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yellowTAB's Zeta 1.0 Reviewed
Provataki writes "OSNews' Thom Holwerda posted the first in-depth review of the recently released Zeta 1.0. He goes over installation, impressions, usage, application and hardware support, BFS queries and concludes that yellowTAB's Zeta is the deserving future of BeOS; plus, it's the only one based on the original source code by Be, Inc."
I have an Abit KT7A-Raid Motherboard with the latest firmware...
First Problem
If I try to install on a Maxtor 120GB harddrive, it says "Could not determine suitable harddisk drive". This happens whether I'm on the UDMA66 channels or the faster HPT370 ATA-100 Channels. But if I drop in a 5GB Maxtor drive, it works but only on the slower channels. There was a replacement IDE driver for BeOS 5 but I haven't tried to see if it'll work with Zeta. With BeOS you could install this on the slower channels and switch to the faster.
http://www.bebits.com/app/2625
But it doesn't help me with installing on the Maxtor 120GB since I can't get installed on any channels to apply the patch.
Second problem
Network card not detected: SMC 1255TX-PF (Accton EN-1216 Chipset).
I'm keeping an eye open for my old SMC 1244 with a Realtec chipset to see if it works. I know BeOS 5 worked with the SMC 1244. I thought it did with the SMC1255 as well, but perhaps I'm wrong.
Mugsy
On german teleshopping Zeta has been sold for more than a year - thought only a beta version. Pretty expensive but hailed as virus free. And they always say: "You can do everything with Zeta that you can do with WindowsXP" Yeah sure - tell that your kid when he tries to install any game.
There seems to be some confusion here as to what BeOS actually is - it's not just a hobby OS or a Linux clone, but a full-featured media-centric OS designed for music and video production. It's fundamentally different to Linux and other Unixes: it's designed to be low latency rather than to have a network-aware window system and multi-user capabilities. It was designed from the start to be a desktop OS - when everyone else was going multi-user, Be stayed single user and concentrated on its multimedia specialisation. It's worth a look, and I hope they do a demo live CD the same way that Be did for R4.5. Otherwise most of you non-pirates are never going to see how cool it is.
Check out bebits.com for BeOS native software, including the Firefox browser you probably used to post that message.
If it survives (and here's hoping), it'll be because its specialised and does what it does very well. Video editing on a 300MHz PC running BeOS 5 Pro was a lot less painful than you might think. I hope they keep that up.
It's a single-user, low-latency media workstation OS for audio/video production. It does pretty much everything you can do with media on Mac OS X or Windows XP - but it does it faster and in a way that BeOS fans will be used to and comfortable with.
The BeOS clone Haiku also made some nice progress during the last months. Most kits do work and are in alpha or beta stage. There are vmware and vpc images to try out on philipp schmid's blog and also some screenshots.
It seems to me from reading the article that the image/jpeg problem is only there when transfering videos from a digital camera, not when downloading films from the Internet.
I can only assume that the application expects a still picure camera to feed it still pictures and have some glitches in support for the limited video features of these cameras.
This makes the glich a little less important.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?re lease=223&slide=1&title=zeta+os+deluxe+edition+scr eenshots
here are a few screenshots for your viewing enjoyment
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I also downloaded (pirated, whatever) for evaluation a copy of Zeta 1.0. I was interested in just testing it on a old celeron 700 box with 256meg memory, intel 810 chipset (onboard graphics) and a 20gb hdd.
First, I did a test install inside a pirated VMWare 5.0 Workstation. Installer loaded without a problem, using something that looked like a 8bit vesa graphics mode. No problem, I thought, this is VMWare and it's unlikely they would have a driver for VMWAare's svga adapter. About 5 minutes into the install, the mouse locked up (VMWare mouse), and got stuck in upper left corner of the screen, unmoving.
Here's where my problems started. While installer was fairly usable from a keyboard (usual things like tab, space, enter, etc could be used to navigate the simplistic dialogs), once the install was done and I was presented with what I assume was a control panel for completing setting the system up, I was stuck.
The mouse was still in upper-left corner, not moving, and no amount of pressing tab, ctrltab, alt-tab, or trying to get focus to move off the control panel app into anything else did anything useful. I cursed and powered down the emulator, and put the same zeta cdrom into the celeron 700 i was talking about earlier.
Installation on a real machine was about as fast as inside emulation. Seems like the real bottleneck here is disk access, and not CPU. Some of the small files took forever to copy. Not knowing the filesystem on the cdrom (it looked like a custom 2-session (maybe?) disk, with only a small boot session), I couldn't tell how the install files were stored. Anyway, a bit of improvement could happen there in the installer.
