According to the Cola Coder, an upcoming update to ZETA 1.0 will enable booting from USB devices. This will not only allow installation of ZETA on laptops that do not have an optical drive, but it will also make it possible to install to and run ZETA from a USB memory stick.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-06-29
Still doesn't have any support of Firewire storage and hence booting isn't possible on the first generations of modern x86 laptops which didn't have optical drives - small Sony Vaio's. Zeta needed to be fought, kicking and screaming, onto this laptop, due to the new installer that doesn't allow the old copy-and-reboot system to work.
Member since:2005-07-06
As far as I know all BeOS versions have always required you to fight to the death to get them onto a Sony Laptop.
Plus if the Sonys have USB which should be all of them, then there should be no problem.
However, I notice your comment about copy/boot. Did Zeta do something dumb that prevents one disk image to boot all systems? Install diffirent files for diffirent systems?
I hope not. One of the tings that makes BeOS so great is the ability to plug a single hard drive into any supporting computer and just boot it. I regularly transfer drives with development work between my LapTop for portability and my DeskTop for memory and speed, and if I have an odd problem pop it into one of my friend's Desktop so he can see what I am doing.
If they did that I understand why you think there are still major limits. USB is fine for me, but one disk image should be all I need to work on diffirent computers.
Member since:2005-06-29
USB was not bootable until laptops/desktops sold in 2004 or later for the most part. This laptop is from 2002. And theres no BIOS upgrades for them, so no way to add support for it...
BeOS runs fine on all Vaio's I've tried it on, it just needs to be forced onto those without built-in CD-ROM's
You can still move an installed Zeta system, but not having another working x86 laptop worth a damn that wasn't an option - not many old laptops support 80GB 7200RPM ATA133 hard drives. I eventually had to copy all the files onto a new partition from within BeOS, then unzip all the zip'ped up packages, and create a few symlinks myself.
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USB was not bootable until laptops/desktops sold in 2004 or later for the most part. This laptop is from 2002. And theres no BIOS upgrades for them, so no way to add support for it...
I think you're off by a few years. Hardware from ~2000 could boot off of USB, though the BIOS support was iffy. That changed over the next couple years, and some pre-2000 systems can boot off of USB with the right BIOS.
Member since:2005-09-26
I have a Sony Vaio C1VFK, made around 2002-3 and I've never needed to boot it from a USB stick, but I can boot from a generic USB floppy drive, which suggests to me that you can USB-ly boot the thing.
I stuck RC3 on it by wrestling the files via zips, but it was painful, as you say.
Member since:2005-07-06
I've found that the easiest way to get BeOS installed on laptops without an optical drive is to first install Win98, then install R5 PE under Win98. I did it this way on my old thinkpad; copied an ISO of my R5 CD to the Fat32 partition, booted into PE, mounted the ISO via ImageMounter, and used the installer app to to copy the ISO's contents to a spare partition I'd prepared. Then setup bootman and all was well.
I used win98 because you can usually boot directly into PE from it without needing a bootdisk (and therefore, a floppy drive), which can't be done in NT-based OSes.
Member since:2005-06-29
This laptop won't boot Win98 (little to no legacy support).
To get R5 onto it when I put in the big HDD, I netbooted Linux, put a 600MB FAT32 partition on it, downloaded the loadbeos.com and the PE image.be/zbeos combo from the net onto that partition, rebooted the machine and netbooted FreeDOS; ran loadbeos.com and installed from there, onto the remaining ~79GB. I then did the voodoo required to get USB Mass Storage working, and ran the R5 Pro installer off my non-bootable USB DVDRW drive.
Zeta doesn't have an image.be, etc, so this can't be done. In fact, without R5, I couldn't have installed it, at all.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-04
on all levels of the system, they have to have the source code on some level. Now with Palm releasing Windows Mobile devices, there is no doubt in my mind that they found a buyer of the old BeOS source. But, it makes me sad 
to see PalmOS go away in favor of Windows Mobile.
As far as I know, PalmSource owns BeOS, not Palm.
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I wish Yellowtab would get a few things straight whenever they decide to do an "upgrade" - All of my hardware is supported, and yet, with each upgrade, the installer f**ks up more, and now, with Zeta 1.0, I can no longer even install the system to a system that ran Zeta Neo perfectly. Plus, if I wanted to try and debug it, the kernel loader won't even boot if I have more than one BeFS partition on my drive...
While having the ability to boot from a USB device is great, I just wish that those of us with standard hardware (list below) would get some of the functionality that we had in the past back again....
MB: Intel 865 Chipset w4 EIDE ports and SATA
CPU: P4 2.6
RAM: 1 GB
Video: Geforce FX 5200
Sound: SB Live!
NIC: Intel Onboard - Realtek 8139 clone
And, no, this is not some cheapo tier 1 mass-market Walmart system - I actually do know about patching various items, and have been faithfully following the BeOS scene since 1995...
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Member since:2005-09-26
Member since:2005-09-04
Member since:2005-09-04
Strike that...
Go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_%28OS%29
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Member since:2005-07-22
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"USB was not bootable until laptops/desktops sold in 2004 or later for the most part. This laptop is from 2002. And theres no BIOS upgrades for them, so no way to add support for it... "
While this is probably true on a general level, it isn't universally so
A friend has a 1999 Dell GX1 desktop (slot-one pentium 2, upgraded by me to P3-450) which boots Windows XP off a USB hard drive case connected to a regular USB 2.0 PCI adapter card (ATA-133 over USB 2.0 is faster than the internal ATA-33 channel)
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Zeta *does* have an "IMAGE.BE" in fact you can do that trick with all BeOS versions (if zbeos isn't broken as it is in dano and ZETA pre-R1). Just copy the 2nd track of the CD with that name so zbeos finds it (dd if=/dev/... of=IMAGE.BE) and put it in BEOS and you're done.
mmu_man, too lazy to register.
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I have a Vaio older than MYOB's and have no problem installing any BeOS onto it. I use my 2.5"-> 3.5" HD adapter, install the OS onto it using my desktop system and then moze it back to the laptop. The laptop has NO removeable media drives - CD or floppy. I could get a floppy drive for it, and it uses a proprietary connector, and the CD drive I can get has a PCMCIA card you use with it (prolly SCSI). It's a PCG-505TR. Killer Pentium 333. No external drive boot options either for it's firewire or USB. I haven't tried installing Zeta to it, nor do I want to as I hane a nicely setup R5 environment on it. It doesn't officially support my 40 GB HD (BIOS sees it as 8) but BeOS doesn't complain.
-Kancept
Member since:2005-06-29
Kancept - find me a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter thats willing to support a very damn new laptop HDD and I'll try that.. the three of them I have here won't let me read the HDD, two of them won't even power it on.
USB is "bootable" on this age of Sony's but only with Sony components. Only one such component exists, their own floppy drive.... which I don't have
The floppy drive in the dock is standard MFM, but that doesn't get around the Zeta-not-able-to-see-its-own-CD issue.
