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I rebooted my machine, went into the BIOS and disabled the onboard firewire card. After rebooting back into Zeta, I was then able to plug in the USB memory card reader without causing the machine to hang, but it still didn't work. The USB preferences panel confirmed that Zeta could "see" the memory card reader, but the machine was still behaving strangely (i.e. was laggy/unresponsive).

Finally, I got a popup message that said "Tracker: unexpected thread error. Should an attempt be made to continue running?" The options were "continue", or "give up". I clicked "give up" but I could tell my mouse input wasn't being accepted. I clicked the Zeta menu just to make sure the system was still responding. The Zeta menu came up, so I decided to reboot, unplug the problematic hardware for the time being, and move on to some other hardware.

I have a Hewlett Packard OfficeJet G85 printer which is attached to an HP JetDirect 170X print server. Setting up my printer under Zeta was quite simple. I went to the printer preferences panel, clicked add printer, and simply completed the printer setup guide. The list of printers was extensive, and my printer was listed by exactly the right manufacturer and model number. When asked about my type of connection, I chose network -> HP Jetdirect, typed in the IP address of my printer, and then printed a test page. It worked beautifully.

I plugged my Logitech USB headset (model 250) into the computer. It did appear in the USB preferences panel, but I couldn't make it work. I went into the media preferences panel and the Logitech headset did not appear in the list of output devices. My guess is Zeta doesn't have a USB audio driver.

Conclusion

I think Zeta has a lot of potential. Zeta is very different from Windows, OSX, and the two "big" X Window System desktops, GNOME and KDE. If you like light weight window managers for the X Window System, you would probably admire Zeta. The responsiveness of the user interface is far better than what I'm use to with the X Window System or OSX. In many ways, it's far more responsive than Microsoft Windows. And in general, the user interface is just "cool", though some people might not like it. Personally, I've always been a fan of alternative operating systems and doing things in a variety of ways.

If you are all about desktop "eye candy", where you are more concerned about your desktop "looking cool" than actually being useful, then Zeta is definitely not for you. I'm not opposed to a desktop looking great, as long as it doesn't slow the system down. I'm quite excited about the development going on with X.org where it will take full advantage of modern video hardware. But for operating systems that don't utilize the capabilities of modern video hardware, I'd just as soon have everything lean and clean. Low latency.

All said, as it stands right now, I can't really recommend Zeta for anyone outside of someone that just wants to play. Most of the included programs are so bad that I wouldn't even recommend installing them. And finding programs to do what you want is going to be challenging. But if you don't care for Linux/FreeBSD, and your hardware is supported by Zeta, and you are able to find a program for each thing you want to do, Zeta is certainly worth considering!

--David Courtney