Submitted by Ever since Be, Inc. was dissolved and its BeOS technology was turned over to the Palm OS charnel house in ’01, Be fans have been eagerly awaiting a successor to their favorite operating system, with very few rays of hope since. Earlier this month, however, yellowTAB released their BeOS descendent Zeta. Have Be fans finally found their savior, or is this just another failed attempt at reviving the dead? Read on — this review will help you decide exactly that.
Zeta: A Refreshing State Of Be-ing
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
enough said!
I guess Zeta is still rough around the edges, I hope a service pack irons out the bus.
I am quite keen to see how Haiku responds whith their open scource OS.
Is it possible to create software that is compatible across all operating systems other than using java ?
Would create alot more interest in other OS’s.
I just will never be able to use Haiku or Zeta since they don’t recognize my hardware. A major hurdle for all new OS’s.
Another problem is writing drivers for each piece of hardware. Timeconsuming and not alot of programmers can handle it. Scitech snap has a pretty good solution for the problem.
Yeah it is possible to create software compatible across all operating systems. Pixel image editor is a very nice example.
http://www.kanzelsberger.com
THat’s all I got to say, still does not work on my laptop like it should by now. I’m not buying it…
…yet.
THat’s all I got to say, still does not work on my laptop like it should by now. I’m not buying it…
…yet.
Have you written to the hardware manufacturer asking them to release specs? Have you told the Zeta team what hardware won’t work? Or do these driver issues just fix themselves? Since, you know, Zeta should work on your laptop by now.
6 minutes without oxygen and brain death begins
As an ex-BeOS shareholder, Zeta give me a bitter taste, i feel like they take advantage of someone else work without having paid for it.. but anyway BeOS was doomed, so i suppose it’s better that way.
Most BeOS fans should be pleased with Zeta, even tough it dosen’t feel like a Be,inc product, it allow to run BeOS on recent hardware.
As an ex-BeOS shareholder, Zeta give me a bitter taste, i feel like they take advantage of someone else work without having paid for it..
Except for the fact that yellowTab bought the rights to create Zeta from Be Inc., right?
… wich wihtout doubt was used to pay off Be Inc debts.
I’m very doubtful that any shareholder saw any of that money.
Steve >Except for the fact that yellowTab bought the rights to create Zeta from Be Inc., right?
Where did you see that ? prove it..
Since Be was a PLC, wouldn’t they have to announce any such sale? Even if it during liquidation?
Yeah, completely unlike a shareholder who temporarily invests money to take advantage of someone else’s work without doing anything to improve it…
“Yeah, completely unlike a shareholder who temporarily invests money to take advantage of someone else’s work without doing anything to improve it…”
So I suppose giving a company money by buying shares doesn’t help the company. There’s nothing wrong with making a little money while you give a company more capital to improve their products. This is one of the driving forces of our economy.
No it’s not anything wrong doing this since we live in a world full of capitalists
but still don’t say you only did it to “help the company” 
and YellowTab didn’t buy the rights to “not improove” BeOS.. so i don’t see what the problem is that yT is improving the OS you spent money on to help then? this discussion sounds a bit strange to me really.
Well its true ZETA has to catch up the lost years of BeOS but again the review didn’t had any depth.
Missing in the review:
– CUPS;
– SANE;
– Responsiveness of the desktop
– More background information on YellowTAB and what they are currently doing to improve ZETA.
The reviewer appear to have missed some very nice points about Zeta. The review fells like it’s trying to look to zeta thru macos/linux/windows glasses.
For example, the reviewer complained about the boldness of the default yellowTAB team, well, I don’t like it either, that’s why I use the smoke theme that gives me more screen real state and looks very elegant, this theme is bundled with zeta and one can quick coin its own custom themes using the appearance control pannel, but the reviewer forgot that.
The reviewer forgot to talk about the Drag & Drop experience of Zeta, which is way better than windows and linux and missing nothing from MacOS X. It’s trully intuitive, allied with BFS queries, it can boost productivty.
