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Zeta Goes Gold
*no comment* writes "Be lives! yellowTAB has announced it's 1.0 release of Zeta has gone Gold and has sent it off to production. The word is that in about 2 weeks, you can have your hands on the latest version of this BeOS derivative."
Catherine was a silver type
I absolutely love BeOS on my old Dell.. fastest thing for it... I might buy Zeta if its as fast as BeOS MAX on it.
I'm friends with the youngest daughter of the former head of the PowerPC division of IBM you insensitive clod!
So where is the .torrent? ;-)
I remember hearing that there was some speculation that they did not legally have the BeOS source code. While they would never comment on it, some people suggested that they must have had access to the code in order to perform some of the modifications they have done. Other people have suggested that they have merely patched previous binary releases. Now, my question is: do they or do they not have the source code to BeOS? If so, is it legal or illegal?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
The supported hardware list seems to indicate that at least one common laptop maker may not be supported very well (supported inspiron 3200, partially supported LS L400, no other details). Hopefully as they get bigger, they'll be able to devote time and resources needed to get running on some of the newer laptops coming out ...
Vobbo: Video Blogs
AC beat you.
Who are the people in the picture at the top of the supported hardware list page? I sure hope those people are not the developers or tech support agents. That one boy whose face is visible looks to be about 14! I just hope that's a stock picture that was altered to add BeOS/Zeta to the two depicted computers.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Nice. I wonder how well it would perform as a HTPC. The site doesn't seem too detailed or give screen caps that I could find, but not bad. Might have to try it on my old Dell P2 400. Anyone have a beta cope that can speak for how well this feature works?
today is spelling optional day.
torrent
posted on May 20, so I don't know if it's final or what.
there's more than one way to do me.
Man I wish Be hadn't died. Now THAT was a hell of a desktop OS. Dead simple install, simple UI with a lot unixy power under the hood. Booted super fast. Did things on 1995 hardware that other OS's couldn't do as well until 1999-2000 hardware came around.
:(
The only downside was app support. If they were still around and had anywhere near the support that Linux does, I'd be back with them in a heartbeat.
Sad.
They've been selling beta versions of Zeta on German television for months touting it as virus and trojan free, and claiming it was actually "faster than Linux", whatever that's supposed to mean, showing it to run on a (supposedly) P1 with 128 MB while playing 6 video files simultaneously. I always got a good laugh out of that, but I'll probably try it out soon nonetheless. Can anyone comment on the quality of the beta version?
Even in the days of low-end desktops with 512MB of RAM, memory is still a relatively scare resource. As such, good software takes care not to waste memory. Indeed, it is therefore quite responsible of them to make note of the fact that their microkernel consumes very little RAM for what it offers (very much, in fact!).
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
go zeta!
me work good!
So did they ever confirm one way or another if they have the kernel source code?
I'd feel kind of silly spending 99 euros for an operating system in which these guys don't even have the source - or even legally for that matter.
Seems sort of weird that there's no screenshots on the page..
What specific app support is missing? There are ports of most of the Linux-centric desktop apps such as Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, AbiWord, etc.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
(My take: It doesn't matter. The NeXT purchase brought back Steve Jobs, who has been worth, at the very least, as much to Shareholders as OS X (I can't believe Jean Louise-Gasse (sp?) would have been nearly as influential, nor would he (or whoever followed Gil Amelio) would come up with the iPod or iMac). A very conservative estimate would be that the presence of Jobs added $2 billion to Apple stockholder value.)
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Check OSNews.com. There were many reviews of the betas posted there. Some were positive, but some were also quite negative.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"based on proprietary code" tells us nothing. We already know that. Hasn't anyone ever confronted one of these guys into giving a straight answer?
No screenshots. No comparisons. The forums lack any real information except "Does this work" and "It's broken". I'm particularly not impressed. I don't want to toy with anything, let alone pay for it, without being able to see what it is.
Possessive its has no apostrophe, you fucking retard. How many visitors a day again and you idiots still can't hire an editor?
Zeta is out of Beta?
Let's hope the software has less errors than the english copy on the web site.
NeXTSTEP was indeed far more advanced where it came to networking and enterprise-related functionality. But BeOS was the supreme leader when it came to multimedia applications on the PC. While NeXTSTEP provided an excellent platform for Apple to build multimedia capabilities onto, BeOS already had them working and optimized.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I'm less amazed that Be's still alive than I am that you have a graphic for it.
----- obSig
Yeah, Steve Jobs definitely brought a lot back to the company.
...
It was definitely a good move. Of course, I like the CARS article when Al Gore was brought onto the board. Suggesting some sort of recount.
Which was funny, because Al Gore had just lost, and had demanded a recount in Florida, but that fell through. And they're parallizing...
fine, don't laugh at my stupid joke.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Why should we care about this OS?
(Ok, apart from the fact it's fast on old hardware and can't get any virus or trojan known to man, yet)
(Serious question. Not trolling.)
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
LOL, that's a funny joke!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
1. It's an alternative to Windows. 2. It brings extreme multimedia capabilities to the x86-based PC. 3. It features a heavily multithreaded microkernel and GUI that will inherently benefit from multicore and hyperthreading CPUs. 4. It provides a POSIX layer that allows UNIX, Linux and *BSD applications to be ported with ease. And that's just a small sampling of the many reasons why you should care.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
stop ruining my gag by actually laughing. ... ...
you insensitive clod.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
As I recall, back in the day BeOS was designed to run on a system with 4 or 8 PowerPC processors. At some point, they made the same switch that Apple is now doing... perhaps it is an inevitable thing?
see a Text Widget
Free I could understand, we hobbiests are crazy, but 99 Euros? WTF?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
No, I'm serious. Your joke was a riot. It captured the irony and the infallibility of the situation all at the same time. I'm not kidding; I laughed. Literally.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
a PS3 port of this would IMHO go realy well and be so suited to a medium powerhouse thats PS3. Heck a PS/2 port would be nice but they certainly have more leaway with a PS3 port given what its got under the hood.
BeOS was also (iirc, I'm not a coder so these things slip) a monolithic API, which has proven difficult to reverse engineer. NeXT rode the UNIX virus, got a candy-coating and MacOS compatability layer in the modern era and is still running loose... and heading back to Intel like a pack of X-wings for the Death Star.
