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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
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
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
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They used to have a screenshots page. It seems to have been pulled or I would have included it. IIRC osdir.com has screenshots of a beta release (RC3?).
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
linky to screenshots.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
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
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.
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
whoa. be switched to intel? next you're going to tell me app... *head explodes*
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
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 ...)
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.
You could always start your own site if you don't want people to bitch about the poor editing. So here, take this nice cup of shut the fuck up and chug it.
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.phpOnce 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.
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.
Heck a PS/2 port would be nice
...
It's on the back next to the USB port
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
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!
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
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.)
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. "
The memory limit is gone. Whereas on R5 it would just ignore anything above 1 GB, Zeta will use it all.
They do have the kernel source. This is not a patch, the actual problem was fixed. It will be interesting to see, as I've heard good word about the kernel Be was using in the end but never got released. This should be it.
I just can't wait to dual boot OS X and Zeta on the same machine. What a strange world we live in!
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.
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.