"Fans of BeOS still mourn its untimely demise all these years after the release of R5 and subsequent sale of its assets to Palm. Now ZETA, a successor to BeOS, has been released. Naturally, we had to review it."
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2005-07-01
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2005-07-29
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...Zeta didn’t put more work into the theme engine. Looks like they only implemented half of what’s needed. The buttons don’t change much (they appear to only change in color and size, but not in form) the window decorator changes and the scroll bars. The rest stays the same. That makes the “themes” look ugly.
RE: Exile All Islamists from the UK [Redux the Third]
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I'm currently working on a new IDE for the Haiku/BeOS/Zeta platform, but I'm not done yet. It will be commercial and sold separately by me. You can find details here: http://s93114613.onlinehome.us/
AFAIK, the only IDE (as opposed to GUI editor) that's really distributed with Zeta is the old BeIDE, and it is likely exactly the same one as shipped with older versions of BeOS, because Be didn't write a lot of the code.
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It looks nice but slipping in a new kernel before release killed it compatibility with a lot of hardware and not just old stuff newer systems as well. I can't speak for anyone else but I can't activate mine so I get nag screens every few minutes. I have posted in the forums over there but have recieved no responses yet.
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2005-08-11
PalmSource has no plans to develop BeOS as a desktop OS. How much would they want to sell the rights for? I would be willing to pay £200 for BeOS R5 to be released under a BSD license. How many other people would? Would it be possible to raise enough to make this worthwhile for PlamSource? Would other companies be willing to put money into the pot to be able to use BeOS code in their products?
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To be honest I think you're better off donating the cash to the Haiku project. They're picking up pace and if the developers could afford to take time off work and focus full-time on hacking up Haiku, they could probably have a runnable LiveCD out by the end of the year.
Haiku is the way forward as it's also developed with the future in mind.
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Ok, all other cons aside... one big, totally unneccessary minus in Yeta 1.0 is tons of all kinds of 3rd party apps. Not only are many of those of poor quality and take up space, they are also totally beside the point.
And it is not just silly games, but other SW too. For instance, I've got nothing against Beam E-mail Client, but default install should just set up live mail queries, as this is kind of uniqe and very clean concept-wise.
The point here is that the default install should showcase typical OS usage and its technology - leave costumisation to the users, they know best!
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2005-07-08
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you can get it here: http://www.bebits.com/app/2680
but it is said not to be working with more than 768MB ram installed. there is also something called beos max wich should support up to 1Gig of ram, which is basically a hacked version of beos 5 personal edition.
the last time i tried it, it was a little painfull to get working right on modern hardware.
but from what i have heard, zeta is still very buggy itself.
keep in mind that all of this is second hand knowledge. since i never got all that enthusiastic with beos it is been quit a while since i tried it.
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2005-07-22
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2005-07-06
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reviewer should install the vesa accepted driver off bebits for decent video support under vmware.
http://bebits.com/app/1105
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2005-06-29
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It's a pity that documentation is impossible to use consistently, and that things are perhaps not fully documented. For example, he mentions he needed VMWare to take screen shots. Well, that's simply not true! If you press the Print Screen button (memory is hazy on whether it needs a modifier: I just do it) it will dump a copy of the screenshot to a file. yT would be much better able to convince people of the value of things if they had it properly documented, it seems. Of course, having not read what's distributed with Zeta myself as of yet (note: I know from posts on the yT forums that my older SMP P3 system with SCSI will not work with Zeta R1, because they screwed up both SCSI and SMP support in various ways) it may also be that the reviewer didn't bother actually reading what documentation was distributed with the system. After all, let's be fair: if you were to review a linux distro coming previously from an all-Windows experience, imagine how many things you'd be flummoxed by, if you chose to presume to go and do things without even thinking about reading all the "read me first!" type of documents!
Member since:2005-07-06
He needed VMware to take screen shots of the install process, something you can't do with native print-screen. And if you read the article, you may notice that the "read me first" document was in German on his English install, and that some of the other documentation was missing. Clearly he at least attempted to read the docs.
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It'll be sorely missed by myself too.
I'd be much happier if YT added useful things, not removing them and adding stupid themes.
A nicety would be automagic tab arrangement, if you open eg a new netpositive window it will be displayed under and a bit more to the right of your parent window. Why do that if you have sliding tabs? You can just as well let the tab slide to the other side of the window and just have it fullscreen, or do that only when you click the resize buttons on the tabs.
Why didn't they do that?
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It's not yT removed sliding tabs. It's Be inc. Zeta is based on so called BeOS Dano - BeOS 6 alfa or maybe beta. Whatever.
I happily booting to Dano with some Haiku inside 
. It's nice, quite stable, clean and done in Be way. But I do not have updated kernel, CUPS, ugly preference panel and so on.
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2005-07-07
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Just a correction: yT didn't remove that feature. Be Inc. rewrote the app_server, so the sliding tabs were already like that when Dano showed up.
I think you had a great idea. Maybe yT didn't do that yet because they didn't think about that. 
Please, post that in their forum. Something like Mac OS' Exposé would be great too.
But maybe yT didn't have the time, or that feature may have a lower priority in their timetable.
See ya,
Franx