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Ars Technica on Zeta 1.0
Quantrell writes "Ars Technica has posted an extremely in-depth review of Zeta 1.0 (/.
saw another shorter review a month ago, but this new one is worth a look by anyone into things Be). Looking at the state of the OS more closely, it looks like it has a long way
to go, maybe too long. Also, the author (rightly, IMO) raises the issue of whether or not Zeta will see success in the face of open source projects like
Haiku. Is there anything but a hobby going on here?"
There has been some speculation in the past that yellowTab does not have legal access, if any access at all, to the BeOS source code. They apparently wouldn't confirm nor deny that when asked. Has the situation changed recently? Have they made a final statement about their possession of said source code?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Can we hear from someone who has used a BeOS or derivative for more than the 1 week, I'll-use-it then-write-a-review-about-it period? While I'm as willing as the next guy to try out a new OS, I'm not going to play early adopter potentially burn up a perfectly good machine with an install that renders it only marginally usable.
#include "humorous_pop_culture_reference.h"
What chance do operating systems like BEOS stand against Mac and Windows? What advantages are there to using BEOS?
...but then I realized it was Ars on Zeta 1.0 and not Ars on Zeta-Jones 1.0, which promised to be much more insightful and interesting. I really like a nice Ars.
Hobby or not, it succedes in other areas. Like many small OS's it has built a strong community, a group of people sharing a common interest. During my time looking after Menuet ( www.menuetos.org ) at times the 'family' aspects were almost as much fun as the technology. It's probably true here too.
Mike.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
The company decided to switch to a software-only strategy and ported BeOS to the Macintosh platform. There were other reasons to justify this switch: it was clear that Apple was always going to be able to ship the latest PowerPC hardware faster than Be, Inc. could
Contrast with...
Apple decided to switch...and ported MacOS to the Intel platform. There were other reasons to justify this switch: it was clear that Intel was always going to be able to ship the latest CPU hardware faster than IBM, Inc. could
Now, you'll notice I removed the words "software-only" from my conversion. Does that mean something? I'm doubtful, but I thought the parallels were interesting. At one time it appeared that Apple might sadly go the way of Be; that is thankfully no longer the case.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
"No, Zeta is NOT as stable as Linux,OSX or Windows or BSD, but it is WAAAAAYYYY stabler and more functional than Haiku that moves like a snail in its development targets."
How exactly are you measuring the stability of Zeta versus the other operating systems you mentioned? I used BeOS for years, and never ran into any sort of stability problems with it.
Now, I have not used Zeta, so I cannot comment on its current state, but considering it is based on the very solid BeOS, I can only imagine that it is fairly solid as well.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
There has been some speculation in the past that yellowTab does not have legal access, if any access at all, to the BeOS source code. They apparently wouldn't confirm nor deny that when asked. Has the situation changed recently? Have they made a final statement about their possession of said source code?
The last time I raised this question, someone pointed out that they're claiming to have overcome the 1GB limitation, which to some at least seems to indicate that they have control of the kernels source.
But I've not seen anything official from Zeta to indicate this. Just BeOS fanboys...
Why do open source advocates ask this question? Do you have a problem with people having a broader choice?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
"Is there anything but a hobby going on here?""
Isn't the majority of OSS a "scratch an itch" hobby?
Mrs. OSNews: Can you expand on your statement? Were these hardware incompatibilities? An inability to run existing BeOS applications? What about the bugs? Were they with the core utilities, or with the kernel, or with the drivers, or what?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
That's interesting.
It is too bad that they do not come right out and state whether or not they have legal access to the source code of the product they're selling, assuming they could even legally say that. It would put a lot of minds at ease to know that software from them is legitimate, and can be used without running into legal problems.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Do you ask Microsoft to see their secret contracts with SCO, their arrangements with Sun, IBM, Apple and others for world domination ??
That legal "question" is becoming a real troll with all the bells and whistles.
Do you really think that could work this way?
Wouldn't they have been sued by now by the legal owners of the code (Palm?) if they did not have access to it?
