YellowTAB, makers of BeOS’ successor ZETA, released a free live version of their operating system. You can download it for free here (click “zum download”). It’s a *.cue file and the download is 175 MB. Note: I cannot … not approved … It has been confirmed.
Sorry we only have the news in german yet:
http://yellowtab.de/news/article.php?id=167
Sorry we only have the news in german yet
Thanks for letting us know, the item’s been updated!
It is right on the frontpage of yellowtab.de, so it is approved.
And even if it wasn’t, it would be rather unlikely for a major internet provider to publish this illegally. This is even more unlikely as there are “limitations for accessing BFS partitions”.
wanted to test Zeta(beos). I haven’t got time to work with beos so much. Even if I am much interested in operating systems – I’m stuck on Linux cause I got my job to do there. ( Don’t have any test box
)
That is not normal: yellowTAB ZETA 1,1 LiveCD as Download with freenet.de
21. October 2005
In co-operation with yellowTAB the freenet.de fire-new LiveCD of yellowTAB ZETA offers 1,1 to free of charge downloads on. The LiveCD makes possible to test it you yellowTAB ZETA without installation.
Thus customers before the purchase of the full version can convince themselves of yellowTAB ZETAs of intuitive operability, stability and that unusual Look & Feel. Download, to burn and wave off reads the foreign exchange.
Download yellowTAB ZETA 1,1 LiveCD of freenet.d
My own translation (I can speak German):
“In co-operation with YellowTAB, freenet will offer the brand-new liveCD of YellowTAB Zeta 1.1 for download, free of charge. The live-CD makes it possible for you to test ZETA without installation.
That way customers can convince themselves of Zeta’s intuitive interface, stability, and extraordinary look & feel. Download, burn, and install.
downloading right now
I rather think “durchstarten” means to boot it up.
The FreeNet page says:
The ZETA 1.1 Live-CD makes offers you an operating system free of charge, that does not even need to be installed.
[…]
The LiveCD has limitations in saving files and mounting other BFS partitions
Yeah, you’re right. Error!
I know it is multi language, but does it start in german and you choose? Or does it start in english and then you can choose language?
For those people who were early and downloaded R1.1 on release day, they might want to try downloading the patch again since YellowTab have pulled a silent update (you can tell by the boot screen – if it still says 1.0, then you have the old 1.1 update. If your boot screen says 1.1, then you have the new update). Personally, I think YellowTab should have releases a 0.01 patch instead of doing the silent update, since there are now 2 versions of the patch.
Apparently, other than the boot screen, a Firefox bug is fixed as well as the Mail Daemon Replacement bug. More info on yT forums as to what else might be in the silent update.
I can’t seems to be able to boot it with qemu, anyone tried it?
same behaviour here :/
waiting for some 10 minutes
I was a HS sophomore when BeOS R4 came out and I was the pariah because I said that BeOS kicked Linux’s ass. All the other geeks thought it was a toy, even though it was in many areas more advanced and ready for the desktop than Linux is today. The fan boy in me would love to leave this thing on feeding bittorrent users a chance to give BeOS another shot.
This is really nice of them. I’ve been wanting to try it on my PC for quite a while. What about those people who bought the cd for $12? Do they get a discount on the full version since they actually paid the money for it?
No readme.txt included in the ZIP…
How do you burn it, say in Linux?
In Linux I used Nerolinux. K3B couldn’t burn it.
how do I do this?
My win-box has no CD-R drive.
There’s a UNIX program called bchunk (or binchunk) that will convert .bin/.cue files to ISOs. I would assume that someone has compiled it for OS X.
That only works for single-track CDs. This CD is two-track.
If you have Toast installed, goto ‘Copy CD’ and select ‘Multi-Track CD-ROM XA’ under advanced options. Now add the boot.img first followed by the second *.img file. Change the block size of the second file to 2048 and press ‘record’.