BeOS was founded by Jean-Louis Gasse, an ex Apple employee (who had something to do with marketing in Europe, iirc - someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
NeXT, well. Yeah. We know what's up with NeXT. Founded by Jobs, financed by Ross Perot, and it GAVE BIRTH TO THE WORLD WIDE WEB!!!!!!! *squirt*.
What Killer App rode BeOS to fame? Anything? Last I checked, it kind of floundered about due to a lack thereof.
Not to sound like one of the other kool-aid drinkers, but Steve's an Innovator and Gasse's a suit. An innovator wouldn't have bitched, pissed and moaned about how it was Apple keeping them from running on the PPC 750 - it didn't stop linux!
"... Bernd/YT don't have rights to the source, they have hacked binaries to make it look as if they have done compiles, ..."
Do you have any substancial proof to back up these claims?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Yeah, i'm not sure I know what the point is.
At one time, there was a project called BlueEyed OS which was basically the linux kernel and X and everything else new with the BeOS apis. I think it's died or on life support, but my point is they could have stlll had a proprietary user space with all the drivers that linux offers, the 3d hardware acceleration that linux/X has for ATI/Nviidia.
And of course Haiku development seems to be moving at decent clip. But hey, if it's all legal and they end up making money who am I to judge.
What linux distributions would be a good alternative to Be?
So, I've looked at all the screenshots and read much of what's available, and I'm still not sure why someone would want to run Zeta on a modern machine. I can see it for an older piece of hardware you have laying around that might not have the oomph to push Windows or a robust Linux. But will anyone make this their primary OS?
I'm all in favor of choice (Hell, I use a Mac so I'm automatically a minority), and it's great to see another alternative to Windows, but it looks like a Playskool version of OS/2. Will the average Joe take this seriously?
It appears to be very geek-friendly, but I don't see grandma wanting to know about mount points and such. Further, to use a 1990's phrase, what's the "killer app?" What can Zeta do on the average 2005 desktop machine that Windows or Linux can't? Everything I've seen in terms of software offerings (CD player, CD burner, video editor, AIM client, e-mail, Firefox, etc...) are things that already exist in Windows and Linux. What's the compelling reason to switch?
World's tallest building rises in the desert
Yes, PalmOS has officially stated they do not and will not let the source out in any form, licensing or not. Also, the source was leaked and what has changed in Zeta/Beta from R5.1 + bone7a and beyond (basically R6) is only done in what was leaked to the net. Bottomline, Bernd has no source license, it doesn't exist. Talk to anyone and everyone in the know, he won't address the topic/issue, and basically is ripping people off by selling a 5.5+ year old OS with some graphical additions to personalize the BeOS R5+. If you have been around long enough, you would know this to be the truth, the whole truth, so help your God. :) BTW, another substantial proof is the binary hacked version numbers in the kernel, the attempt that is. It was caught within hours of the first Zeta Beta and subsequent releases.
--- Old Time NeXThead
I know, I downloaded from a BeSharer the tarball, uncompressed it and indeed had the sources. Kernel sources (partials), stuff like malloc and such. Seriously, the BeOS core code was last dated 1992-93, not kidding. A LOT of the core of the BeOS was and such still is in the form of Zeta/Beta, 12-13 years old. - OSXexpert
So you do admit to having seen these illegally redistributed sources, correct? What effect will this have on other software you have written and released? Have you been tainted by viewing such illegitimate source code?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
That is very interesting, indeed! Could you please provide us to links of some such discussion from people in the know? You have seriously put the legitimacy of this product into question.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I've been following the progress yellowTab have been making, ever since they licenced the rights to distribute BeOS R5PE and Pro (when they acquired the rights from Koch Media). yellowTab have some small mistakes as they were trying to learn how to stand on their own two feet, but lo-and-behold, they are now a company with 35 employees (and rising). Unlike BeInc, yellowTab know a thing or two about marketing, and are slowly generating enough revenue to employ 70 employees. They have a few of the old BeInc engineers who originally worked on the BeOS, and they have managed to hire / contract some of the Haiku (former OpenBeOS) developers to work on some of the Zeta components.
If yellowTab play their cards right, they will have enough finances to employ the targetted 70 engineers, and work on Zeta R2, which for all intentional purposes can be regarded as BeOS R7.
The more the merrier, I say, and I wish them luck.
Revolution = Evolution
It really isn't a new OS. It is based on the decade-plus old BeOS.
And yes, there are applications for it. See bebits.com for applications.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
http://www.openstep.se/jobs/
It is a NeXTSTEP 3.0 demo Steve Jobs gave 1992 (previously covered on /.). It looks almost like my Panther version of Mac OS X in 2005! When I first saw it I was even more pissed of at Bill Gates who I see responsible for depriving us of OS advancement through MSs monopoly actions :(
1992! Argh (faints ...)
Fewer errors.
In Germany you can buy Zeta for several years in homeshopping channels as "alternative for windows". They sold even the Betas without mentioning the beta status. The price: 100 Euro.
Look for details here.
640kb? Who cares?
Someone in Redmond?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
What are Linus' favorite lyrics? "Yo, BeOS, get out the way, get out da way. Yo, BeOS, get out da way, get out da way." just my fidy cents
Why would somebody want something so light-weight? It seems as if people enjoy being the exception so they make imparactical decisions. You would be better off running a major Linux distro... and guess what? It will cost you the same.
My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
Haiku-os is another Be derivative. "The goal of Haiku R1 is to be source- and binary-compatible with BeOS R5."
Now, will Haiku and Zeta be compatible in any way?
http://haiku-os.org/learn.phpWith Apple in league with intel, there is a chance that once again I'll be able to run BeOS on a Mac.
Hightlights
It added the direct atricle and two commas for the sake of clarity. Also there is the use of single inverted commas for illustrative purposes, that is how to indicate the relevent subject material. I replaced the profanity with something more acceptable and the non PC 'retard' became a 'person with an intellectual impairment. Remember, they are not disabled people, but people with disabilities. Unless of course you meant muscle retardation, but that would become spasticity or increased tone. The final change was "can't" (double inverted commas for "can't" contains an apostrophe) to cannot. This is proper english.
