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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.
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
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?
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
BeOS was considered very strongly as a foundation for what would become OS X instead of NeXT - see the What is OS X? guide.
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.
Windows has never been run on a supercomputer.
Well, unless you include clusters. But boot times on those are still limited by the abiltiy of each individual node.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Zeta OS? Now what are they going to call the next version? It's like Apple calling their OS, OS Infinity.
Apparently you were never in grade school. The next version would be "Infinity plus one and no returns."
Plus, after Zeta, there are still eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, and omega.
Hmm, they seem to be using a fair bit of GNU in there. Better make it GNU/Zeta.
Or, if it's meant for novices, GNU/Be.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Directly from yellowTAB
Hardware requirements
Minimal Requirements:
* Pentium 200MHz (or Cyrix, Athlon, Via...)
* 32 MB RAM
* 600 MB Hard Disk Space
* 8 MB Video Memory
* bootable CD-ROM Drive
* Mouse, Keyboard, 14" Color Monitor
Recommended Hardware:
* Intel Pentium III 1 GHz (Celeron, AMD Athlon Duron/XP)
* 256 MB RAM
* 4 GB Hard Disk Space
* 32 MB Video Memory
* Soundcard
* CD/DVD Drive
* Mouse, Keyboard, 17" Color Monitor
Check our hardware compatability list to see if Zeta will run on your machine.
---
When Apple's Copland plans failed, they looked for outside help. Jean-Louis Gassée's Be Inc. was one of those possible sources. Steve Jobs was the one they eventually chose.
BeOS would have been more lightweight and probably more efficient, but OS X is maturing into something quite useable. The UNIX roots of OS X have helped lure new developers and new types of users to the platform. Having more developers is never a bad thing.
BeOS would also have been a cleaner start. It's difficult to say how much (or if) UNIX is holding back MacOS X. I find OS X somewhat bloated, especially in terms of the number of files that it is comprised of. I wish it took less time to make a backup.
BeOS is/was also advanced in terms of file meta data. That situation is still quite messy in MacOS X.
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.
My Linux box boots in 1.5 minutes. Once every year and a half. Also fast enough.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It took me a second to get the subtle GNU/Ance of this post.
yellowTab has a story under which they have gained access to BeOS code (legally) prior to the Palm deal. Zeta = BeOS + yellowTab code + some Haiku code
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 it's quite annoying, I would rather the boot process take longer and it be ready to go the moment the desktop pops-up."
That's funny because I can't stand having to wait for every little thing to load before starting.
Maybe I'm just spoiled, but the difference is more startling when one uses a dual proc machine. My XP machine at work gets up to speed quickly. Almost as soon as my desktop is up, I can start loading my apps. On my laptop, I see that lag that you're describing. I'm reasonbly certain that the other processor is doing the work. Great stuff.
In any event, at least seeing that your computer is almost there is a psychological relief. Sort of like 2 minutes of commercials is usually better than seeing 2 minutes of black screen. (Which NBC likes to do here frrm time to time, don't ask me why.)
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.
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
I concur, and therefore propose a new and relevent benchmark for system boot time called BMPY or Boot Minutes Per Year. This will measure the amount of time (a 24/7 machine) spends per-year in a booting state. for instance imagine you can boot Zeta in 15 seconds but you need to reboot every three days (this is a hypothetical example I have no idea how often it will need to be rebooted) then you have 365/3 boots per year or 122 total boots for a total boot time of 1830 seconds or 30.5 BMPY. Now take another system for example linux that takes 1.5min (a conservative estimate, my system with no optimization takes slightly less) too boot but needs to be rebooted only once a month (again conservative as sometimes I only reboot at major kernel releases) for a total of 90*12 or 1,080 seconds, which comes to 18 BMPY. So in this case although it takes the linux system longer to boot, it actually spends 12.5 minutes less per year booting up. I hope someone will take this idea into serious consideration and maybe create a standard benchmark.
-kaplanfx
Visualize Whirled Peas
I'm sure someone out there can do a better job of explaining this, but I'll take a shot:
Metadata is data about data. File metadata is information describing a file or its contents.
On many operating systems, file metadata comes primarily in the form of filename extensions. A file with the name "house.jpg" can reasonably be assumed to be a JPEG image file.
Unfortunately, filename extensions are pretty limited as a means of storing file metadata. There's a lot of other metadata one might want to store and retrieve for a give file.
Classic Mac OS went a small step further, storing 2 pieces of file metadata: file type and file creator. This information was stored separately from the filename, allowing Mac users to name there files whatever they wanted, without having to include a filename extension. It also allowed them to have some JPEGs open in Photoshop when double-clicked, and others to open in a web browser, by means of the files' creator metadata.