He complained about Instant Messaging on Zeta, well, if he cared to access BeBits (the major BeOS/Zeta software archive) he would have found IMKIT which is a freeware that supports msn, icq and some other cool protocols and is really integrated with Zeta taking advantadge of BFS, People files and stuff.
He complained about scanners… have this guy seen SANE? Zeta is bundled with SANE so it supports more than six models… also CUPS is there.
One key point of the Zeta package that the Reviewer also forgot to tell is the applications that are bundled. The author says “apps in different stage of antiquity”, that is a lie. There are old apps, yes there are. There are new ones? Of course! For example Zeta comes with a brand new media player with many features. Zeta comes with a Video Editor that can rival the first and second incarnation of iMovie. Pretty slick and powerfull with Real Time effects, these two are made by YellowTAB, so one can see how yT is focusing on developing nice apps in house. Zeta comes with GOBE 2.0 which is an old office package but trust me, i’d choose no other. If someone care, he can check the story behind gobe and appleworks…
As the reviewer said, he is not much into multimedia, well, looking at the DVD box in my desk I see written: “Zeta” and “Media OS”. Zeta is a true beautifull multimidia oriented OS. The MEDIA pref pannel says it all.
The reviewer also forgot to tell things from a developer point of view and talk a little about Zeta microkernel and Zeta services (or kits), for example the media kit that does the multimedia stuff or the application kit. Also the Be API used to code using all those features is very polished and elegant. BeOS/Zeta was created to take advantadge of multiple CPUs and Multithreading from the start. Just check the “proccess controller” that comes bundled, it will give you power to manage your running process down to each of the threads. You’re able to move priorities, kill threads, for each running app. Never saw those features in windows or macos x. And never saw a desktop system that could take advantadge of multiple CPUs the way Zeta does.
Heck, I own 3 Modern macintosh systems here (iMac G4 and 2 iBooks), my Zeta machine is my old Pentium 200 MMX with ATI Radeon 7000 VE and a capture card, and I CAN EDIT VIDEOS!!!! when you last thought you could do video editing in an old p200 mmx?!
I don’t mean to start a flamewar here but we need a reviewer that actually understand about Zeta to the point of showing: what make Zeta unique, how Zeta can boost your computer experience and what is currently missing.
have I told you guys that MacOS X Tiger spotlight is nowhere near BFS queries?
I think I’ll do a deeper review of Zeta, maybe OSNews will carry it…
“I think I’ll do a deeper review of Zeta, maybe OSNews will carry it…”
Please do! It sounds like you know more about BeOS/Zeta than that guy by far.
Zeta is only fucking beloved BeOS.
I wish OSNews would stop posting about BeOS and its revival attempts because everytime they do I am forced to be reminded of my all-time favorite desktop OS (for its time) and I am SO SO saddened by what eventually happened to it.
I still remember when I first got the news that BeOS was going to focus on embedded only after a failed x86 attempt. This, I knew deep down, was the start of the fall and sure enough it was.
RIP
Is it just me or has anyone else missed seeing any screenshots yet? Not even on the yellotab home page. C’mon guys this is a GUI OS isn’t it?
I told YellowTAB to put some shots up last week so new, potential buyers get an idea. They didn’t seem to listen so far.
yeah.. that’s the worst part of YellowTab.. they really suck at doing marketing, they should write some more info and specs about Zeta aswell on their site if they want to attract more buyers..
I would add a request for LiveCD too..hard to convince anyone who probably have Windows XP installed and (on different degrees of satisfaction) running to simply decide to drop some cash on Zeta out of the blue.
I sent this request to them and all I got back was a link to some eBay offers.
I would add a request for LiveCD too..hard to convince anyone who probably have Windows XP installed and (on different degrees of satisfaction) running to simply decide to drop some cash on Zeta out of the blue.
The old BeOS install cds were LiveCDs. You just had to alt+f2 to get into a different workspace, where you could run programs in a limited fashion.
I don’t know if they kept it this way in Zeta. I figure they changed things as they decompress their massive software library (mostly taken from bebits/bezip) because it otherwise wouldn’t fit on cd.