Mouse didn't die on the celeron, so I'm writing off the odd mouse behaviour to something VMWare related. After install, I rebooted the celeron and yes, Zeta takes a 15-30 seconds to boot. Sure, whatever, my Windows 2003 Standard (pirated) install on my 2.2ghz p4m laptop with 1gb ram takes maybe 10 seconds to come out of hibernation.
After reboot, i was still presented with the same 8-bit vesa video color. This was on a i810 graphics adapter! Even LINUX of all things supports such old equipment. Not Zeta. No 16-bit color or resolution > 640x480 for me.
TO summarize my report here, the following things I'd like to see happen with Zeta before it becomes more usable:
1) Accessibility (keyboard/otherwise) in installer and the main os/apps.
2) DRIVERS! (WTF @ not supporting i810 graphics in 2005)
Then you should just wait for haiku-os to become useable. As I understand it is supposed to be free.
2 - does not take advantage of the huge existing base of developers who know the POSIX and Windows API inside and out the world over.
That's just.. wrong. BeOS *is* Posix compliant. Always was. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
3 - can't run any of the good, and not-so-good software written on any OS for the last 30 years.as to "can't run software" arguement, well, a similar argument can be made for Linux or even OS X.
4 - Re-implements design flaws that have been already been purged out of Unix or Windows (well, just Unix)Example?
Personally, I wish they didn't waste their time reinventing the wheel. Other designers have already been there, and while there's a lot to say about the heavy legacy of various existing designs, they work and have billions of man/hours put into them.Personally, I am glad to see that people are willing to continue exploring alternative UI designs, new FS's, etc. Reinventing the Wheel has a LOT of benefits -- faster algorithms, new programming technique, and so on. More ideas being tested is never a bad thing, no matter how many "man-hours" have been invested in the "old way".
Also, I'd like to point out that Apple, Google, and MS are "reinventing the wheel" in desktop search, since BeOS had this 10 years ago. BeOS also had true SMP back before MacOS even had multithreading. BeOS is *still* one of the most innovative OS designs around, and I'm thrilled to know that it's development is being continued.
on the other hand, I don't think Zeta can make a go of it -- unless they start distributing it for free. Alas, they don't seem to want to do this...
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Much as I hate to say something nice about Linux, I think you're relying too much on rumor and faulty memory.
BeOS was usable on the desktop when Linux was just a little toy [...]
Word Perfect for Linux, one of the early commercial desktop applications for Linux, came out in 1996.
In 1996 BeOS was still demoware.
The short boottime is something that has always been a huge selling point for the Be to me, as I hate slow-booting operating systems (luckily OS X has good sleep/wake functionality, else it would be such a pain to use).
Boot time can actually be relevant... but you have to know what it means. By itself it's only an issue if it extends into mainframe-class hour-long melodramas, because rebooting the computer is not something you should need to do all that often.
% uptime
9:18AM up 702 days...
% uptime
7:18AM up 217 days...
% uptime
9:18AM up 50 days...
% uptime
9:18AM up 73 days...
Windows "boots fast" because it puts up the login dialog as soon as the graphics subsystem has initialised far enough to display it, and because it preloads a lot of the files it uses during boot. These tricks provide an illusion of performance but don't actually do anything to make the system run any better while you're actually using it.
BeOS has a big advantage over Windows NT and UNIX-based systems like Linux and Mac OS X. It doesn't actually have a lot to do during the boot process... there's no multi-user support and very little background processing, most of what it's doing is loading drivers and starting the desktop. And it's a relatively lightweight desktop, more like Windowmaker than Gnome or KDE.
This is laudable, for a dedicated desktop OS, but it does mean that "boot time" isn't really a useful measurement of overall performance. It's more akin to "login time" on Windows or UNIX/OSX.
Umm, 15 seconds might blow away my Windows XP and Ubuntu box, but it is certainly pretty close to my new iMac G5. I haven't timed it, but it is surprisingly fast. This author makes it seem like OS X boots SO slow (I have seen slow-booting Macs: OS 9 and OS X on G3 iBooks, but, um, let's stick to technology from this decade if you're complaining about boot times, because I bet he's not testing on a comparable PC ... though he does mention a PII, but also mentions faster computers) and that using sleep/wake is the only way he can stand it.
R.Mo
This is where you need to use some proactive piracy buddy. Download the full package via torrent. http://isohunt.com/download.php?mode=bt&id=3879079
and buy it if you think it's cool.
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