Why do all this? This gentlemen or woman obviously has an appreciation for correct English usage. I hope this was educational.
Once a 100% BeOS user, I played around with Be again a fortnight ago, hoping to get into working on the very very cool instant messenger kit. But it was too hard. I couldn't get SSH to work, there are problems with some tools (eg: Bethon) only working with R5, others only working with post-BONE releases, etc, etc, and the browsers are too heavy to run nicely on my compatible hardware (dual p2, 256MB) and I got sick of it. Until the community can get to the state where you can get a development workstation set up without having to bleed and until the distributions can get support for basic hardware like SATA (or else applications that work nice on the old compatible hardware), it's not going to get much momentum behind it.
:( ) and my experiences trying to get basic tools up and working a fornight ago put me off one time too many. I installed debian stable on that on Sunday so it can replace my mailserver.
This is a shame, because the interface is a damned side faster and lighter and nicer than either gnome or mac os x (and in spite of the yucky bloaty skinned rubbish that zeta has replaced the old beautiful elegant fast LAF with), and it used to be much easier for young developers to get used to the environment than linux (at least it was easier for me).
The coolest thing about Be though was the filesystem. Check out this: http://eiman.tv/imkit/use.html. This is an instant messenger system that's based on the filesystem. So each user's icon... is a file with metadata! Neat! All written by the same guy who's written this new metadata file system that's shipped with tiger.
Anyway - it's too late for me now. I only had one computer left that would run Be or Zeta (my newish mac and newer SATA x86 box won't run it.
But I'm guessing that in ten or fifteen years we'll start getting to the point where kernels are interchangable, so I hope Be people keep up their good work because it was one hell of a fast exciting system back in the day.
Believe with me, my saplings.
As you all know, Haiku is far from finished, well maybe not that far, but i think that when Haiku R1 is ready, Zeta/YellowTab will have som major problems. A software house like Yellowtab does not have the money and manpower to keep up with the modern OS demands for the long run, but the open source haiku community have and will probably even get more devs in the future, so my guess is that YellowTab some time in the future will end up as a disto maker. Like Red Hat, the Haiku devs will supply the kernel and drivers and YellowTab will probably focus on it's software and making a Haiku Distro. But that's fine with me.
Bits of News Giving you the latest bits.
I you allow, I would draw your short attention to a blog entry of myself about the odyssee we had and have, just because we have the same name as this "ZetaOS":
The ZetaOS diary of an (involuntary) Insider
(And of course my apologize for the fact that I am linking to a Microsoft-based blog...)
-- Watch me working: www.magerquark.de
What linux distributions would be a good alternative to Be?
I would have said "Debian", on the grounds of similar antiquity, but then they went and released a new version.
So I'll say "Lindows/Linspire" instead, because it has the same single-user design and consequent security flaws.
Some group of people struggle against all odds to produce (well, update) a whole modern independent OS free of Windows and Unix baggage.
Slashdot responses summarized:
--It's not free/Unix/OSX/real.
--I already have Linux. Why should I care about anything else?
--LOL BeOS is so dead!!11 pwned! noobz
--I don't know what it is, I don't want to find out, and I don't like it.
I think this provides a strong clue as to why human society has not yet attained a state of nirvana-like perfection and happiness
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
There are probably few cases around of anyone being prevented from editing & compiling their own source code, that they wrote or obtained the rights to or even licenced under permissive terms.
There are innumerous cases of people being prevented from editing & compiling the source code for software that belongs to someone else that they have not been granted such rights to, whether or not they have purchased the right to use that software.
Not all software is yours to do with as you please, of course. You can argue that the rights to use but not modify such software is not useful to you, but it is undeniably useful to many others. The fact that we are still able to choose what software we use and what software we purchase (Windows OEM bundling aside) means we are still, for the moment, free. At least in this respect.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I am trying to point out a mistake to the editor / submitter so that he or she can fix it. Why are you stupid ass-licking cunt-sniffing moderator cocksuckers trying to prevent me from doing this? Please mod the parent post up to +5 Informative, so that the submitter and editors will read it. And metamods, please rate the "troll" mod as "unfair", and hopefully fuck up the shithead's kharma.
I'm all for diversity, but who is going to use it?
Why would I like to use it?
Finally an OS for x86 thats fast and resource efficient! Ive placed my order. I almost cried when BeOS whent tits up. BeOS and now Zeta OS is faster than anything ive ever run on x86. Its a real shame its not free but ill buy it anyway just to get some competition going.
I do hope Zeta will take off. I do think it have a much better chance of success than BeOS because of all the open source applications. The applications barrier is so much smaller today than when BeOS was trying.
HTTP/1.1 400
I can bearly justify Tigers hefty price tag to myself and thats for a well established, stable, powerful operating system that is supported by the likes of Adobe and Microsoft. How can this compete with Linux and BSD with a 99 Euro price tag and limited application set? That has to be a typo right?
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
To me the main question is: does Zeta have support for Java and Flash. If one wants to use the OS to browse the Internet, these two are absolutely essential. Usually most popular pages have some Flash content and some have Java-applets. I know that one doesn't need these two so often, but to have pleasent and seamless Internet experience without some pages not working or pagefunctions missing, these two are needed.
If Zeta OS doesn't have Java and Flash, I believe that they wont succeed on making impact on consumer markets. Same goes to business markets, they don't have the required applications. Atleast with Linux you have an option to get the popular applications to work if you want to (MS Office, Dreamweaver, Photoshop etc...).
If Zeta doesn't concentrate on some niche markets like Internet kiosks, I believe that they will be out of business. For me, there is no incentive to switch from Linux to Zeta, and to Windows users switch to Linux is much better choice than Zeta. In Linux world you have lot's of choices and overall stability, ie. you don't have to wonder if Linux will be around in 2015, it will.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
- did this get modded insightful!?
Flaimbait would have been more appopriate...
Ethics is what you say you do. Morals is what you actually do.
Does it run under VMware?