Not too much later, the World Wide Web appeared, and with it the use of filename extensions as required metadata for any files to be transferred via the Internet. So Mac users learned to live with filename extensions. Most of them were already doing so.
One development that accompanied the rise of the Internet was the development of mime types, another means of storing file metadata. BeOS used mime types extensively for storing file metadata, in conjunction with a database-driven filesystem. From what I saw, the combination was pretty effective and powerful.
File metadata on Mac OS X is a mess because Apple has officially abandoned the traditional Mac type/creator metadata system. This is one area where Apple could have taken a leadership position as they transitioned their core userbase and developers to their new OS, as they did in other areas like Core Audio, but instead of replacing the type/creator paradigm with some newer, better metadata system along the lines of that which already existed in BeOS, they simply chose to fall back to the less powerful but more internet-compatible filename extension paradigm. Yet they did not completely abandon the traditional system, as it would have made porting classic Mac apps to O S X more difficult. So some Mac OS X apps use type/creator metadata, some only use filename extensions, and some use both. Without a clear leadership direction from Apple, things are kind of a mess. Not that most users would notice.
There is some hope. Last I checked, Dominic Giampaolo was still working at Apple. He was the main brain behind the BeOS filesystem and went to work for Apple a few years back. He's responsible for the journaling support that was recently added to Mac OS X. Many folks (myself among them) are hoping that Dominic will bring the BeOS metadata system (or something like it) to Mac OS X. I believe Tiger and Spotlight will bring some improvements in this area.
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
I have no idea what bug you have up your butt, but here's a few points.
Yes, BeOS is a dead operating system. There are no marketing claims for BeOS after about 2000. If you're going to be evaluating the original claims for BeOS made during its brief moment in the sun, 1998-1999, compare those claims with what was around then, not what's around now.
Steinberg ported Nuendo to BeOS. You'll notice that it could process 96 media tracks simultaneously. Why is this significant? Because on the same hardware the NT version could only do 48 tracks.
As a matter of fact, yes, BeOS did have a better media core than anything else did, in one specific area: latency. There was literally nothing else beyond true RTOSes that could touch it. If you go to a stage show in Vegas, Disney or even some Broadway theatres, there's a non-zero chance that the sound and lighting system is still being run by a BeOS-based system from LCS. In 2005, other operating systems have caught up in some respects, but the main thing that "beats" BeOS in media processing is simply Moore's Law: machines are so much faster now than they were six years ago that it doesn't matter that their signal processing still blows moose chunks.
There are other things that BeOS had that no other operating system had, most notably the file system and live queries that could operate on metadata. Make a virtual folder that contains all the word processing documents you've edited in the last week? No problem. BeOS was by far the most responsive operating system I've ever used. And you know what? It got more commercial applications announced for it in its first two years of public release than Linux did in its first five or six. (Some of those commercial applications are in fact still around, now on other platforms.)
Yes, BeOS had its share of problems, some of them did involve driver support, and there's been very little development on drivers since 2000. But it wasn't difficult to find supported hardware back then--I ran it on a pretty much stock Gateway PC--and I can assure you that BeOS does not suck. If Be had made some wiser business decisions (like not going after the non-existent internet appliance market, and knifing their desktop developers in order to do it), it'd probably still be around.
I'm not particularly interested in ZetaOS because, in the context of 2005, it's not a very compelling operating system. But you obviously don't have a clue why so much of the computing world was excited about it in 1999.
I call this the Disney effect. If you've ever been to a Disney theme park you typically wait about 20 minutes to get on a ride (excluding the "mountains") however they break the line up and never let you see the whole thing as well as have little pitstops of entertainment before you get on the actual ride.
I've always thought it was brilliant and was reminded of it the first time I saw Windows 2000 boot (it goes through 3 stages, NT text, then the splash, then the screen before login).
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
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
My C=64 boots in 2 seconds. ;-)
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
no, i do understand.
the problem of storing metadata that way is that its non portable. it's exactly the same problem that plagued macos classic. great when you only deal with macs but bad when the internet comes around and suddenly you have no simple way to transport files around.
also bad when you need to talk eg nfs or smb.
storing metadata in bundles and the whole bundle system allows macos to be transparenly "native" on just about any filesystem.
linux and nt have the ability to attach metadata to files, but nobody uses it. it would be a huge pain if anyone did start, because it would then suffer from again being non portable.
osx bundles are a sort of compromise between having metadata available, but in a way thats portable. its a bit ugly, but it works.
its also all xml, woo woo.
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?
If all of that works...I know a big "if"...there shouldn't any shortage of software.