Well as an old BeOS user since R4.5 I see some great improvements of BeOS in Zeta and i find the progress very nice indeed.. although I don’t think YellowTab should have released this version as 1.0, since it got some really nasty bugs..
My system get’s kernel-panic sometimes when playing MP3 someone told me there was some kind of bug in the AC97 driver, i cannot play any videos at all since i just get a one-colored background in the mediaplayer (overlay problem) and the ATI driver seems to unsupport my laptop monitor, it just goes black but with a light gray-contrast (guess it’s the backlight that turns on)..
But in general yT has done great improvements since BeOS both small adjusments that gives the user some more comfort in working with the OS just small ones like the fastlauncher that i really find usefull.. (like quicklauncher in windows) but also some more critical improvements such as many new drivers such as support for more onboard soundchips support for USB-harddrives (my maxtor 200gb works flawless) and alot of other things.
but.. it’s still not a 1.0 version in my eyes..
/ Tommy Frössman aka. Fanskapet
Well you know, I wouldn’t mind playing with this but it looks like they’re just trying to sell it, with no screenshots, and no way to download any evaluation version that I can see. I’m curious what their business model is and who they see their audience as. Are BeOS fans likely to pay money for this? Are there enough BeOS fans willing to pay for this to keep the project solvent? If they’re just going after old BeOS fans, then none of this is important. Still, I’m curious about it. I never used BeOS – would like to mess around with it.
Oh, and here’s something, and it could just be my system. When I go to “Shop” I get a big white empty screen, save the header and sidebar. I’ve tried this in Epiphany, Firefox, and Mozilla. I’m going to assume this works in MSIE, but you’d think if you were selling an alternative OS you’d try to make sure your site worked properly with the browsers that the kind of people who are willing to try out an alternative OS tend to use. Unless of course, it is just my system, in which case, mea culpa. At any rate it’s clearly not their responsibility to accomodate browsers that aren’t MSIE or anything, but for business purposes it makes sense to make sure that there is nominal compatibility with the store so I can call a number or write away or something.
I have to say I, personally, am underwhelmed by their effort here, and I haven’t even seen the OS yet. For those who are using a compatible browser, what is the cost of the OS?
If you set the page language to be german, in the top-right corner, you’ll see something in the shop page.
Yeah it’s bad.
It costs 100 EUR.
well.. not many company’s developing operative system has any “evaluation versions” but indeed they should get out some more information and screenshots to get more people interested in their product.
I think ZETA is going to have fate as CherryOS. Straight Down the flusher.
eh CherryOS? CherryOS was a emulator that ripped of code from the PearPC project and sold it as a own product.. that’s not even a operative system.. so that’s a dumb comparision.
ahh well just odd comments here so i’l just stop commenting on this thread
I like that review cause to use “a Windows or MacOS perspective” is OK; cause those are the two ones you have to compare with, if you say, that you’re doing a Desktop OS.
I’ve bought a RC but the R1 has been improved in some fields and in some fields it even went back – simply outdated, would have been fine for a preview version 2 or 3 years ago. But hell, we have 2005 and no one should waste his time with such a poor product.
Well just FYI I did report the browser problem on their contact page so hopefully they’ll rectify it.
I understand the point about evaluation versions of a developing product, but I think selling a whole OS – a whole platform, really – is a difficult sell and maybe the traditional rules shouldn’t apply.
I’m not an expert in marketing so maybe they know something I don’t, but I think if I was marketing this I’d want to make it viral. I’d want a lot of buzz, word of mouth. I’d want to get it out there in such a way that people couldn’t live without it, then figure out how to make money from selling upgrades or something. I’m not sure.
Unless, as I said earlier, there are enough old BeOS fans out there with cash in hand to keep this going, in which case this is irrelevant.
I am personally curious to see how it compares to the much-maligned Linux desktop in terms of usability. BeOS certainly had its fans, and there was an attractive spirit about it. I wonder if that can be revived with these new BeOS implementations.
Hello, spose this guy hasn’t had the time to bother exploring the OS and apps that come with it. The review was superficial at best and to me, bloody pathetic. I hope they write better reviews (indepth and thorough) for other OS’s out there.