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
The old OpenBeOS project is now called Haiku: http://haiku-os.org/learn.php
Personally, I'd rather wait for them to succeed, or if they don't learn from the ideas and move on. I don't see the point in another commercial BeOS effort when the first one, with an admittedly GOOD product, crashed and burned. OS lockin has gotten stronger, not weaker - WinXP is stable enough for quite a large number of people. (I.e. that's not their major complaint any more.) I know it's rife with virus and spyware issues, but those problems are as much a function of user habits as anything - as demonstrated by the success of a mechanism (email viri) which requires the active help of the user to run.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
2. It brings extreme multimedia capabilities to the x86-based PC.
:)
I've used BeOS on and off for years. I used to have a box running 5.03 in my game/media room, just because I wanted to see how this "Media OS" fit in.
Frankly, I couldn't see anything in it that made it a "Media OS". It didn't run faster or handle video better than NT4 or Windows 2000 on the same hardware, and I had to add RAM to the box that had been running NT4 to make BeOS happy.
The only "Media OS" feature seems to be the ability to tag media with metadata in the filesystem, which is a dubious practice in the first place (unless you abandon all other operating systems, you have to duplicate the metadata anyway), and it doesn't seem specifically relevant to "media" over other kinds of data.
3. It features a heavily multithreaded microkernel
It features a multithreaded kernel with an internal API based on passing C++ objects around, anyway. Does that make it a microkernel? I don't know: most of the systems I see touted as "microkernels", like Mach, don't seem to be anything like the real-time message-passing kernels I'm used to from my work in the control-systems industry. The most microkernel-like OS I've seen on a personal computer actually predated the academic use of the term and wasn't ever described as one by the vendor.
If someone who is more intimately familiar with BeOS can comment on these points I'd appreciate it.
Not to troll or flame here, but Zeta looks like an OS that runs on old hardware.
People are used to the visual eye candy of OSX's Aqua and XP's Luna. Eye candy makes an OS seem more sophisticated.
While Zeta may be an excellent way to bring new life to an older machine, there's no way any Windows user (or Intel-Mac user) would switch to it. It just doesn't look like fun.
Great to see something new from the BeOS world, though.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
It's not free/Unix/OSX/real.
I don't know about this. BeOS is a very comfortable and familiar environment for a UNIX user, with a very complete and very "native" UNIX API that's not just something slapped on the side like (say) Interix is on Windows NT. I would happily consider BeOS a member of the UNIX family of operating systems.
I've downloaded a lovely DivX from the net (bittorrent rules), and I find it almost impossible to seek using VideoLan/WindowsMediaPlayer/WMPClassic/NeroVision
People exaggerate when they call the BeOS kernel a microkernel. It is smaller than the Windows NT and Linux kernels, but bigger than QNX and Mach. A large portion of the OS is outside of the kernel proper (like the filesystem, networking pre bone, the application server etc) and can be swapped and replaced on the fly. Other components require a reboot (video 2D drivers, BONE) when the componets are replaced. The components are very modular, so a lot of people are fooled into believing that all components can be replaced, hence it seems like a micro kernel. Heck, even Haiku (former OpenBeOS) are working in parallel on multiple components, this is only possible due to the well organised framework/components of the core OS.
So to answer your question, it strickly isn't a microkernel, but it's architecture and components are like one. Most kits use messages for interprocessor communication, but for performance reasons a pure microkernelish approach was not taken.
Revolution = Evolution
BeOS always sounded great to me, until I got to the part about C++. Apparently the APIs are all implemented through C++ objects, which makes it impractical to program with most other languages.
And you know. . . I really detest C++. It's like somebody saying: "Hey, we've got this great, efficient, modern OS! The only catch is that you have to program it with COBOL." Yeargh!
By way of comparison. . . I recently got into Mac OS X programming with Objective-C and Cocoa, and I'm falling in love with the language and the environment. Everything is turning out to be so easy, it's ridiculous. (That after a pretty steep learning curve right up front, I'll admit.)
It looks to me that YellowTab is going about this the wrong way. They seem to be trying to market this as a general purpose desktop, but that is a hard market to break in to with incredibly strong established competitors (MS, Apple).
The low system specs and mulitmedia capabilities scream for this to be put into a TV-set-top box like a DVR. The low system requirements might even be good on appliances, medical imaging, and kiosks. I think they should be trying to sell their stuff to Sony, Panasonic, Scientific-Atlanta, etc instead of trying to break into desktops.
Is that you, Darl?
Yes, you are, in a so-far successful attempt to rack up positive moderations from people who can't be bothered to read yellowTAB's statement.
Their very clear statement, linked above, says:
"lack of a clear statement" leading to "much doubt as to the legality of their software"? Go back under your bridge.
(If I'm feeding the troll a little snack, it's the gullible moderators who've served it a full-course meal of positive moderations.)
With Linux today I ...
:)
Stop right there. If your standard of comparison for media is Linux, any operating system will look good.
Ever wonder why there are 1000 amateur video players for BeOS? It's dead easy to do.
Same reason there's 1000 amateur video players for Mac OS X. It ships with a component for doing video. I wouldn't call it a "Media OS" on that account... I was hoping for something deeper (like, say, real-time scheduling or at least something inherent in the OS itself).
I don't have problems seeking in divx files. It is probably an issue with the file you downloaded. IN any case, seeking will always be clumsy with MPEG type files anyway, since most frames depend on 1 or more frames before (or after) it.
So the basic seek goes:
1) Notice the user wants to seek somewhere.
2) Find the keyframe before, but closest to the point the user asked for. This is because the only frames that are not dependant on others are keyframes. They are larger in size then other frames, so most agressive video compression formats only spread them sparoticly throughout the composition, often when there is a lot of scene change.
3) Load that keyframe into memory.
4) Process the movie forward, resolving the dependancies of the frame the user asked for. (this could involve the rendering of dozens of frames)
5) Display the frame the user was after.
