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."

Comments

Interesting Review

[Arghdee]

However, I noticed a few niggles.. The fact that minor oversights like videos being image/jpeg instead of video/mpeg exist suggest more testing is needed. I would expect more of a major version release, even if it is only Version 1. (Being that it is based off a relatively well aged code base) I really do hope this does succeed - I would hate to see the developers waste their hard work.

Re:Interesting Review

[GauteL]

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.

Deluxe Edition?

[onion2k]

From the Zeta FAQs:

"The Home Edition and Developer Edition don't have all the applications the Deluxe Edition does."

That's fine, I just want to poke about with the OS and see if I want to go further.. Developer edition will be fine thanks.

Pop to the Shop section.. Alas, only the bloated Deluxe edition with 3Gb of apps I'll never look at is for sale.

Back to *nix..

Re:Deluxe Edition?

[Aluminum Tuesday]

My first introduction to BeOS was a live CD of BeOS R4.5, which was distributed on a magazine's cover CD for the purpose of giving people a taste of BeOS and the chance to see if it'd run on their machines. I suspect they gained a number of customers from that live CD (me included), and I also suspect YellowTAB could benefit similarly.

Good

[kahei]

Look, a faint dim spark that still lights the way toward the wondrous land of OSes that are not encumbered with the baggage of Unix and Windows.

The forward thinking population of /. will now mock it because:

* It's old.
* It's not Linux or OSX.
* It's not free.

They will ignore the fact that:

* Much of what OSX has just started to do, in terms of usability, BeOS explored all the way back then.
* It's really easy to develop fast GUI apps for.
* And to develop for in general.
* Diversity is good, and a billion people writing GNU-style apps for Linux is not diversity.

In summary, I -- hey! Get out of my yard! Damn kids these days.

Re:Good

[drsmithy]

The forward thinking population of /. will now mock it because:

The only reason I will mock it is because it isn't multiuser.

Re:Good

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Look, a faint dim spark that still lights the way toward the wondrous land of OSes that are not encumbered with the baggage of Unix and Windows.

An OS that's not encumbered by the baggage of Unix or Windows is an OS that:

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.

3 - can't run any of the good, and not-so-good software written on any OS for the last 30 years.

4 - Re-implements design flaws that have been already been purged out of Unix or Windows (well, just Unix)

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.

Re:Good

[jedigeek]

Actually, a lot of the things in BeOS had been copied from what Apple started in the 80s. And what do you mean by "what OSX has just started to do, in terms of usability"? os x has been basically the same (although it has clearly evolved) for nearly 5 years now. I'm just wondering: have you even used a mac?

If you take time to read the badly written review on OS News, you'll notice that Yellow Tab seem to have totally derailed what made BeOS good, and made a bizarre version of BeOS mangled with terrible open source fonts, icons and themes. And it costs more than an OEM copy of Windows. Consider that 100% of consumer peripherals support Windows, and Windows has a simple UI that nearly everyone finds easy to use, Zeta pretty much fails it on every account. I don't really understand the argument of using BeOS over Windows, other than a lot of noise created by disgruntled anti-Microsoft slashdot posters. What does it have going for it that the end-user cares about at all? Absolutely nothing.

Re:Good

[haggar]

The effort invested in BeOS is worthwile, because BeOS doesn't feel anything like Linux or Windows. It's the most respnsive desktop OS I know, with it's great emphasis on multithreading and it's near-realtime scheduling (but not completely realtime - it's tweaked for responsiveness, not hard-realtime).

I have heard and read arguments like yours, and without a single exception, they came from people who did not use BeOS (booting it up is not using it). Those who used BeOS apps for at least a few hours, understand why BeOS is worth the effort.

The other remark I would make, is: having people experienced in a certain area/product is useful, but sometimes it's much better to take the leap into the new area, instead of regurgitating old ideas and contents. That's the only way to progress. Otherwise, we would still use (very advanced perhaps) core memory and valves in our computers today. At the advent of semiconductors, valves were a really mature technology, but semis were so much better that the choice was clear, at least for computers. Valves are still in use today (as will UNIX be) because they offer unparalleled performance in high-power high-frequency applications.