His username speaks volumes. 'nuff said. :-)
--S
-- sigs cause cancer.
That was only to illustrate the fact that no company is supposed to do business on illegal stuff, yet they have no reason to give you proof of that, you are supposed to assume they are.
And if they aren't, well it's up to DOJ and friends.
That whole topic is overrated, and just kept artificially alive mainly because some ppl in the "community" think they are important enough that they have the right to know about deals that aren't supposed to be made public.
First of all, I am not on osnews anymore.
Secondly, Zeta has hardware incompatibilities with hardware that is supposedly *supports*. I have 3 major problems with my laptop (all using chipsets that are supposedly supported), my Savage4 3D card on my other PC (also supposedly supported) and the IDE disk on my Duron PC (Zeta can't partition it).
Yes, I am in talks with yellowtab to fix the problems. They are currently working actively for them, and I thank them for it. However, some of the bugs did not exist in the 1.0-beta while they appeared in 1.0 (like an SMP bug that hits my 1-cpu laptop).
So, as I said above, yes, Zeta has its problems. But it is WAY more usable than Haiku. That was the point, not if Zeta has bugs or not. All OSes have bugs. It's just that Haiku is not even comprable, neither I believe it will ever be. Haiku will never reach "user usability quality status" because only Axel works seriously on it.
BeUnited is the standards body only, the actual site for the Haiku Operating System is here:
Haiku
As I have commented previously, YellowTab is going about this the wrong way. They seem to be trying to market this as a general purpose desktop, but that is a hard market to break in to with incredibly strong established competitors (MS, Apple) and a generally conservative (i.e. not open to drastic change) base of potential desktop customers.
The low system specs and mulitmedia capabilities scream for this to be put into a TV-set-top box like a DVR or even a game console. The low system requirements might even be good on appliances, medical imaging, kiosks, and ATMs. I think they should be trying to sell their stuff to Sony, Panasonic, Scientific-Atlanta, Deibold, etc instead of trying to break into desktops. The desktop market is just a loosing proposition for them.
...on Amigas.
Seriously, the gist of TFA's conclusion is that Zeta's usefulness will only be proven by porting Linux software to it.
I hate to sound like David Spade, but I would be excited by this because...?
I had an early PowerPC Mac in the late 90s and was excited by the prospect of running BeOS on it... until Be announced that their binaries were platform specific, which essentially meant they'd have to decide on one architecture or another.
As it stands right now, even the reviewer is pointing out that all the useful multimedia software is *nix ports (which I'm betting are not optimized to Zeta's kernel).
Kudos to Be for making a lightweight OS. Unfortunately, at the same time Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds were figuring out that their respective successes would come from pulling a Microsoft and putting a GUI to a vastly popular, proven CLI environment and getting to keep the multitudes of software already designed for UNIX.
Had Apple gone with Be, I think it would have lasted about three years before going tits-up. Five years of Classic compatibility ensured OS X's survival, and I strongly doubt Apple could have made BeOS and Classic coexist as peacefully without compromising one or both (witness Vista's back-and-forth on evolution v. backwards compatibility).
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
No?
WWW
If they're better for something than the open source alternatives, have at it. If they're enough better for something to draw people away from open source alternatives that don't cost anything, then they're doing something right and they deserve to make a bit of money.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
One of the primary tenants of BeBox/BeOS was multiprocessor.
How can this be an in-depth review if they don't check it out on a multiprocessor system?
Also does it support hyperthreading?
A recent German issue of c't magazine says, that YellowTab already owns _ALL_ rights of the source code.
Regards,
Dennis B. Schramm
Sigs suck!
I don't get this. He wasn't asking YellowTab, but rather the highly knowledgeable slashdot crowd. Clearly, an answer is forthcoming.
(The problem with single user is with support for remote applications, e.g. running a thin client server or trying to remote applications via a web server. Every client then runs in the same configuration "space", and any changes effect all other users! Unix doesn't have the problem only if you guarantee that each remote client is logged in with a unique user id.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You wouldn't happen to have a link to the article in question, would you?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
And? Should this be an explanation for what I see as a moot point and others are trying to fuzz about?