I tried that and it didn’t work. I did try changing the block size of the second img file to 2048 but both images where already 2048. The first cd I made my PC didn’t see as a bootable cd at all, the second disk it did boot but it wasn’t able to find the beos boot volume It said to hit space during boot sequence and ask for it to boot from the cd. When I tried that it just ignored my keypress because USB keyboardsmice fail to initialize on bootup (and I don’t have any PS/2 ones laying around).
To be clear I had 2 attempts to make a multitrack cd. I didn’t burn one image to one cd and the other image to the other cd if anyone misinterprates what I said that way.
Open terminal, change directories to the unzipped image and type:
drutil burn ZETA_1.1_LiveCD.cue
It’s just that easy.
Is there any way to convert this to an .ISO, I want to mount it in a VMWare machine ot at least be able to burn it
it doesn’t even boot in my pc, i get a kernel panic
AMD Sempron 2800+ 2GHz
1GB RAM
Gigabyte MoBo (nforce2 chip)
:/
Report back to yT your hardware configuration and results, and consider that their free download achieved what it needed to
Ok, so life (and yT and Zeta) aren’t perfect, but at least you didn’t spend the money to get a CD that wouldn’t boot!
As far as I know, your configuration should be supported by Zeta, therefore, this is a bug.
Same here
AMD Athlon XP Mobile
1 gig of RAM
Abit AN7 (nforce2)
Downloaded, tried, liked. Only caveat is that Zeta Live CD starts with German and I don’t understand it. But you can change the language from Preferences. On the whole, I think it has potential, pretty good, but my DHCP didn’t work.. maybe something to do with my router.
Anonymous: on Linux I burnt it with cdrdao write –device /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 –speed 10 Zeta.cue or whatever the cue file was named.
Now in BeOS 5 about to compile Haiku
Good news! Yellowtab heard what the people were saying and responded. This is really awesome on their part. If this is good and works on my PC, they can count me in.
i haven’t it yet and i was waiting very ansious for it but now i see it ;_;, well anyway i’ll have a DVD-BOX with covers of Zeta CD-LIVE so i’ll download zeta 1.1 live-cd i’ll burn it and i’ll put it on zeta cd-live 1.0’s box.
Yellowtab seems that doesn’t want to loss a client because today i was thinking to make a patched R5.03 PRO version with driver updates for myself, hmmm… now i’ll have to test Zeta 1.1 before back to R5 PRO. Anyway yellowtab is going in the good way, slow but in the good way
. Regards.
I’m really getting fed up with seeing the BeOS icon beside Zeta. It’s Zeta, not BeOS.
Afaik, Haiku needs it’s own logo too.
There is no more BeOS, these are different products.
Calm down. hah!
Haiku does have its own logo. And pretty nice too I might add — unique and with calming leafy goodness 🙂
http://www.haiku-os.org/images/logo.gif
I meant on osnews posts.
Seeing the “BeOS” icon for Zeta is a bit of an insult to BeOS.
Don’t start this flame again, in 5th time.
Returning to BeOS logo atOsNews was hard compromise for Eugenia and Bernd at others.
And it is logical for OS-es with microscopic userbase – as those all are BeOS ancestors
Eugenia and I had this conversation along time ago when Haiku (and all beos clones) had a yellowtab icon !
Now that is something to be mad about.
She had the same argument: BeOS is dead.
I said that they are all children of beos so they should have the beos icon.
It’s all my doing.
Want to step outside?
To create a bootable image using cdrecord (instead of a CUE file), just burn the 2 tracks:
$ cdrecord -v zetaboot.img zetacd.img
“$ cdrecord -v zetaboot.img zetacd.img”
This did not work for me, I’m afraid, I got the following error:
Sense Key: 0x5 Illegal Request, Segment 0
Sense Code: 0x72 Qual 0x03 (session fixation error – incomplete track in session) Fru 0x0
Is there any other way to burn it?
erm.
so why doesn’t everybody use iso images?