Re:Good

[AnObfuscator]

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...

Re:Good

[ltbarcly]

I have heard and read arguments like yours, and without a single exception, they came from people who did not use BeOS (booting it up is not using it).

Every time I've heard someone say turds aren't good to eat, it's been someone who doesn't even eat turds (tasting it and spitting it out isn't eating it).

And now hopefully you see why you are wrong.

I would love to try it

[castlec]

Unfortunately, the price is just too high to justify. The effort required to customize a linux installation is well worth 99 eur in my opinion. If they survive, I may try them in the future but not right now.

Re:I would love to try it

[peterih]

Then you should just wait for haiku-os to become useable. As I understand it is supposed to be free.

Re:Hobbyist OS ?

[dysprosia]

Well, BeOS's target was always in high-end multimedia, and old boxes aren't always the best for that sort of thing, regardless of OS...

They have been selling the beta since about a year

[yormas]

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.

Re:Such a waste...

[ssj_195]

I'm not sure if this applies to Zeta or not, but to make a point about this argument that crops up whenever someone forks a project or appears to re-tread old ground: Programmers are not interchangeable, especially if they are programming for free, and in their spare time. Such programmers will tackle the projects that interest them, and if deprived of such projects, may well opt to not tackle anything at all rather than help with an (to them) uninteresting project.

Re:1999

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

1970 called, they want Linux back

Given that Linus Torvalds was born on December 28, 1969, I'd say he was precocious...

BeOS is not Linux

[Aluminum Tuesday]

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.

Re:BeOS is not Linux

[Aluminum Tuesday]

"I'll just hack together a distro"

And for media pros without the skill, time or inclination to do that, here's BeOS! Ready-made for what they need. Understand?

And maybe BeOS was offering this stuff before the others were; did you think of that? Maybe there's an established user base of people who want to keep using the OS they're used to, rather than switch to one you'd like to see them using. Maybe they don't like your choice of OS, and maybe they wouldn't like the one you'd put together for them.

Maybe Be and YellowTAB "get it" in the exact way that you don't.

Re:BeOS is not Linux

[wiit_rabit]

I think Roscoe has probably never used BeOS, much less Zeta. Although I will sound like a fanboy of BeOS (or Zeta), I encourage everyone to experience this OS. Other posts and the article talk about low latency, but you need see the OS first hand to understand what this really means. Secondly, with millions of PII '440BX' or similar based systems out there being tossed in the trash pile for no good reason other than they won't run XP very well, they should sing running this OS.

Re:BeOS is not Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

First, let me say I have a dual 133MHz BeBox at home and used to think it was a wonderful system. So I'm not an anti-BeOS zealot.

But exactly what apps are these media pros using on BeOS? The OS can be designed for that kind of work as much as you want, but without the apps to take advantage of it. Correct me if things have changed, but what replacement would any 'media pro' have for any of Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro, Shake, Motion, Logic, Cubase, DVD Studio Pro etc etc? Because those are the apps all the media pros I know of use.

It's nice that BeOS has a fast system-wide search with live queries, and it's nice that it had it before other systems (I remember using it back in 96 or so). But most 'media pros' don't spend all day searching for files.

No matter how great the OS is, no matter how great it is at running on an old machine, it's the apps that matter. Sad, but true.

I might consider installing it on an old machine for my dad who surfs and does nothing much more. But it'd be useless for any 'media pros'.

Re:BeOS is not Linux

[paulbd]

All major desktop OSes are more than fast enough to handle multimedia.

That depends on your definition of multimedia. There is no (mainstream) Linux distribution that, "out of the box" is fast enough to handle professional audio requirements. The fact that Linux can handle such things when patched is because of the great work of people like Ingo Molnar. Yes, the stock 2.6.12 kernel is now better than any Windows release to date in this area. But its still not possible to get the performance of OS X without running a patched kernel.