On a video without a decent number of keyframes, the above process could take a while. Some divx have been encoded with only one keyframe, so seeking in the composition would require rendering of the entire passage from the beginning of the movie. This is an extreme example, but highlights the fact that seeking performance in a divx/xvid composition is dependant on the file itself.
zeta is theoretically a pretty cool thing.. the more OS's the better in my opinion.. as long as everyone thinks of ways to make everything somewhat compatible.. atleast documents.. and hell, if an OS's can connect you to the net, let you chat on IRC, browse the web, send out emails, and type of documents, there isn't much more you need for some people.. i have thoroughly enjoyed BeOS's software packages that come along with BeOS.. as well as tons of the software bebits.com has to offer.. however, why the hell doesn't the Zeta site have ANY screenshots?? what are they trying to hide?? the hideous desktop?? BeOS Max Edition was a good thing, and so is Haiku.. if it weren't for those things, then BeOS would of been extinct years ago.. but the way Zeta is preserving the legacy, is lame..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
I met an officer of Zeta and they were showing a wide screen monitor running zeta, and it looked wonderful! And apparently they have sold a lot in Germany, anybody bought and used it there? It looks pretty much like BeOS did when it was running on my 9600 Mac with dual 200MHz 604e cpus. Which I have to say, was much, much smoother multitasking/multimedia wise than my 128MB, mobile Pentium III 450 MHz Dell Inspiron 7.5K with RH9. I wonder if the latest linux kernel can match the smoothness of performance I had then. Anyway I found Pulse (the cpu monitor) somewhere in the app bar, it comes with a lot of apps and has a nice greek ZETA. What more could you want? Seriously I remember when my Mom bought a dedicated word processor at Staples years ago, it was $70 bucks and a pretty clunky green screen but it worked great. Then advanced to various macs. I'd pick an iMac for my Mom again if it wasn't a matter of money, but Zeta for wordprocessing probably would be great for Mom too. Apparently Zeta uses CUPS so it can handle "lots" of printers too.
Actually I would really like to have Be's live filesystem query in a rightclick popup for windowmaker. Anybody know if that tracker project makes it so?
None, really.
:)
BeOS was like MacOS done right (God, I hate the old MacOS. 9 and earlier. Hate them.) with a healthy dose of OSX thrown in, except it was out way before OSX was even on the horizon for Apple. Oh, and it could run on x86, of course.
Not really any resemblance to Linux, aside from being a bit Unixy. It was really, really tied to its graphical environment, to the point that it was impossible (IIRC) to boot to just a prompt. It was OK though, because it was very good about being able to get to at least a 640x480 VGA desktop in emergencies. It was really hard to mess it up so bad that it couldn't at do that much.
You could install it on an old 486 or low-level Pentium and expect to get a usable, very responsive, fast-booting desktop out of it that had a low memory footprint and could do way more video or audio decoding than one would have ever thought such a machine was capable of. Can't say the same for Linux.
My memory may be colored by the fact that I got a copy of this OS around the same time as I got BeOS (Right before Be died, then), but I thought whatever version of QNX with its Neutrino (is that right?) desktop that was around then was a little bit like BeOS. I mean, in terms of responsiveness and the "feel" of apps running on it, and the cohesive feel of the overall user experience. They don't look at all similar, of course, and BeOS was far more capable for most desktop tasks, if only because it had more desktop-oriented software ported to it than QNX. QNX is actually made mostly for embedded stuff and for has-to-work systems like airline control type things; it just also happens to be good for turning your old Pentium I's into MP3 jukeboxes or dedicated web browsing machines
I may be completely off, but I belive Gasse was president of Apple Europe. Jean-Louis and Apple never quite saw eye to eye. When they were looking around for their OS, Be only wanted to license and not sell (they had interest from the clone manufacturers). So instead of licensing BeOS for $10 million/year they bought Next for $400 million and killed off the clone business. I am still not convinced it was the right thing to do, but Steve's the billionaire, not me.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Will be apps.
/.'ed -- http://www.yellowtab.com/phorum/ .
There is a limited application set, the development of which is rather difficult in nature. If you read their forums, many of the users that have supported Zeta during its slow development binter and banter back and forth about what they want, and what they are getting.
Linux users get the same way, perhaps not as vehemont as Zeta followers do, but they do.
The problem is going to be finding developers that are willing to develop in that envoirnment. I believe that C++ is the only language for which you can use to develop in Zeta. The lack of language variety is going to make getting developers difficult, and a rather centric group of developers will build the OS, giving it a rathe r lop-sided or narrow build.
At the current time however, their forums are being
It looks nice, it may work beautifully, but the limited application set sort of deters me from wanting to use it.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
Palm wont let the source out, no. But unfortunately for them the deal was signed _before_ Palm became involved, hence they have no say in the matter. At least that's what I've read. Waiting to see the results of the release in any case.
Just what is Zeta basing their OS on? Is it just a licensed version of the released BeOS binaries and their own code, or do they actually have Be source code? I've never quite found a straight answer on their site.
my point is they could have stlll had a proprietary user space with all the drivers that linux offers [...]
I don't think that it's the userspace that's the interesting or important bit of BeOS.
This is like some of the "new Amiga OS" schemes based on Linux... what made AmigaOS interesting and useful is not something that you can get from emulating the userland on top of a different kind of kernel. Which is why I'm glad that the latest "new Amiga" is based on a reimplementation of the Amiga Exec, and why I'm glad that Haiku is not just another Linux or BSD kernel with a GUI on top.
Most of the IP of BeOS has made its way into OSX or Linux via folks contributions or jobs. Spotlight is basically BFS graphed into the HFS.
Neither of these sentences are meaningful. First, the architecture of Linux and BeOS are radically different, all that I can imagine it borrowing from BeOS are userland and application components. Second, Spotlight is the exact opposite of BeFS: it can metadata and other material provided by applications through its API, but it mostly indexes the contents of files and its store is NOT in HFS or dependant on HFS: what it mostly uses HFS for is avoiding hierarchy traversals to find changed files. It's more like "locate" on steroids.
I installed BeOS about 6 months ago as part of a open source dataabase testing project. See www.genezzo.com. It was really cool. BeOS is worth spending time on. It's is a very different database philosophy, and it's one that should have a future. I vowed to spend more time with it on a newer PC, maybe using Zeta or Haiku implementations. The Zeta people have been hard at work now for years. It's great to see a golden master from these guys. I'll be buying a copy.
Maybe I'm playing the devil's advocate but yellowtab.com is running Linux
Does it mean that ZETA is targetted to desktop only or they couldn't get Apache to compile ?
[n/t]
1. BeOS was not a multi-user system. This, in my opinion, is the critical technical issue that killed BeOS.
2. NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP already had important developers on the platform (like Adobe, Aldus, etc.) in markets that were critical to Apple's user base. The only really cool application I remember seeing running on BeOS from a major company was Steinberg's Nuendo.
