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yellowTAB's Zeta 1.0 Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the obscurantism dept.

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."

10 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. They have been selling the beta since about a year by yormas · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. BeOS is not Linux by Aluminum+Tuesday · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Good luck, but ... by Aluminum+Tuesday · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Why do I want this? by Aluminum+Tuesday · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Haiku OS - BeOS clone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Interesting Review by GauteL · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  7. screenshots by doubleshot · · Score: 3, Informative

    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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  8. Re:Good by AnObfuscator · · Score: 3, Informative
    1 - does not take advantage of decades of POSIX normalisation, made by hundreds of thousands of high-level developers and designers.

    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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  9. Boot time MAY be relevant, but... by argent · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  10. Boot Time by R.Mo_Robert · · Score: 3, Informative
    Booting is a matter of, say, 15 seconds, completely blowing away any Linux, Windows or OS X install. 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).

    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.

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