I think personally this guy would be better off writing a review for Barney the Dinosaur as it is more to the level he might be able to convey with his shallow writing style.
Next great review OSNews? Please let it be substantial and not another Linux vs Windows flame fest peice.
There needs to be a quality control on the items coming from OSviews. Any reasonable points are undermined by the glaring errors.
The comments about instant messaging were indeed stupid and uninformed. iChat was launched as an AIM client. How many protocols does MSN Messenger support?
To ignore any and every 3rd party IM client and treat Zeta’s offering differently to Apple’s or Microsoft’s is ridiculous.
It´s funny to see a review of a multimedia oriented OS reviewed by a guy that isn´t a multimedia-oriented person as himself says, So i think that this review has not any validity.It´s as if a person who does know nothing of aeronautic would speak of the failures of a concept of a spaceship
first:obviously this windows release has nothing to do with innovation, it´s only for force user to upgrade to faster pc only for do the same things that you are doing right now on your old computer.period
second: faster windows? on 3 ghz computer with tons of ram and the lastest gfx card sure windows is faster but no because windows itself is fast but because the hardware is more fast.And sure that with this configuration win98 and winxp are million years faster than windows vista
and last but not least, linux lived cd (knoppix) runs faaaaaaaaaaaaaaasssssssssteeeeeeeeerrrrrr than windowsxp, despite linux is running from cd and winxp is running from HD, on my 500 mhz celeron, and that hardware is more than 5 years old.And knoppix do all that windows do.So yes linux on old hardware is funny
Wasn’t Zeta to be open sourced some time this year? yellowTAB keeps promising this for quite some time already. Until that actually happens Zeta remains just another proprietory OS and there is no reason for me to use it.
I’m pretty sure they never ever promised that.
A PC (msdos) partition table has 4 slots, allowing 4 primary partitions per disk. These 4 slots exist whether or not the partition metadata are valid or not. You can’t delete a slot, but you can set the slot metadata to empty.
BTW, extended partitions are a hack, implemented as recursive partition tables. BeOS’ DriveSetup doesn’t allow populating extended partitions. Hence my apologetic stance.
tcl and python and i think that even perl are far broader then that stinky java
isn’t that site the same that removed a crap review a while back?
anyway, while BeOS can run nice and allow you to edit video on ‘old’ hardware, it’s not old as in ‘any crap you have laying on the basement for a decade’. anyway… not getting into that.
and yes, write it! …and don’t forget to submit the link to slashdot also
Yes you’re right, osViews had to remove an article about 2 weeks ago because lack of facts ++.
—
http://bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits.
That’s already been discussed here isn’t? i belive that the ‘conclusion’ we get from our _guesses_ was that yT was formed after the Palm purchase so it “could” have a license from palm… anyway, i don’t recall it.
the weird part is that they don’t claim that they have a license in a clear manner even knowing that the community has this doubt very seriously, so for me it proves that they don’t have.
— gabriel
Seems there could be a real opportunity for Zeta as a Laptop OS if not all laptop maufacterers were aiming for most powerful instead of most efficient (longest battery power).
Seeing as it runs easily on older hardware, it could be made into a fantastic option if there was say a transmeta based laptop that did >6 hours. And since most laptop users use them for quite non-demanding tasks like wordprocessing, browsing, progrmaming, budgetting etc there would be no problem with applications, especially now with Java support.
I’m not sure how the networking part of Zeta scales up though? Bluetooth, wireless etc?
I’m not sure how the networking part of Zeta scales up though? Bluetooth, wireless etc?
Wireless network card-drivers work on a per-chip basis, and I think 2 out of x chipsets are supported. I could be really wrong though.
Also their page mentions coming with an NDIS wrapper so it will work with most Centrino-wifi.
There are one or two entries on Bebits for Wireless. Someone is working hard on wireless support at least.