3. The NeXT system had a proven track record of success in heavy-duty custom application development, thanks to the superior development tools (Interface Builder, etc.) and development toolkits (WebObjects, etc.). Be had no equivalence here.
4. This is not really an issue of OS quality, but OpenSTEP did not compete directly against Microsoft products. In fact, OpenSTEP ran *on* Windows NT (as well as Solaris). Be's attempt to break Microsoft's stranglehold on hardware OEM's caused Microsoft to leverage their monopoly to wither any such deals.
5. The selection of NeXT rather than Be allowed Apple to leverage their experiences with MkLinux and the knowledge base of all the *NIX developers in the world. Going with Be would not have provided this opportunity.
6. Steve Jobs (There is no Rule Six). Granted, I would have like to see Gasse/Sakoman/etc. back at Apple, but I'd rather have Jobs.
I was in a meeting with Bernd where he finally admitted that they have licensed the source. The company I was with at the time is STILL an all BeOS shop, and they're tickled pink about Zeta.
Now, they use R5 as their current platform, and purchased a copy of the most recent beta of Zeta to test. It has TONS of problems, paramount among them, the OpenGL implementation is just horribly slow, which, for a multimedia OS, is inexcusable.
I didnt find any screen shots on their webpage. Anyone else? (google search time)
destroyed what was once a great user interface.
Didn't you just get through arguing that BeOS is a member of the UNIX family just like Linux?
If that is the case, then it wouldn't be difficult to take pradigms and design implementations that exist in BeOS and put it into Linux, would it not?
I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps at the present, C++ is the only compiler that's being used. But think about how many other language interpreters are written in C++. If you've got C++, it practically guarantees that you can build countless other interpreters.
CGI-limits reached, please try again later!
Oh well, i'll check it later when the Slashdot kids go to bed.
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
BeOS was like MacOS done right (God, I hate the old MacOS. 9 and earlier. Hate them.) with a healthy dose of OSX thrown in, except it was out way before OSX was even on the horizon for Apple. Oh, and it could run on x86, of course.
OS X actually is based on NextStep. Next was on the scene before Be, and with an equally large wow factor and equally tiny marketshare.
And yes, Next ran on x86 boxes too, which is why OS X has run on intel since the very beginning of its development. It's merely an evolution of Next, with Carbon thrown in to offer backwards-compatibility for developers.
Having said that, Be definitely was a lot faster and a lot nicer with media. I ran it on 486's, pentiums, and even a pII, until I moved to an all debian setup.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
I'm broke, €99 is a lot to spend on an OS just to see that I don't like it
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
No, Be was a micro kernal.
"Attention Citizens, 2+2 now equals 3.947547175. Please recalibrate your equipment now" --The Computer
Name mangling: completely compiler-dependant. This is why an API should be specified in C. Any language can have a C FFI. A C++ FFI, otoh, would be extremely brittle. In fact, as far as I know, most wrappers around C++ libs also feature a C wrapper around the C++. Unless, of course, you're opposed to both JITed and compiled languages and prefer to live with needlessly slow programs.
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
Spelling matters.
BeOS was a revolutionary architecture in that it was pervasively multithreaded. Threads were fast switching and everywhere, and, most importantly the entire desktop and application environment was fully multithreaded. Unlike Windows, where messages sit inside a single apartment model message queue, a BeOS window could receive multiple messages at the same time. Applications could take advantage of this to do some impressive thing. I remember watching multiple software rendered openg/l teapots and video playback in multiple windows on my dual pentuim II.
But alas BeOS was ahead of its time because right around the time BeOS first began to get noticed on the Intel world was right around the time AMD and Intel yanked up the Mhz wars and for a time it seemed like the SMP and Parallel vision of Be's future was entirely wrong. Certainly many pundits called it incorrect. But nowawadays multicore and thread on a chip cpus are coming, and it certainly looks like that we will be without an operating system that can properly exploit them and for some time.
This is my sig.
...that Be is going to be switching from PowerPC to Intel in order to not be left behind Apple. ;P (1998 is calling)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
So was NeXT. Doesn't make the API for making gui apps any less "monolithic" or a pain in the ass.
I only wish BeOS was a member of the UNIX family, but only by marriage or law, not by blood.
If TCP and by extention Telnet are part of your definition of a member of the UNIX family, then there was no UNIX before there was BSD. Were SGI GL and Sun News Unix? I never used a pre-4dwm Silicon Graphics box, or a pre Single Unix System Unix for that matter, so I won't go there. Practically speaking, sometime before 1985 or so with POSIX, and after Berkley first developing TCP for their Unix, there was no UNIX in any current sense of the term.
My most important point, that you didn't touch on, is my objection to your grandparent post. POSIX is indeed slapped on the side of the non-Unix BeOS, and while a fair approximaion of it, this is a less complete POSIX than those available for Windows NT. Before Microsoft purchased Interex (which I've honestly never used, I have successfully avoided XP until very recently), there was an NT Services for Unix, which if you installed the Telnet server (included with NT Server 4.0 CD), it did indeed allow you to log in remotely and use Korn's POSIX Shell. Even though Windows and BeOS don't internally use or boot with Unix, after booting they are both able to present passable Unix interfaces (with appearances of POSIX compliant subsystems) because most of their internal systems are at least as funtional, even if different from Unix, and so can maintain most of the Unix facade.
My point with top and GCC was to point out that internally, BeOS is not Unix, and it boots and manages itself differently than Unix, or a even a kernel traditional proper. Would you say Unix style job control is a part of your definition for a member of the UNIX family? Because if you try to compile BASH with GCC, it will die when it fails to comprehend the job control parts. Forget about native C compilers - unless you consider Metroworks native - that would be at least as native as it to Mac OS System (pre-Mach). That is to say, not at all native.
Is VMS a member of the UNIX family? No, it isn't, but it too can be treated as a Unix alike with the right functionality installed, and so can meet the Single Unix Spec and be POSIX complaint, just like Windows NT can be made to do. BeOS can't - it was brought close enough to offer a variety of functional GNU and Unixy tools, but unfortunately Be met its fate before madking it to the point where Government-level POSIX compliance was an issue, and the original sources weren't available enough that someone could legally (or apparently otherwise) hack it up to par.