Why do I want this?

[TedRiot]

I admit that I'm totally ignorant of BeOS - all I know about it is the name.

Who is this for and what kind of things are they supposed to do with it? What does it offer that current operating systems with lots of applications don't offer? From the GUI orientation of the article I suppose this is not for some specific server need.

Variety is good, but what (good) variety does this bring?

Re:Why do I want this?

[kahei]

It's main benefits are:

Very good with all things video
Fast, especially at GUI tasks
Very good filesystem, such that you can define a folder as 'everything in /etc that is less than 5 days old and is a sound file'
Easy to write for
SVG graphics! Okay, not really a solid benefit but a cool technology; graphics are vectors and therefore zoom and scale as you would expect.

It was designed to be an efficient single-user graphical OS, specially for use in multimedia (ie they couldn't think of any other niche for it). As a result it's much faster than Unix/Linux and much cleaner and freindlier than Windows for doing GUI tasks and as a platform for video codecs.

In terms of apps, the big open source projects (firefox, vim etc) are all there, but there's precious little else.

The main DISadvantage is that nobody uses it and there's not the slightest chance that anybody ever will :) However, it is more comfortable and responsive to use than any other OS I can think of -- a bit like using NeXT, in fact, if anyone remembers those.

Re:Why do I want this?

[Aluminum Tuesday]

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.

Re:Why do I want this?

[tomstdenis]

"It's a single-user, low-latency media workstation"

You mean like a VCR?

Hehehe, sorry.

Tom

Re:Good luck, but ...

[Aluminum Tuesday]

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.

Re:1999

[Anonymous Coward]

1996 called....they want their joke back.

Re:Such a waste...

[Aluminum Tuesday]

And doesn't it suck to live on a planet with chefs putting effort into new and exciting fish recipes when they could be cooking you a tastier hot dog?

Re:Zata as download image

[Aluminum Tuesday]

It's actually easier than that - if you give them some money, they'll mail it out to you on a physical disc. They even throw in a manual so morons who can't even get the OS' name right ("Zata"?) are at least in with a chance of understanding what it's about.

I can understand you wanting to pirate from big faceless corporations, but geez: YellowTAB is a really small and specialised company. If you like their stuff, buy it.

"In Depth"...

[Mike Connell]

For the MTV generation maybe, but I didn't see a great deal of depth there: filesystems? 3D support? network stack quality? hardware coverage? It looked a lot more like "I installed some CD and this is what happened" to me.

Not to mention that a review containing "Firefox 1.0.3 requires no introduction, however, a few notes on it are justified: fast & stable. I do not know what the yT guys and girls have done, but they made Firefox on BeOS stable and usable. And that's a great achievement." strikes me as a little suspect. Is Firefox not normally fast and stable, or is the reviewer really stuck for good things to say about Zeta?

Re:"In Depth"...

[i-neo]

I think the reviewer is probably a former BeOS user. He used to have problems with programs such as Firefox (display bugs).
This comment is interesting for people like me who used BeOS before, but stopped because of the lack of support of the open source comunity.

However I agree this is not an in-depth review, just the experience of a user.

As review are often biased, I prefer to know what the review did or experienced rather than having a lot of numbers and charts that often don't mean anything since you may have a lot of different hardware configuration.

What I can say about BeOS is that it was really good (back in the 2000) for realtime audio compositing, with really low latency. Even with my low-end computer, I managed to get good multimedia performance.

I think it is worth trying, just to feel/know that a system can be/behave differently with another OS, even on the same hardware.

Re:"In Depth"...

[Aluminum Tuesday]

Firefox used to suck on BeOS; it was sluggish and crashed if you looked at it the wrong way. Obviously yT has fixed it.

Haiku OS - BeOS clone

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hobbyist OS ?

[tha_mink]

The sad part is that you can hardly run it on an old box. To run it properly you need at least a good video card (which I never spent much on).