At least I know what I'm talking about, unlike the trollers around.
You mean one employee lost a whole project due to his inability to make regular backups, I think.
This reeks of a FUD post...
mmu_man is a reputable 3rd party software developer whose only work on Zeta (AFAIK) is on the French translation. Either way his points are valid.
As far as having the code is concerned I suggest those in doubt read about the differences that have been noted in the Ventur kernel.
Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were. -- Chicago Reader 10/15/82
Haiku is an open-source binary compatible recreation of BeOS and they have a great sob story.
BeOS lives, technically, but in an incredibly small niche market of hobbyists. It's like the tree that keeps getting cut down to three feet tall because it's growing up in the hedge...It'll never be great, but it won't completely die for a long time. I still have a BeOS partition that I screw around with occasionally or boot up to show to a computer geek friend, but I seriously doubt it's going to take the Desktop market by storm.
Article: bottom of page 4: Note the hardware information shown in the About screen. This shot was taking running within VMWare. Also note the date on the kernel revision. There was some dispute early on about whether or not yellowTAB actually had full access to the source code for BeOS, or whether or not they were just reselling the old kernel and adding on third-party additions. The newer kernel revision appears to lay that question to rest, although yellowTAB has not been very open about discussing this question, possibly for licensing reasons.
If they're updating the kernel and selling it... i'd say they have access to all the source.
Sorry, there's no online version of the article available.
;-)
Here's the paragraph in German, taken from c't magazine issue #14/2005, page 88:
"Als der BeOS-Erfinder Jean-Louis Gassee vor vier Jahren das Handtuch warf und seine Firma inklusive der Urheberrechte an Palm verkaufte, war das Original-Betriebsystem trotz aller Fan-Bemühungen zum Tode verurteilt. BeOS-Adept Bernd Thorsten Korz investierte trotzdem Geld und Nerven in seine Firma YellowTab, um ein Nachfolgesystem im Bündel mit aktualisierten alten sowie neu entwickelten Anwendungen auf den Markt zu bringen. Mittlerweile hält die 38-Mann-Firma sämtliche Rechte am Quelltext des ursprünglichen Betriebssystems und hat nach eigenen Aussagen annähernd 90.000 Zeta-Pakete verkauft."
That's in Englisch:
"When BeOS inventor Jean-Louis Gassee quit four years ago and sold his company including copyrights to Palm the original operating system was doomed despite of all efforts of the BeOS community. Nevertheless Beos-initiate Bernd Thorsten Korz invested money and nerves in his company YellowTab in order to publish a BeOS-successor bundled with updated old and newly developed applications. Meanwhile the 38-man-company owns all rights of the source code of the original operating system and claims to have sold nearly 90.000 Zeta packages."
Since German is my mother language, I hope I didn't make too much mistakes
Regards,
Dennis B. Schramm
Sigs suck!
No. Zeta no longer supports PPC and, even before Apple announced the x86 switch, had stated they did not plan to port Zeta to PPC.
Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were. -- Chicago Reader 10/15/82
Diebold?
pervasively multi-threaded vote fraud?
64bit fully journaled file system to hold all the non-existent votes?
a media OS for a media that is complicit in war crimes.
ok it's a bit of a long shot but why not. at least BE can be useful after MS killed them and apple shut them out from the ppc market.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
YES they have. Sorry, but this is a question everyone asks.
From their website:
"I heard that ZETA is using some illegal code. Is this true?
No. yellowTAB does not use illegal or leaked software."
They aquired the rights to the code before Be was eaten by Palm. There was also some code Be opensourced before kicking the bucket. Zeta is based on BeOS 5 Dano.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Sony is in a spiralling decline and it's not at all clear how they will be able to break out from it. The changing nature of the music industry has caught them cold, and the feauding-warlord nature of their company structure prevents them from making an effective response to the changing nature of music systems and even DVD players (their players offer less features for rival formats to DVD whereas the cheap knockoffs tend to have everything).