ISOs don’t work for BeOS live CDs AFAIK (never seen one). BeOS live CDs consist of two tracks, a boot disk image and a BFS volume. In the BeOS CD Burner it’s simple to add the two sessions and burn a CD. In just about everything else you need to use .cue files. Although, I’m not sure why that’s a problem, .bin/.cue files are common enough that they’re a lot of programs that can burn them.
Runs fine on my amd64 3000+.
I think the resolution default of 600×800 is a little strange for a modern os.
Everything works but somehow I don’t get the fonts big enough to be readable with a decent resolution.
I didn’t find Zeta to be very responsive (probably because it’s a live cd) which is a bit disappointing since this is THE key feature Beos/Zeta are praised for…
The way the menues work also seems strange to me but you get used to it. Configuring in general is easy.
you miss the device in cdrecord
cdrecord dev=x,x,x zetaboot.img zetacd.img
you get the dev simple with:
cdrecord -scanbus
the -v is only for verbose if you wanne see the progress of burning. so like:
cdrecord dev=x,x,x -v zetaboot.img zetacd.img
Is this how far zeta have gotten in 5 years, im truly not impressed. I still remember the last BeOS that was released, and even though you could feel that they were doomed it was still impressed by it. This on the other hand, feels very unfinished. I mean just the fact that although i switched to english in the preferences, there are still some items of the os that are still in german. The applications that come with it seem scrounged up from BeBits. I mean, i loved BeOS to bits, but this release of Zeta is, well just blaaah.
You might have gotten that it is a german livecd? So don’t be confused when things are in or stay in german.
An english one is also on the way and will be up soon
Oh absolutley, i knew it was an german livecd when i downloaded it, but the options was there to switch language to english, and it actually switched some parts of the OS ui. My complaint with that is that they should have either a) removed all other languages except german or b) made sure that the languages involved are fully translated.
Remember this is theire chance to show of theire OS to the public and maybe generate some sales. So a little polish never hurts.
The German thing will hopefully get resolved if they release an English live CD soon. I didn’t like it either but I downloaded it from a German site so I guess it’s to be expected.
I had a couple of other complaints though. First up being a message that said “Drücken Sie ‘Reboot’ um die Live-Demonstration zu beenden”. I don’t know what that means, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that it means “Click Reboot and the Live Demonstration will end” or something to that effect. I could have done without it there, though.
Also, Firefox didn’t want to seem to go to any websites, even after I went into the preferences and set up the Networking. I know I had a valid IP address because I got a pop-up saying so, so I’m kind of curious as to why I couldn’t actually view any sites with FF.
I have the same problem with the networking in Zeta. It recognizes my network card as being a “Via-Rhine” driver and aquires an IP address just fine.. But after 5 minutes of browsing the web, the connection just dies and I can’t get it back unless I reboot.
This happens in Zeta 1.0 and 1.1. Perhaps the Via-Rhine driver is busted? I really don’t know.
Suggestions?
JeffG
I don’t think it’s specific to your network card because I’m using an Intel NIC. It’s identified in FreeBSD as fxp0: <Intel 82801BA/CAM (ICH2/3) Pro/100 Ethernet> which definitely doesn’t use a Via driver.
I’am not a big fan of yT but i think they continue to improve BeOS post R5.
Even though the “Be’s way” isn’t still here yet, i think they go in the rigth direction with this downloadble version and the many improvements they’ve done so far.
I’ve still got that bitter taste about how they obtain the source and how much they (haven’t) paid for it..oh well..
Can someone give me an idiots guide as to what program I need to burn it under Windows XP and how to do it?
Thanks!
Now to burn on windows?
Now to burn on windows?
Just do a Google search on cue files, and you’ll find a program that supports it. At least Nero does.
It seems like an English/German combo. Is there a way to switch to English only? Or is this Live CD only in German? I’d really like to thorougly try it out … it seems extremely responsive even on the LiveCD. (Once the CD finishes loading of course. The actual boot up is slow due to the CD. But after it finishes loading, everything is zooms. In my opinion anyway. I think the X Window System has major latency issues personally.)
for those who actually have it installed, is 1.1 really worth $100?
in my oppinion Absolutly!!!!
