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BeOS Lives on in the Form of Zeta

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the rise-from-the-ashes dept.

DgtlDivide writes "BeOS, one of the pinnacle examples of something really good that died far before it should have, is apparently not quite dead yet. BeOS has continued to captivate a large and devoted community. The Haiku project is working on an Open Source version of the OS and now out of Germany comes Yellowtab's Zeta, a continuation of an unreleased development version of BeOS code-named "Dano." Is Zeta worth the price? Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?"

7 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Better, earlier by Mikey-San · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/zeta-1.0.ars

    Eat me, lameness filter.

    --
    Mikey-San
    Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
  2. A cool link! by VAXGeek · · Score: 1, Informative

    Click here for latest Zeta news!

    --
    this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
  3. BeOS Lives? Truly??? by null+etc. · · Score: 4, Informative
    Wow, way to go with the TIMELY reporting! I liked this story better when it was submitted June 19th:

    http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 6/19/1742245&tid=87&tid=189&tid=190&tid=8

  4. Will it make it as an OS? by Coryoth · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well it seems Zeta has been kicking around for some time. The earliest of those being from 2002 when it was first announced that yellowTab had picked up some rights to BeOS. I gather (from comments in those many stories) that Zeta has been on sale, at least in Germany, for quite some time now, and went 1.0 in July. The reviews have been lukewarm, and it really hasn't raised much (if any) mainstream attention.

    Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?"

    I find that rather doubtful. BeOS was a fine OS in its day, but while the rest of the world has been improving (MacOS, for instance, now actually has something decent to offer) BeOS has been mostly treading water as yellowTab try and modernise it where possible and get support for modern hardware. It's not that Zeta is bad - it looks like quite a nice OS - it's just that it certainly isn't revolutionary or particularly interesting for any reasons other than BeOS nostalgia... and these days you need to manage to stand out in some way or other as an OS to attract enough application developers. Without applications your OS is just going to slowly stagnate and die unless you can find and fill a niche. Given that Zeta is aiming at the general desktop... I just don't see them managing to get enough strng application support to really pull that off.

    Jedidiah.

    --
    Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
    1. Re:Will it make it as an OS? by jsebrech · · Score: 2, Informative

      Well, as the vast majority of OS installations in existance run as single-user installations, that doesn't sound like too much of an issue.

      Maybe "single user" is the wrong term, maybe "horribly insecure" is better. Anything you run on beos has root level power. That's a lousy design, and apart from windows (in practical situations) all operating systems have long since abandoned it due to all the security problems it causes.

  5. Re:Depends on leadership - and public image... by Lord+Kano · · Score: 2, Informative

    Gasse miscalculated one thing, the return of Jobs.

    Had Steve Jobs not been brought back to Apple, Be OS would have been the foundation for the "next generation" Mac OS instead of NeXT's.

    It would have taken less work, less time and could arguably have yielded a better final result to build a new OS on top of the Be OS compared to the process of porting NeXT's OS from the ground up.

    LK

    --
    "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
  6. Why are you so wrong? Mod parent down... by Tezkah · · Score: 5, Informative
    BeOS already runs on Intel hardware. It has been running on x86 for over 7 years now...

    Due to Apple's aggressive moves and the mounting debt of Be Inc, BeOS was soon ported to the X86 platform with its R3 release. Through the late 90s, BeOS managed to create a niche of hardcore followers, but the company failed to become solvent. As a last-ditch effort to increase interest in the failing operating system, Be Inc. released a stripped-down, but free, copy of BeOS R5 known as BeOS Personal Edition (BeOS PE). BeOS PE could be started from within Microsoft Windows or Linux, and was intended to nurture consumer interest in its product and give developers something they could tinker in.

    - from Wikipedia

    That being said, it will have to have changed a great deal between when I saw it last, and it's next incarnation, otherwise - the current crop of Mac OS X and Windows XP / Vista already does what BeOS did.


    The only way that Mac and Windows and Linux are now able to do what BeOS was doing is that we now have 3GHZ processors in our computers, while BeOS was providing the same speed and responsiveness on much slower machines. The threading of BeOS is one of it major strengths, and windows is JUST NOW (with vista) starting to implement the idea in full.

    That said, the story doesn't give us any new information... oh... Zeta!? I had never heard of this product before on slashdot...