Sony were working with Be some years ago and there was speculation that they would buy them. They should have done. They could have had an OS that was ready-to-go on the desktop, easily ported to embedded systems, and all of the engineering team, and a company that size could have kept it ticking along lying in wait for the right opportunity to reach out and grab a sector of business.
Beos is still selling within a niche, I was using a DAW (new last year) based around it. Incredibly flexible, and awesomely powerful. If they stick at what they are actually damned good at, SMP audio for instance, they could do some really amazing things. Undercut mac, avoid the joy of windows and lose the complexity of linux.
Brain(s): 0.0% user, 1.3% system, 0.1% nice, 98.6% idle
I ran Be on a pentium-300 laptop and I actually had a rather satisfying experience with it. Be ran surprisingly fast for a Windowing OS. It ran much like QNX runs-- responsive, quick loading, fast task switching and multitasking. The article gets into this a little bitBeOS's strength was always in its relatively lightweight frameworks, and its highly responsive GUI, which were the result of a new, relatively uncluttered code base and an emphasis on multithreading everywhere in the OS. But I really don't think that it hits the nail hard enough on the head. On my laptop be can run a web browser, play mp3s, and run an email client at the same time with little noticable slowdown: again, this is on a [slow] pentium 300 mmx machine. In fact, Be performed most graphical tasks better than the same laptop running on a well tuned Gentoo install with fluxbox as the WM (honest!).
Anyways, this review of Zeta is interesting because it again revisits the platform that could potentially make a great niche for itself in lower-powered situations such as mobile and embeded devices and old [s]crappy laptops like mine. The only thing is that the article really doesn't strongly enough emphasize how dramatic Be's strengths and weakneses are: driver support is EXTREMELY limited, the multitasking and other system performance (espescially sound) is REMARKABLE...
Be is a rather fun OS to play with, and there are tons of excellent free applications for it: check out http://www.bebits.com./ The only real drawback of be is its limited hardware support and the lack of support for many applications that people are used to. Let's hope the Zeta guys stick with it and add support for some more hardware (Wireless baby, wireless.)
.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
Jean-Louis Gassée should of accepted their offer of $200 million.
The problem was, it was more of an emotional want (he wanted 400). In business you can't let your decisions be driven by emotion or revenge when clearly his company wanted worth that much.
As someone who used BeOS quite a bit, there are several really important things that the reviewer misses:
BeFS. While he touches on the subject of attributes, he missed the most important part of the BeFS. It was *searchable*. On *everything*. It was really handy for emails, because you could use the attributes to get through tons of email, even if you were the most unorganised person ever. The technology in things like Apple's Spotlight are only now just getting the same capabilities that BeFS had in 1998.
Mutli-Processor. The BeOS took advantage of dual processors. The apps were all mutlithreaded. And it was *fast* because of this. This reviewer did not run a version of Zeta on a dual-processor box, and so can't say whether or not this still holds true.
Multimedia. He does go into this, but not very well - the graphics on the original BeOS were crisp and clean, and looked spectacular with just about every monitor and video card, *automatically*. This was at a time when I was still looking up Horizontal and Vertical refresh rates to put into an X config on RedHat 5.2, and that didn't even work well. Sound was amazing and took advantage of just about every sound card feature. Furthermore, it took advantage of the full power of the speakers, too. I'll never forget the first time I booted into BeOS after rebooting from my Windows partition - I nearly blew out the speakers!
In all, I think it would have been better had someone who was a Be afficianado actually write the review. It's a good review, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't tell me how the new Zeta *feels* when compared to the BeOS.
libertarianswag.com
BeUnited is working on a native port.
e -history-of-java-on-beos/
http://bryan.varnernet.com/archives/2004/09/01/th
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Heh.
transmission_err
Major milestones in the last few months have included building GCC on the Haiku kernel as well as starting up Tracker (equivalent of Explorer) in a graphical environment on real hardware.
