On Friday the 11th of March I went to CeBIT 2005, the world's largest hi-tech fair held annually in Hannover, Germany. The fair covers everything from the Digital World and is expected to receive around half a million visitors this year. After an overview this report mainly highlights yellowTAB's presence and their new Zeta operating system.
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That first link is busted 
Zeta's time has come!
And luckily for me the windows are fully customizable. One thing I did not like about BeOS' default look was the varying title bar size depending upon the amount of text written within them.
Personally I prefer a full size title bar to easily drag the windows around using this bar. Also then IMO you more instantly know where widgets are located. Zeta includes some nice presets such as a MacOS X look, but windows can be of any non-square shape as well (not that I think that option really adds useful functionality, but it does add user choice for some optional eyecandy).
I have always been a huge fan of BeOS, and am very excited to see Zeta taking shape. I'm just worried that Yellow Tab is going to drag their feet with the release of 1.0. Also, I'm not a big fan of the new window decor (also seen in the BeOS 5.1 beta) I was quite fond of the simpler look from 4 and 5.
Good work, nonetheless, and I am ready to buy it for all my PCs once it comes out.
Hi mike can you give us the meat on the RAM once and for all:
The question that kill, did you see the PC running with let say 2G of ram and using all the 2G?
Hey, the biggest Amiga fan in the world (as far as I know) is reporting about Zeta :-) And he has pleasant comments, too :-) My hope for humanity is restored :-)
Seriously, Amiga was my first OS love, BeOS the second. And regardless of naysayers, I think yT are doing amazingly well, all things considered (heck, most of us thought they'd be out for the count by now, but they look stronger than ever. Hope they'll survive long enough to be a Haiku distributer.
Does my heart good that a patched up 5 year old OS can still win over THe M$ crowds at a big trade show,one can only imagine just how impressive the original BeOS must have looked running alongside Win95 and 98 in shows past
Please link to another modern BeOS. (Works with XPs and P4s, more than 512MB, current drivers, etc.)
Wait, there isn't one.
YellowTab is the best thing BeOS has going for it.
@ AlienSoldier
Running with more than 1 GB of RAM installed seems to work without problems at the fair. However I was unable to test myself if all of this RAM could be used, but I would really be surprised if this was not the case. My home PC only has 512 MB of RAM.
@ Zenja
> Hey, the biggest Amiga fan in the world (as far as I know)
> is reporting about Zeta :-) And he has pleasant comments,
> too :-)
Well the BeBox was promoted to be new Amiga when Commodore had bankrupted two years before. In fact most of the early adopters were Amigans. Both systems share many common philosophies, especially when it comes to GUI performance and multitasking (including the configurable prioritized sheduling of software).
I showed yellowTAB's CEO a video of AmigaOS4 being demonstrated on an 800 Mhz AmigaOne and he was very impressed and stated that it was as if he was looking at Zeta.
IMO also some of Zeta's and BeOS's most impressive features were originally inspired by AmigaOS. For instance some things he picked to demonstrate me included:
Workspaces - This is very similar to Amiga's Screens. What I like better about the BeOS/Zeta implementation is that you can drag Windows onto different workspaces. What I like better about the Amiga implementation is the default depth gadget every screen has for switching.
Overlay - An Amiga feature I heavily used in the 80s and early 90s (genlock) to combine video with computer graphics.
Default systeem and software wide multi-laguage support - The support for different languages in AmigaOS4 and Zeta seem to be almost equivalent, except for Zeta's support for Chinese and Japanese languages.
Drag and drop and desktop fuctionality - In Zeta you can simply drag and drop images or highlighted text straight onto your desktop and the OS will create a new text or image file with an icon on the icon on the desktop. AmigaOS and most applications do also have good clipboard and drag & drop support, but dragging such content onto the desktop doesn't work.
Add to this Amiga-like efficient memory handling, effective preemptive multitasking and datatypes support and it's easy to understand that there's a lot implemented in Zeta/BeOS for Amigans to like. :-)
I was there, and i saw the promotion and the demonstration of Zeta....
A lot of people is talking wether yellow tab has acces to the source, or zeta is build on Beos PE 5...
I dont give it any thoughts, as what is under the hood.
Zeta was really amacing to see in action, as they were sragging a frame right of the media player, and INSTANTLY placing it inside an open textdocument, as an immage..
Furthermore they marked a piece of the text, and placing it as a file on the desktop... (Still with lightning speed).
Then they showed that they had like 12 virtual desktops running in the background, at the same time.
All this and even MORE work in real time, with an 1600mhz processor and 512 megabyte of memory.
I say this system kicks ass, no matter what's under the hood.
It looks and acts just like BeOS...
Well done Yellow Tab.
As far as i know if your machine contains 2GB Ram the R1 will use 3/4 of it. The thing yellowTAB did is not kinda patch/hack. It is well done 
I wouldn't call 3/4 of 2GB RAM "well done", however it's certainly better than previous results.
102" Plasma TV...i have to get me one! perhaps a third mortgage...
Look at BeOS Max, a bit like frankenstine (cobled together out of parts), but no more then Zeta.
See http://www.bebits.com/app/3892