Yes, absolutelly. Now it’s for me the best OS in x86 machines and now the only thing that I still use PC machines. Zeta 1.1 is now everything I expected for a modern OS.
It’s pretty slick, but for some reason, it rendered my Realtek 8169 unusable to any Linux distribution until I unplugged the box. LG3CD, Knoppix, and RHEL3 all oopsed when trying to load the r8169 after I used the network driver. However, once I unplugged the box, all was well.
Works like a charm! I am very happy, as this is the first time I see Firefox for BeOS! And it is excellent.
This is on a thunderbird 1.2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, Nvidia MX400 graphics card and SB EMU10000, I forgot the name now… anyway sound works great!
However, Midiplayer is not installed correctly, cannot open a patches file.
It have the lines of a great OS. But only the lines. It needs much more work – feels like a beta version.
My major gripes are the following two problems:
1. The English/German thing. When changing the language from German to English only some of the UI changes. For instance Firefox still has a German UI.
2. The Network.
The network was sloooooooow. It took ages to load pages and sometimes it wouldn’t load at all. I tried both Firefox and another browser (can’t remember the name).
I hope they improve it ’cause I relly like the general feel of it I must say.
OK, I really can’t figure out how to get this burned, but I want to try it out. I’ve tried both the cdrecord and cdrdao methods mentioned in the other comments, and cdrecord fails with “cannot open /dev/pg0” and cdrdao fails with an error message from the .CUE file.
Specifically, ZETA_1.1_LiveCD.cue:5: syntax error at “FILE” missing Eof
What does that mean? Is the CUE file bad, or the zetacd.img file (referenced in line 5) bad? There are no MD5 checksums; how are we supposed to verify the integrity of the files?
I even tried K3B, but there upon *selecting* the .CUE file (not burning it) it reports that the .CUE file is unusable. Help, please?
tks
thats what I used, nothing simpler.
Just downloaded and run the CD on my custom built PC.
So far very impressed, picked up all my hardware without any problems and I am actually writing this now in Firefox in Zeta.
Iv messed around with a number of Linux installation including Xandros and none have been this slick.
Going to seriusly consider purchasing it.
Old BeosR5 was much, much better. Forget it…
I have to say, things work way better than I could originally imagine. Expecially since I remembered to select the Finnish keyboard mapping :o)
At the moment, I am posting from NetPositive. Freakish how good this very simple browser still is!? And, for some reason, fonts in NetPositive are much crisper than in Firefox. I guess Firefox is not yet completely optimized for BeOS.
Anyway, for me, the trouble with playing MIDI files is the greatest drawback, as I am a smalltime composer.
Talking about which: why is the only MIDI sequencer included MeV? While MeV is a nice app, it’s really in the very beginning stages of development. Very nice, promising, revolutionary if you like, but buggy. Why not include the beautiful Sequitur? I think Sequitur kicks MeV’s butt bigtime. At least, yellowTab could have included it alongside MeV.
I have to give yT credit for listening to the public for once. This is a step in the right direction.
Oddly enough I got thrown into kernel debugging land at boot though. It’s odd because the install CD works just fine on this box. The Live CD should do the same.
Good thing I didn’t pay 10EUR for it just to find out that it doesn’t boot
for some reason the livecd doesnt like my video card or maybe my monitor. i have nvidia 6600gt and a relisys 770 monitor. everything boots up and i hear some login sound, but the monitor goes blank after the zeta booting screen. kinda like the frequncy is out of range or something. i read somewhere that it defaults to 800×600 which should work; unless they’re trying to have a 120Hz refresh or something.
(1)Zeta kicks ass.
(2)Fast and stable so far.
(3)Will purchase on monday.
Use cdrecord to burn
cdrecord dev=x,x,x zetaboot.img zetacd.img works perfect.
Seeing as I’ve yet to have hardware that works with Zeta, this is a good idea, going to try it shortly, then if all is well, I’ll buy the sucker!