Top in itself isn't important, but it was intended to point out that process control and scheduling in BeOS is a very different thing - instead of niceing processes from -20 to 20, there are multithread aware process groups, each group is killable, and each thread can range from 0 to 100. This can be used to host an externally convincing Unix simulation if tools are created specifically with that in mind (e.g. the much nicer top replacement that I had downloaded, an ifconfig, a bash that can access Be process controls), as the BeOS implementation is at least as functional - but it is still different. Conversely, Windows has a less functional scheduler, it can still simulate some of the behaivor of nice, but with much less granularity.
Like Window's weak scheduling, in some ways BeOS offered services that did not even approximate Unix functionality - notably the lack of multiuser infrastructure, and so only the thinnest facade of Unix was offered for that. Be doesn't internally manage itself like Unix! $ls -l would still show flags, user and group info, but only PC-DOS equivalent file permissions were grokked. (An interesting irony considering the post-Multics nomenclature of Unix.) Booting BeOS into Single-User Mode is not possible - Be doesn't boot like Unix! It offered a debugging mode and basic VGA in case your hardware driver was causing the boot issues, but nothing like SGI's PROM ofered. Note that on PowerPC, there was of course OpenFirmware like on Sun -
Practically speaking, sometime before 1985 or so with POSIX, and after Berkley first developing TCP for their Unix, there was no UNIX in any current sense of the term.
OK, so the PDP-11s and VAXes that I was working on at Berkeley in 1980 weren't UNIX. The software I wrote that shipped in some of the 4.1BSD tapes wasn't UNIX software.
Would you say Unix style job control is a part of your definition for a member of the UNIX family?
That would have to be "no", I'm afraid, because that was actually developed at Berkeley while I was an undergraduate there, and it didn't become a normal part of "Trademark UNIX" until well after the 1985 date you referred to, since AT&T used a quite different mechanism called "layers" based on the BLIT terminal model and what became Plan 9.
Is VMS a member of the UNIX family? No, it isn't, but it too can be treated as a Unix alike with the right functionality installed, and so can meet the Single Unix Spec and be POSIX complaint,
That sure sounds like you agree with me that having a subsystem that meets the POSIX specification is actually unrelated to whether the OS that hosts that subsystem is a member of the UNIX family. So, really, there's no point even bringing POSIX into the question... POSIX is a definition that's useful for writing and supporting portable software, but it doesn't fundamentally differ in kind from (for example) the "Software Tools" virtual operating system and other schemes for running software developed for UNIX on other operating systems.
as far as BeOS being Unix goes, it depends on which sense of Unix one means
Precisely:
One can easily treat BeOS as an early, pre-X11, pre-POSIX single-user Unix, as long as only externally presented interfaces are used
Are you familiar with the Turing Test? Consider the thought experiment Turing created: when you're deciding whether there's an intelligent enity on the other end of the teletype link, you don't have any way to examine that entity's internal design, all you have to go on are the externally visible interfaces. If you can't tell by using those interfaces whether the entity at the other end is a machine or a human, then you have to treat it as if it's intelligent... whether it's a human, a martian, a DEC VAX, a dog with an Internet account, a Turing machine, or a thousand literate monkeys reading responses from books called "how to be human".
UNIX is like Intelligence in this respect.
Since the only thing that you can interact with an operating system through are the externally presented interfaces, that's all you can use when you're talking about whether it's a member of the UNIX family. As in the Turing test, the internals of an operating system are irrelevant.
I would love to concede every point you made, and smugly bash Windows as inferior in every technical and practical sense.
I'm sorry, we seem to be having unrelated converstions here. It's not my intention in this discussion of UNIX to "smugly bash Windows", and I certainly wouldn't describe Windows NT (at least) as inferior in every technical sense. There's a lot of really interesting and useful solutions in the NT kernel. I'm also not equating (as you seem to think I am, unless I'm badly misunderstanding you) the concepts "is a member of the UNIX family" with "is good" or "is not a member of the UNIX family" with "is bad". There's quite a lot of operating systems and environments I've used that I consider very good indeed that aren't in any way UNIX-like, and quite a lot of members of the UNIX family that I've used that I'm absolutely sure you wouldn't consider "UNIX-like", based on the kinds of facilities you've said you expect to be in any UNIX system.
The only aspect of being a member of the UNIX family that's really relevant to being "good" or "bad" here is that it's a lot easier to get along with the creature or machine at the other end of a teletype link if one can find common ground with i
When you say "UNIX family", you mean a system that is capable of behaiving like what would now be called an archaic "UNIX", using the minimal interfaces that didn't change much before a more modern era of standardisation and advancement. For most people who now use "Unix", this is an obsolescent use - probably because we never used a historic "UNIX" productively as a stand alone system like you apparently have - today, most of the value of Unix is how it adheres to POSIX and such for the sake of inter-computer interaction. Most people today would only value UNIX for historical or legal purposes, to trace the direct lineage - not for the "UNIX" interfaces which have since been largely redefined, other than the basic HCI which is still available and basically the same. It seems to me, you assign value to UNIX as a consistent Human-Computer-Interface, meaning the HCI presented by UNIX in its heyday before POSIX, GNU, and UNIX(tm) was shuffled around. This somewhat unique, though very respectable stance you seem to be coming from can be causing confusion, if only for its rarity in today's "Brave GNU World".
For most people today, the term "Unix" is "Unix family" or "Unix-alike", which means a system capable of behaving according to modern POSIX and SUS definitions. BeOS cannot reach that, but it is close enough for somebody who only needs "UNIX" - it will fail to provide for modern Unix's needs. WinNT is farther by default, but can be brought into line to various degrees with different products. I propose as far as the defaults, this is because BeOS (by design) is much simpler, and there is no reason not to present that default - but then you can't get much further past the default. Here's a question - do you perceive that there is any way in which a system can pass as a modern Unix but not live up to your legacy UNIX? It seems you say WindowsNT doesn't, because it's Unix or UNIX is "slapped on the side". I would assume Mac OS X does. Does VMS? How about modern IBM mainframes? The ones that host Linux environments?
