac OSX in a big way and would like to replace our expensive workstations like Suns and HPs with Mac OS X commodity hardware. My push over the summer is send out the same message to the product managers of Catia, Pro/E, Unigraphics NX (although they do make Parasolid for OS X), AutoCad and Rhino3D. Aside from the folks who need to use these programs on a daily basis everything else can be found for Mac OS X right now and thanks to Fink and Darwinports many of the projects from the open source community. I believe many of these engineering applications can be ported with X11 instead of Aqua. Some elitist insist on Aqua from vendors porting to OS X, but I believe in baby steps for developers to get them acclimated to the new environment, just like Matlab. Insisting on higher GUI and Apple HCI compliance will delay and chase away these ISVs.
The idiocy continues..
Next up, someone will tell me that Windows has to load the Internet into RAM, which is why the swap file gets real big, and it causes Windows to load slow when the moon is full.
WE'RE TALKING ABOUT WINDOWS XP, NOT SERVER 2000, OR 2003. You don't run XP on servers. Unless you like the 10 connection limit.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -