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I have two, some would say -- minor, problems with yT. First: there is no LiveCD. I have two computers now, a PowerPC Pegasos (it won't run yT for sure) and a x86 laptop. I know that laptop support in alternative OS-es is lacking. I will not spend a dime on a OS that may be disfunctional on my HW.

Second: I've read on OSNews that they have few problems when it comes to communication (easy word) with developers.

It may have it's flaws (like the audio output thru my the wrong port on my mobo). But it's the only decent desktop alternative for x86 PC users until x86 Mac OSX comes along.

about Zeta ever seen.
Even BeOS/Zeta dedicated sites like iscomputeron.com, zetanews.com or haikunews.org made weaker reviews .

but it is slowly fading. R1 is in my opinion OK. It has more drivers than the last offical relase from Be Inc. Is easy to navigate and responceive. As much as I would love to use it, and there are many things one can do with it. The problem I have is that I can't get enough use out of it without having to boot back into Windows. They are in dire need of updated codec support. Too many "media" files won't work on the "media" OS. While they have Firefox, lack of java, flash and other things that make web surfing enjoyable are missing. Too many webpages are just not viewable. It is a nice OS but too many missing things to be of real use as a desktop. Also, the damn GUI needs help. Serious help.

Oh, and just forget trying to share files between your Windows partition and Zeta partition. It is possiable but you need a PHD to get it to work. Again it just goes back to "Nice OS, not enough support for common file systems and codecs."

the author refers to "an util on mac os 7", it's called finderpop and it's still working on mac classic...
I'm also cannot understand why there's no such a thing into kfm or nautilus.
As I said before, I remember there was something like that in october gnome (gnome 1.053 i guess ?), you could drag directory and a panel and browse it like finderpop or beos....

Does someone know why it has been removed ?

..and other OSes don't: you don'thave to bitch-slap the OS in order to have it listen to you. I have a Pentium 4 3 GHz at work with WindowsXP, and I still have apps steal the focus, or not reacting to my mouse or keyboard commands if another application is keeping the CPU busy. And sorry to say, the same happens with Linux, any Linux.

With BeOS, no matter how busy some application orprocess is, if I click somewhere, that mouseclick is taken into highest regard! I really feel I am listened to, I feel nothing else is important but my bidding. It's a refreshing, unbelievable feeling, if you have succumbed to being second-class citizen to Windows and other desktop OSes.

Not to turn anyone off of Zeta but it's true...

Yeah Zeta 1.0 is quite nice, I enjoy it and it suits everything I do on a daily basis except gaming, but I dont mind. One problem is the Audigy drivers are broken in 1.0... Something that has worked absolutly fine up until this release...

Submitted a bug report almost a month ago at bugzilla.yellowtab.com but nothing yet.

Hopefully they'll get this fixed so I can make it a more official on my machine.

Good OS though, very sturdy, and nice to work with.

This is really an excellent OS from stability point of view.
I have a corrupted DVD with 7 files on; When I tried to copy them to my windows machine it took the explorer with it and I got the black screen of death; on linux on the other hand (Xandros 3.0.2 Business Edition + SUSE 10 Beta3) the KDE environment got frozen I could not use my mouse and my keyboard at all.
2nd test I did was when I tried to read the content of a DVD with a file of size 4.5 written By UDF(Universal Disk Format) file system, just windows and Zeta 1.0 were able to mount them and show their contents correctly.

Who wants an OS to work on his workstation then it get forzen on your face while you are running vital programs on the background that will get it corrupted or trashed because you want to reset your system?!

A couple of ways of sharing files between Zeta and Windows spring to mind even without a PHD.
Here are three, 1) Format a partition as FAT32 - this works pretty well for Linux as well, 2) Use a USB flash drive, 3) Burn a CD.
Also you could use your idisk or FTP server.
You can even read but not write to your Windows NTFS.

Honest review for once.

I still find using W2K for desk top file transfers around the desk top to be a curse, utterly stupid as most desktops are when they don't know what you want them to do when it gets a little bit complicated.

With BeOS, OpenTracker, it asks you what to do with some choices, skip, over write etc etc.

And so many other Tracker features come to mind that I miss, all the best ideas of MacOS minus MacOS own stupid limits esp NO crashing, NO modals.

Its this emphasis on MS catching up to OSX on shiny things that so disses me. That is just junk, I want the Finder,Explorer,Tracker to be a darn sight smarter at handling lots of exceptions with dialog choices than translucent cpu sucking cycles.

Now if OpenTracker & plugins could have been ported to Windows, I'd be in heaven, best desktop + best apps. Ok if it were on Linux instead, I would look for equiv apps and be almost as happy.

But waiting for Haiku but not expecting any new apps is difficult, unless maybe Java shows up (where is that anyway). I suspect Intel OSX will take away most of the potential Haiku/Zeta users, afraid to say.

end of rant

uh. no. RIght now, until haiku is finished, BeOS R5 + bone nad other updates is the "best way to use BeOS" . Zeta is a joke.

Ahh but I have. I have a 160gig drive. The first partition is NTFS and is for XP. The seocond is FAT32 that has all my personal files on it. Then there is an 80gig drive that has Zeta. Guess what. Zeta can see that I have a 160gig drive and can see that I have an NTFS partition but thinks that the NTFS partition is 160gig. When in fact the first parition is only 40gig. It simply will not see that there is a second partition that is FAT32. I did it this way so that I could share files between OSs. Works great for any other OS I have played with, hobby os or otherwise. Doesn't work for Zeta and each time I have tried to get a response from YT all I get is silence on it. They have helped me with other issues but will not acknowledge that this one even exists. So, hope that it will get fixed is very low. If Zeta could replace my XP it wouldn't matter so much. But Zeta is not a desktop replacement, not yet. Maybe someday. Hopefully YT will go out of business before then.

Dude I am not stupid. The problem is that Zeta will only recognize that there is one partition and not two. There isn't an option to mount the FAT32 partition. It just plain isn't there.

Compared to previous releases R1 was increadibly fast, easily as fast as BeOS R5 was on the same hardware, in some respects far quicker. Now there were also a lot of neat touches I thought to the whole setup. But those nicities came at one hell of a cost - the OS is as unstable as Charles Manson, any and every net aware app has at one time or another brought the OS to its knees, not totally crashing out the system, but crippiling all other active net apps with it, no more do we see the "Program <insert name here> has caused an error and be closed", nope, the system just leaves the app to sit there. Memory protection, always pretty damned good in BeOS is non existant under the R1 release of Zeta, every previous version of Zeta (RC's and Neo) did NOT have these issues. Applying anything that puts a sustained load on the OS (such as ripping a DVD, and converting it on the fly using handbrake) will cause the whole OS to crap itself. On the same hardware, BeOS never EVER caused such issues, and nor did previous versions of Zeta. And don't even get me started on how it seems to swallow up ram left right and centre.

In short, R1 was an abortion of a release, perhaps not as bad as unpatched RC1, but not far off. YT would have been well advised to have kept it back for 3 or 4 months to sort these issues out, and to hire some folks to actually test the damned OS before it ships!