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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."

28 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting Review by Arghdee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. 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.

  2. Deluxe Edition? by onion2k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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..

    --
    http://twitter.com/onion2k
  3. Good by kahei · · Score: 3, Insightful


    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.

    --
    Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
    1. Re:Good by drsmithy · · Score: 3, Insightful
      The forward thinking population of /. will now mock it because:

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

    2. Re:Good by haggar · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Sigged!
    3. 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...

      --
      multifariam.net -- yet another nerd blog
  4. Re:Hobbyist OS ? by dysprosia · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

  5. 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.

  6. Re:Such a waste... by ssj_195 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:1999 by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Funny

    1970 called, they want Linux back

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

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  8. 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.

    1. Re:BeOS is not Linux by Aluminum+Tuesday · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "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.

    2. Re:BeOS is not Linux by wiit_rabit · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:BeOS is not Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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'.

  9. 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.

  10. Re:Why do I want this? by kahei · · Score: 4, Interesting


    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.

    --
    Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
  11. "In Depth"... by Mike+Connell · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    --
    Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
    1. Re:"In Depth"... by i-neo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:"In Depth"... by Aluminum+Tuesday · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. Re:Hobbyist OS ? by tha_mink · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    You'll have that sometimes...
  15. Re:Why do I want this? by tomstdenis · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    You mean like a VCR?

    Hehehe, sorry.

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  16. 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

    --
    TechColumnist.com -- http://www.techcolumnist.com
    Looking for avid moderators and posters that want to contribute!
  17. Re:Be, A Member Of An Elite Group by blueZhift · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    --
    To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
  18. 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.

  19. 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.

    --
    R.Mo