In my opinion, every operating system needs a simple text editor. Zeta has one and it is called StyleEdit. StyleEdit is just an extremely light weight text editor (think Windows' notepad.exe).
After messing with StyleEdit for a few minutes, Zeta again prompted me for my serial number and activation key. I checked out my Zeta CD box again and still couldn't find it. Finally, by accident, I happened to flip the postcard over. The one entitled "ZETA Version 1.0 Activation Keys". On the back of that card I found the serial number and activation key. I typed in my key, clicked the button, the program "phoned home", and just a moment later it let me know that my information was accepted.
In watching the activation process communicate back to the Zeta website, I was reminded of the fact that the EULA did say that a person was allowed to install Zeta onto multiple machines that they owned as long as they didn't run them at the same time. For example, you could run Zeta on your desktop, and on your laptop, and you wouldn't require a second license as long as you didn't run them at the same time. Of course, there isn't a technical limitation preventing you from doing so. It's just how the license agreement reads.
Zeta comes with a program it calls "DVD Player" (which is actually a port of VLC). Calling it "DVD Player" is inaccurate though. VLC is capable of playing all kinds of video and audio files. Ironically, in my tinkering with Zeta, playing DVD's was the only thing I could not get "DVD Player" to do :). With mpg, xvid, mov, or even vob files, the "DVD Player" program would at least play them. Sort of. The high quality videos I had were skipping really bad. It was as if my CPU was being choked. But according to the CPU utilization meter, the CPU wasn't going over 50% usage. So I'm not sure what the problem was. It's interesting to note that BeOS (hence, Zeta) is supposed to be the multimedia OS. Right?
Zeta comes with a music player simply called "Media Player". It's a very light weight player that is capable of playing many formats "out of the box", including MP3. It handles streaming audio from the Internet and has the minimum features you would want such as repeat, shuffle, and playlists. For many people, anything more than that is considered bloat. Personally, I've kind of outgrown the ultra basic media player programs. I would prefer a program like RhythmBox that allows me to rate music and create a music library. But for my occasional Zeta usage, the included Media Player program works just fine.
All of my music is stored on a network attached storage device. By using Zeta's WindowsNetworks application, I was able to mount my music share quickly and easily. The WindowsNetworks application provides you with a graphical tool to mount Windows or Samba shares. It has fields for username and password, share name, server IP address, workgroup, and server name. I entered in my username and password, the share name I wanted to mount, and the IP address of my NAS. I then clicked "mount network drive" and the share was instantly mounted.
The primary tool used in navigating the Zeta file system is called Tracker. Tracker is like Explorer in Windows, or Finder in Mac OSX. Tracker is extremely fast. Navigating from one directory (folder) to another is instantaneous. A directory full of images will show up as thumbnails. The thumbnails are large enough to get an accurate idea of what the image is. And each thumbnail has a subtle dropshadow to improve the aesthetics of the directory display.