Actually, the sad part is that you have to pay out the heinie (~$114 USD I think) for it. I give YellowTab props for picking up the project but damn...I can buy Windows XP Pro for $85 USD.

screenshots

[doubleshot]

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

New hardware

[gilesjuk]

I would have liked to have seen the review done on modern hardware. Large SATA hard disk, dual core or hyper-threaded CPU, Nforce chipset, PCI express graphics etc..

It's popularity will be severely limited if it doesn't support as much hardware as Linux, never mind Windows.

99 euro?

[Zedrick]

"For only 99,- Euro, a bargain."

Even compared to FreeBSD or how much a Linux distro would cost me?

Sounds nice, but for 99 euro I would at least want a time limited installation to try out, before taking out my VISA.

Re:99 euro?

[crazymandias]

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.

Re:Be, A Member Of An Elite Group

[blueZhift]

Oh and let's not forget about OS/2! No really, please don't forget about OS/2...

So?

[Willeh]

While it's a nice thing to have for the former BEos enthusiast, the rest of the world shrugs and says "So?" I think that with the pool of apps ported to all platforms (Firefox, VLC, Thunderbird et al) A modern platform has to have some significant advantages to stand out.

I just don't think that having a Spotlight(c) like functionality in the OS is much of a selling point, neither is "Good video editing" capabilities. For all i(and everybody else) know it's just another video editing application, when in the rest of the OS world there's already plenty to satisfy the budding Spielberg or (god forbid) Uwe Boll. It's just an example to illustrate the lack of REAL tangible selling points this OS has. Any of the real BEos fans want to educate a sceptic with some real advantages instead of that subjective "It's just a better experience for ${APPLICATION}" garbage you hear in every platform discussion?

Re:OMG

[Aluminum Tuesday]

Because we all know an OS lives and dies by its GUI glitz, right?

Re:Zata as download image

[iibagod]

I want an OS that does what I want. I haven't found one that completely fills my needs. I have no agenda either way towards free/non-free. I don't want to get screwed out of my money because I bought an OS that didn't live up to my standards (Again). I am a potential customer, and may end up buying it (highly unlikely at this point), but as long as there exists little to no return policies for software (but but you could have copied it and sent it out over the internet!), then I find a way to try it if I feel the need.

Let's just say I'm not buying it or trying it and leave it at that, shall we? Or would you like the last word?

Re:Be, A Member Of An Elite Group

[BlowChunx]

...errr, I get passionate about my wife, not an operating system.

The OS is a tool. In that light, it's like getting passionate about a cordless drill. And you need to get out more.

A little review of Zeta/some issues I've noticed

[timecop]

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)

Re:Zata as download image

[Aluminum Tuesday]

"I want an OS that does what I want."

Sounds good to me. Here's hoping YellowTAB releases a live CD demo of Zeta, like Be did with BeOS R4.5.

Much as I hate to say it...

[argent]

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.

Boot time MAY be relevant, but...

[argent]

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.

Boot Time

[R.Mo_Robert]

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.

Novel hobbyist toy

[ehaggis]

Although I like the look and concept of Zeta, where does it fit into the OS ecosystem? Unfortunately it does not. Zeta may be doomed to a novel hobby OS. It has several disadvantages in competing with other operating systems. (Assuming it is competing.)
1. Look and Feel - OSX hands down is better. Dare I say, even Windows XP is better?
2. Drivers, Support, Compatibility - Windows XP
3. Cost - Linux
4. Stability - Linux, OSX
5. Security - I'll give Zeta this category, only because there would only be a few niche virus writers / crackers who would even attempt compromising a specialized system like this.
6. Interoperability - OSX and Linux are better

I am glad to see someone attempting to compete (assuming they are competing) on the desktop, but to succeed they will need a contemporary OS, not a circa 2001 OS.

Naming Issues

[magerquark.de]

May I suggest the readers to read about MY (negative) experiences I had with this Zeta-OS?:

http://tinyurl.com/dx2ol

Thanks
Uwe