First, a comment on old apps. Lately everytime I boot a Windows machine it seems the updates to the media player is making the play-back window smaller and smaller. Each update also seem to make the controls to move away from the default setting harder than before. I don’t know why for sure, but I have been noticing more and more of what I think are ads showing on the sides as I play videos from certain site. The Anime Music sites are a random grab-bag but there seems to be tons of ads when I go to space related sites.
One thing I found with the simple media players of BeOS – Simple to use controls – No ads. Sometimes old code is better.
As for code working on all versions of BeOS that is why I release *all* my code in source code form, most time I do not include the binary at all. As long as the code was written for 4.5 or more recent I have found code ports between the diffirent BeOS easyily (not networking code) with most of the problem clearly pointed out by the compiler.
People!!! BeOS is dead and will NEVER be back in anything better than a shell of its former glory. I loved BeOS as much as the next tech who could truly appreciate its wonder, power and glory, but its over… OVER. No more. Get a friggin life already. The new versions of MacOS and Windoze are on the way and they are so far ahead of any Be Dev right now that there is no hope to catching up let alone coming close to a solid OS for the media masses. Linux also beats and BeOS implementation out there by a long shot. There just isn’t enough people behind any of the BeOS clone projects to make a serious go of it. So, for God’s sake please, abandon these dead dreams and put your efforts into worth while projects. At least then you’d have something of real value to show for your efforts.
The rolled the drum for some years about how great will Zeta be… It was all a SHAM. I’d choose R5 anytime. I WILL NOT pay for this… this “shadow” of BeOS.
It is a joke and has 0 credibility.
Regarding Zeta…Until the legal issues regarding IP is cleared up then YellowTab doesn’t have much credibility, and it costs as much as XP. Might as well wait for Haiku.
> The scroll wheel in my mouse for example, was useless
What kind of statement is this? It’s like complaining about the trunk being to small when reviewing a Ferrari.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to compare Zeta to a Ferrari, but I simply want to stress that to point of Zeta is not neccessarily to make your mousewheel work. I agree that it sucks if it doesn’t work, but come on, Zeta is a highly alternative OS, it’s more or less obvious that it’ll suck sooner or later in some points.
But who cares?
It’s a fun toy and I’m sure it might even have it’s strenghts and some fascinating aspects.
There’s so much talk here and yet I have not heard that many people actually buy a copy…
I want to buy it. But I am in Canada, the site is not clear to me about what I need to do to get it sent here.
Does anyone know of a Canadian dealer, and if it is on Zeta’s website could you please give the URL as I have not found it.
I’m in Victoria, BC. I bought my copy (an upgrade from RC3) from BMTmicro- http://www.bmtmicro.com , as ICO decided not to carry it. Pretty fast service.
mark
Well I think you can find something amazing and something like a great advantage in avery OS – you can find advantages on a C64 for example.
Everyone has to decide if the price (not talking about money) for this or that advantage is a good deal in comparison to the disadvantages.
Another review OS Views posted about BeOS/ZETA/HAIKU was seriously lacking of facts but if you test an OS on your system and something doesn’t work, than it’s more or less your duty to mention it.
But of course you should mention your hardwareconfig, too.
np
ok then BeOS are dead but Haiku and Zeta are not.
You “can” only install one windows XP licens per PC with Zeta I can use them on all my PC’s + I don’t need to by a office (don’t start with Open Office they don’t support MS files) (We have 6 PC with the old once 4 are in use) so all off them will not have next Windows (Zeta/Haiku can only get better).
And about legal thats Yellowtab’s problem in sweden we can by something in goodfaith and I belive when they say they have right to sell Zeta. I don’t know if they have the source code or not but they have made some big changes with the kernel.
“Yeah, completely unlike a shareholder who temporarily invests money to take advantage of someone else’s work without doing anything to improve it…”
Someone has no idea what the stock market is….
This is twice now that they’ve put up an article that has either been horrendously missleading and innacurate, or just out and out BS (depending on your point of view).
I run R1 happily, I have to say so far that OSNews’s own review has been the most accurate based on my own experiences. YMMV of course, especially with some models of Dual P3 systems..