Works on my work system, be interesting to see how the home computer goes. Could do better on the language switching though. Shouldn’t need to download a language specific version.
The full version of R1 completely switches language right across the system without issues, I’m guessing that due to the boot media being read only that some of the setup doesn’t update…
Great OS! What a refreshing change!
Took me a while of fumbling around before I found the language changer. Also, I got DHCP working, but it took a while to take and a restart of firefox. Got it in 1280×1024, coz it looked fuzzy before on my lcd. It comes with a German keyboard setup, so the y key was z, etc. Some of the langage is still in german but I’m finding my way around anyways. 🙂
Hey, burn the .cue file in nero or something. 😉
When burning in NeroLinux, don’t forget to click on Finalize Disc so that you can then click on Disk At Once. Multitrack bin/cues like this one requires DAO mode to burn.
I tried it on my 1GHz laptop… it boots okay, but they don’t get the pitch for the display right, so the graphics are all skewed making it unusable.
cdrecord worked reliably as always…
Resolution was transformed to 1920×1200 after with a few clicks
I think it’s great that ZETA is making this LiveCD available.
Early opinion on value = don’t know If it’s worth $100 (Deluxe)
Zeta failed to recognize file systems on 3ware card…
I kinda got used to that space.
Quick tip…if you have problems booting press the space bar at the start of the boot process to enter safe mode.
Glad I got to try the Live CD before purchasing. On my laptop it only boots in safe mode so low resolution, no sound, and USB mouse not recognised. Didn’t see any wifi support but I didn’t look that hard. In fact as they have still got the GL teapot demo and Gobe Productive its working roughly the same as 6 year old Beos R5. Maybe it would be best to try it on a desktop.
Now running on my home system but my Echo Gina 3G plays sound but with distorted output. Still works well otherwise on both systems.
I’m a BeOS veteran (I think I earned the title, being around since 4.0), and I was devastated when Be inc. went down. Zeta is the best hope, together with Haiku, of resurrecting BeOS. In fact, Zeta is exactly the continuation of BeOS. Remember all those people complaining that, without development, BeOS will be obolete, as it won’t boot on this and that CPU, won’t support the new network and graphics cards etc.? Well, Zeta is the product that made that support possible, and it even boots on opterons.
There is no disrespect to BeOS by using it’s icon for Zeta stories, on the countrary.
I’m posting this from NetPositive. Zeta booted without problems on my amd64 based system.
I had to change the screen resolution and I think the USB mouse only started working after I opened the USB preferences panel.
The main problem is that it didn’t mount my NTFS partitions. The Reiser partition mounted ok, but is read only.
PS: Net+ still doesn’t seem to have JavaScript support. The preview feature does not work.
Zeta doesn’t boot on my one computer and doesn’t recognize the onboard video cards on my other two computers. I can’t get above what looks like 256 colours.
I’m glad the demo was free because now I know my hardware isn’t supported.. despite being on the list. Strange.
Oh well. Really, not too much has changed since BeOS 5. Just the interface and the preferences app. That’s all I really noticed. Preferences app keeps crashing. Media player goes nuts when trying to connect and doesn’t change radio stations.
Maybe it works better on better supported hardware.
Einstellungen=Preferences
Sprache=Languages
Schriften=Fonts
Tastatur=Keyboard
Aenderungen die sie hier vornehmen wirken sich auf das gesamte System aus.
=
Changes you make here affect the whole system.
Btw, why the hell is the default language set to German ?!
That really makes no sense to me. (I know it’s a German company…)
Btw, why the hell is the default language set to German ?!
That really makes no sense to me. (I know it’s a German company…)
So a German company offers a live CD to its prospective German customers via a German ISP on a website in German …. yeah can see why you find it hard to see why the default language was set to German for this CD release 😉
I remember not to long ago, Zeta was selling there Live 1.0 for about $10.
Common, just look for the icon with the German FLAG on it (under system preferences).
I bet it is even easier then changing the language on say a MS system.