Now for you, the BeOS presents a useful UNIX HCI as you see it, and I have to agree with that, so it presents a useful "UNIX family" interface, and even API as long as you can stick to the C subset of the BeOS C++ API, and to straightfordward shell scripting. However, it does not present sufficient "Unix" HCIs, computer-computer interfaces, or sub-shell level programming APIs to be usefully considered "Unix family" to most modern perspectives.
(AKA UNIX, as opposed to a modern, POSIX multiuser post-UNIX Unix with X11 on top.)
Now for the other bit of confusion.
Windows NT can provide a "native" "Unix" API, with or without Interix as part of the solution. I don't know what kind of shell will made you happy, but Korn is at least as "UNIX" as BeOS BASH, in that neither one is CSH (assuming that CSH is historic UNIX enough to satify your needs). If Kor doesn't cut it, I am aware of BASH interfaces for DOS/Windows and WinNT as well.
Windows can present a telnet interface just like BeOS. BeOS is much easier to activate - it's hard to beat the checkbox interface. But then, for everyting that BeOS properly supports, it is much easier than Windows. There are also many things that BeOS supports through its partial POSIX systems that are much harder to use than wha
I'm not going to respond point for point here. I'm just going to take this comment and explain what I really do mean, because you're still focussing on implementation rather than design:
When you say "UNIX family", you mean a system that is capable of behaiving like what would now be called an archaic "UNIX", using the minimal interfaces that didn't change much before a more modern era of standardisation and advancement.
When I say "UNIX family", I am referring to those systems that follow the UNIX design. Because far from being "archaic", the design features I'm talking about are absolutely critical to the success of UNIX in areas where it's proven strong.
The two biggest areas where UNIX diverged from every other operating system before it, and most since, is the integration of a huge amount of functionality into a very small collection of fundamental concepts that could be applied over and over. What UNIX did to the computer world was really as revolutionary as Newtonian physics, or as the modern atomic theory of matter. Before UNIX, every separate object or interface in a system was unique, built by trial and error unto a library or a set of system calls that were used by that object. The system that inspired UNIX, Multics, brought some of these together but it was nowhere near as well integrated.
Thus simplicity and consistency are an important part of the UNIX model. This lets systems like BeOS or AmigaOS that have a simple and consistent (albeit different) design more easily fit into the UNIX family. I would place AmigaOS outside it because the basic operations have such different details, but BeOS lets you apply "UNIX physics" often enough that you can treat it as a UNIX system and most things "just work".
The core design features of UNIX are two basic concepts (two fundamental forces, if you like) and a very small collection of system calls (the atoms, or fundamental particles, perhaps) that brought them all together.
The first concept is that every object has a name in the same name space. UNIX was not completely successful in this, but it was very close.
The second concept is that every object is accessed through an opaque object (file descriptor) and that all file descriptors, whetehr created by opening a file, inherited from the parent process, or created through a system call like pipe(), behaved as similar as was possible for the object they were providing access to could manage.
The fact that in UNIX a socket is a file descriptor means that you can have a single program monitoring a variety of network connections, you can write a program that provides a network service without using a single network call, and run it from inetd, and it just works.
Windows NT and BeOS do not do this (unless this is different in Bone). This means that you can't "wrap" a service or daemon in NT or BeOS the way you can in a system that's a closer relative to UNIX. This means that you can't run a program from a superserver like inetd. This means that you have to write different code for operating on data if you're reading it from the network. This interface, the Berkeley socket, is a "unix family" interface in traditional UNIX systems and because it is network connections can be dealt with using "classical UNIX physics".
X11, though, is not a "UNIX family" interface. It's an OS-independent interface defined in terms of a library. How that library communicates with the window system is open-ended... the connection can be a TCP connection (which may or may not use the socket interface), a local connection (which may be through a UNIX domain socket or a VMS message port), and so on. To the application it's just a string in its own namespace (not the file system namespace) that the library can use to communicate with the display server.
There are UNIX-family window systems. In 8½, for example, the mouse and keyboard and window that a program uses can be accessed by opening files in "/dev". But because X11 doesn't fall inder "unix p
I am really not of the UNIX generation, so I guess I never really saw the simple consistency of UNIX in that light - as a desireable, working and useful in and of itself worldview. It seems I was always seeing efforts at moving away from UNIX, towards Windows, towards Linux. Maybe that's why I'm such a BeFanboy, instead of a Weenix-Weenie.
Yes, what I am looking for isn't UNIX, and might not even be Unix except for an accessible environment or emulation I can call, much like WINE - only when I need it, because some useful functionality hasn't yet been properly reimplemented natively. I might merely be looking for a post MacOS/Win95 WIMP desktop system, with a decent, fairly featureful but completely multithreaded nonblocking webbrowser, and a standard productivity suite. I would like UNIX style low-fat remote accessibility for the times some shit hits the fan - a nice OpenFirmware might even do the trick if GRUB can't be brought up to the task.
The name for what I wanted was BeOS, and it always felt over 89% there, until it got buried. Java for the Web, AbiWord almost Word compatible, NetPositive no Javascript yet, Mozilla almost feasible... no, it wasn't UNIX, it was just a nice smooth desktop that had plenty of promise. I'm not using Unix for UNIX, but for the glut of existing apps that can run on it - mostly GNU.
Just like I didn't really use IRIX for UNIX, but for the hardware that ran on it, and some of the fancy software that could take advantage of it. Maybe I could have gone a different way with different experiences, but for me, Unix is just one means to an end of an alternate desktop. The networking features were more of a luxury than a necessity for me, so more often than not the BeOS Network Kit fit the bill, and even if I broke it, it wouldn't take down the rest of my system. Because I don't trust BeOS networking as much as say OpenBSD, I really would rather avoid the BONE setup, and keep things segregated.
So you already had what you were looking for, and didn't need BeOS to be your UNIX. But I still need Haiku, or Blue-Eyed OS (what happened to it?) or maybe a different alternative Debian desktop, or Yellowtab or Zeta to be my BeOS.
Thanks for clarifying your posts. It was informative, and only consumed huge chunks of my time. Thanks for spending yours as well.
Oh, and also for the sockpuppets vivisecting meatpuppets, and the literate daemon-king. It much better than going outdoors.