But this article, Running it on an ancient Pro system with a whopping 32Mb’s of ram… And he wonders why he gets slowdowns? As Eugenia said on OSViews, that is below the minimum requirements… From other things mentioned, I’d have to take a guess that his video card wasn’t supported fully either…
When doing a review, supply the system specs. Not doing so is dishonest, not to mention unhelpful to potential new users.
I truly hope OSViews gets their act together, because if the rest of their reviews are like the two I’ve seen regarding Zeta, I have to say I pity the poor users out there that mistakenly stumble on the site thinking it might provide insight into alternatives to Windows…
…but it does make one or two valid points, hardware support IS an issue, but how can it not be with an OS that has not been updated in many years and drivers dependent on OS enthusiasts/programmers.
On the other hand, I am getting tired of the comments about BFS and attribute querying. BFS competes well against Google desktop, spotlight and the upcoming Vista + updates. It is a very quick and powerful tool and I think the people who berate it simply don’t understand its power or have not used it. I have, others have, programmatically and it is very useful. If someone had the time, a Google desktop-like product could easily be written for BeOS in native code, using attributes or even simply augmenting the current attribute system with the giant indexed file (or db) method.
So there.
On the other hand, I am getting tired of the comments about BFS and attribute querying. BFS competes well against Google desktop, spotlight and the upcoming Vista + updates. It is a very quick and powerful tool and I think the people who berate it simply don’t understand its power or have not used it.
I never used BeOS for more than a couple of hours, but I’m a bit tired of seeing BFS metadata search sold as something that it is not. It’s a nice technology that could have _led _to great search tools years ago, when all you asked from an OS was for it to have a sort-of-working native application for each need. But nowadays, as the vendors lock-in falls apart and documents start to flow more freely between different OSs and systems you need a real live query system to:
1) index and search the _content_ of the files through a library of importers/plugins
2) work on different filesystems, with various degrees of extended attribute/metadata support
That’s what Beagle, Spotlight and Windows’ next search tools aim for.
BFS metadata looks more like a good foundation layer for the part of the search that happens on it. But in real life (in real work) you have to deal with USB pens formatted in fat32, or remotely mounted shares in NTFS seen through samba, full of Word files and PDF files with no metadata set on them, save for those an importer can extract from the proper ‘data’.
Again, I’m sure a BFS-only-solution is great for a limited use, and it was really a breakthrough when it came out, but our needs or at least the needs of many users have changed since then.
i would love to see zeta succeed with beos, however…i don’t see it happening, and the main reason is drivers and hardware support…..
a hardware company can only be expected to support so many opperating systems… it costs them a lot of money to port to windows, linux, bsd, zeta, mac, and God knows what else
.. that being the case… hardware vendors will gravitate toward supporting the highest volume customers…… windows first, then osx, then linux/bsd…..
i’m not saying this a death sentence….., in fact i really hope zeta succeeds…. it would truly be a breath of fresh air, but i don’t know if it is gonna happen…… but who knows….. linux took off…… maybe some day in the not to distant future beos will surpass linux
It looks cool, particularly to someone who was a huge BeOS fan back in the day. But they want $100 for it! Come one! Tiger is $129, and it does a hell of a lot more. They need to get real with a pricing scheme.
I think you got it wrong. Zeta runs on x86 hardware. If you were thinking of OSX Tiger, then you must buy hardware too, which is OK, but costs a lot. And third party software if you want to use for anything more.
On the other hand, if you are already using x86, you must buy only the OS. Name one commercial OS with a price less than Zeta which knows more.
Name one commercial OS with a price less than Zeta which knows more.
It’s not there yet, but most probably will be cheaper, and surely will contain more (but still usable) software: SkyOS (https://skyos.org).
IMHO (from “client” point of view) 100$ is too much for such thing.
On the other hand (from “seller” point of view), if we count how much they spend on production, support, and all those travels around the world and think how many copies they can sell, 100$ may be not so much to cover costs and buy some food.
Name one commercial OS with a price less than Zeta which knows more.
It’s not there yet, but most probably will be cheaper, and surely will contain more (but still usable) software: SkyOS (https://skyos.org).
You gotta be kidding!