Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
If this thing is actually based on BeOS then by looking at the support for Xircom PCMCIA cards I'd say it was an early version 5.0 source:
PCMCIA Communication Cards
Maybe I'm blind, but I don't see a single 32-bit CardBus adapater in there.
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
Some people like to support the underdog. I have purchased the Release Candidate of Zeta, knowing more than likely that I'd be throwing money away. I think of it more like a donation, to ensure that an alternative to Windows and Linux continues surviving. Bernd seems to be managing the company quite well, so it looks like yellowTab just might make it. Once they have the 70 employees Bernd has been talking about, expect a full on revival of BeOS (awaken from the dead :-).
Plus, Haiku is getting closer, so by supporting the successor to BeOS, I am indirectly supporting Haiku. By showing that there is money to be made with BeOS, developers are more than likely to start offering software for another viable OS.
Revolution = Evolution
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.
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!
Well the people who are like me for example and im not alone. I have been wanting a fast, efficient stable OS for ages but the closest thing ive come to contact with so far is QNX and BeOS. Ill bet there are millions of users who are fed up with Windows XP and just want to surf and play around. They arent enough interested in computers to try linux because what they really want is to play with the apps, not the OS.
I think Zeta should work as hard as possible to get Zeta OS bundled with computers. Start a riot about dual booting, team up with Linspire, anything to get attention. If they are visible people will get curious and once they see how fast a computer really are without all the bloat most users will never look back.
HTTP/1.1 400
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
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?
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.