So yes, they are not usable right now, but they are not "still NOWHERE".
With virtual memory disabled, I get over 18 billion terabytes of potential swap file space! Cool!
18 billion terabytes == 18 zettabytes. Coincidence?
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
IMO one chance Zeta might have is if it invents itself as an alternative to OSX for running music or video apps (Be was already heading in that direction when it was killed.) There's usually no need for remote applications or multiple users on dedicated studio systems, so Zeta could focus on Be's strengths and not reinvent the wheel if they went in this direction. Sound engineers are a great market for a hobby OS like this, BTW-- they have different needs than most computer users (many high end studios still use Mac OS9!) and really have no fear of using exotic tools (from the guys I've known, the more obscure the equiptment the better.)
How does that have anything to do with the question of whether Yellowtab has access to the source code? They're selling Zeta as their operating system. If I buy it, I expect it to be supported. If they don't have access to the source code they won't be able to support it very well now, will they? More importantly, it would be very possible that it would die after that single release because they couldn't make improvements without access to the source code.
Generally, buying a piece of software from a company that doesn't have access to the code just isn't very bright imo.
BeOS was always a single-user operating system, and ZETA appears to be the same... That, in and of itself, is sufficient reason to completely ignore ZETA
Naah. The reason to ignore Zeta is that it's an obscure and incompatible proprietary platform that doesn't have any market share and will never have. They aim for consumer desktops, so multiple users are not really needed anyway.
One of my biggest complaints about Windows is that it is derived from a single user operating system
No modern Windows is derived from a single user operating system. You don't know what you are talking about, lookup Windows NT.
The problem with single user is with support for remote applications, e.g. running a thin client...
Wow. Just wow. The depth of your knowledge of Windows platform is astounding.
...another operating system featuring processes, applications, windows, icons, and all the usual things that other operating systems have. Why should anyone use this O/S? it's basically the same thing with any other O/S, just a different iteration. It might be more polished, it may have cleaner APIs, but it is just the same.
We need fresh ideas...come on, developers, offer us something new!
Isn't that why BeOS went out of business in the first place?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
A half dozen other alternative OS's were able to boot perfectly well on Apple's PPC boxes, including several still with us (YellowDog anyone?) None of them had the benefit of having hired away a bunch of Apple engineers...
No, the "difference" was that Intel's investment arm had just dumped a boatload of cash on the struggling Be, gotten a seat on their board, and maneuvered them to going x86. Rather then confess this to the faithful however Be decided to piss all over the company that had spurned 'em and claim Apple made 'em leave Mac/PPC (boohoo)
Lesson learned? It's hard enough for free OS's to compete against the MS juggernaut, much less pricey half-written 'multimedia' ones. At least Nextstep had a richer OS & development environment, some customers beyond the hobbyist market. Oh, and was able to convince Apple to pay them $400 million to take over Apple's OS R&D.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
http://www.bug-nordic.org/haiku.php Q: 'SELECT * FROM BUG_NO_VISITORS_BLOCKED WHERE UserAgent = 'I Ain't telling you shit!';' E: 'You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 't telling you shit!'' at line 1'
The problem with single user is with support for remote applications, e.g. running a thin client... Wow. Just wow. The depth of your knowledge of Windows platform is astounding. I was pointing out a potential problem with using BeOS as a server. The depth of your ignorance is astounding. And if you think all versions of NT were "multiuser from the ground up", then why did Citrix have to go through great contortions to make multiple concurrent users work? Perhaps you should study the history of Windows a bit more before you criticize others' opinions... and stop trying so hard to be an asshole, it doesn't become you.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If you're insisting that no version of Windows was derived from DOS, then perhaps it is you who does not know what you're talking about!
I specifically told "modern versions", but thanks for playing anyway. On your other points I would even comment upon, you are just trolling, I suppose.
I'm just guessing, but I'm pretty sure that would be aginst the agreement they have with palm, since palm is all about embedded applications.
Why not fork?