yellowTAB is pleased to announce that it will unveil version 1.0 of its flagship product, the Zeta Operating System, at Cebit 2005. Zeta 1.0 will incorporate many fixes over previous versions, as well as some new exciting features.
yellowTAB to Showcase Zeta 1.0 at Cebit 2005
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Too bad it’s not free. I love BeOS. If it could be updated, it would be really impressive. The system was rock solid and fast as well. I would love to boot one of these things up on a current system. But I’ll wait for OpenBeOS (or whatever they are calling it these days).
yuppieeeeeeeeeee!
Congrats to all of yT and all of us, who are members of the wonderful BeOS community– larger and more active than one would expect of the community of a so-called “dead OS”!
I’ll try to make it to CeBIT– it’s next-door basically (okay, half-day car trip, but oh well).
It would be nice if Zeta released some kind of liveCD, so the ones who never tried BeOS before, like me, could try it, and maybe buy a copy later.
Sadly it means nothing that they reached 1.0: Since they don’t hae the kernel source there’s little future for this OS – it will never make the leap to 64-bit nor will its structure ever develop further.
Hey, that’s a great idea. They could give it a 30 minute time period or something before it dies. That could break into the group of people who would rather try before they buy. I would definitely give it a go and probably buy too if it was good. Right now I have no clue and won’t until I actually buy or see an installation.
I am glad to see BeOS back. I am planning to get a laptop and run Zeta as soon it comes out. I would like to see more alternatives to Windows. I own a G5 and I love it but I want Zeta now!!!
-2501
Has YT said anything about the legal status of the code base for Zeta?
How do they expect people to buy a system they don’t know the legal status of? I would probably buy it if I knew that Palm would not shut the whole thing down in 6 months.
The mentioned “many fixes” were really desperatly needed, and i still don’t think that Zeta can run as stable as BeOS 5, and i won’t try it out unless they release a free demo / Live CD.
And I’m rather afraid of the “exciting new features”. Fucking up the preferences apps was enough “surprise”.
I know a lot of my fellow CS nerds and I would pay $25.00 for a copy of Zeta that contains all of the drivers and development tools. At this point, Yellowtab should be scrambling for cash and a customer base so selling a $25.00 bare-bones development version for us to play with would be a great idea. We don’t have $100.00 for an OS that might not be worth jack $hit on our computers, but $25.00, especially with free shipping, is very reasonable.
I am much more interested in work on Syllable and Haiku at this point. Anyone gotten the images of Haiku to load up in bochs?
Interesting… I didn’t know that, what are your sources? I’m assuming you have those, because you make a statement, not pose a question.
If you head on over to http://www.bebits.com you will find BeOs max v3.1 which does boot as a live cd. It’s not Zeta but will give you a very good impression of what to expect from it.
Everyone who use Beos R5 Pro or Zeta knows there is no need for a live-cd. The System is too easy and every BeOS R5 Pro or Zeta CD is a Live-CD too. Ask BeOS and Zeta Users if they can give you access with this tool ( http://www.bebits.com/app/4047 ). Go to their IRC Channels, visit their Usergroups and ask them how your hardware will work with BeOS or Zeta.
I hope they stick with their original agreement to support those who bought early. I know many have had enough ‘surprises’ already. It would be a big boost to their credibility if they make such support a ‘priority’ issue and show early adopters that their monetary support was acknowledged and appreiciated. A little extra for these folks would be a nice touch too, they deserve it since they are the ones that enabled yT to get this far!
There is no way YellowTab has any BeOS source code whatsoever seeing the progress they’ve made with Zeta, which is basically zero. Hacking up a few apps up on top of the leaked Dan0 release isn’t exactly momentous. Not being able to support more than 1gb memory?? That should be trivial to fix if they had any of the source, which of course they don’t. Why do people give this the time of day, it’s time to move on. I can’t imagine Zeta 1.0 will be much different than Dan0 was, bar a few apps such as the very poor iTunes clone and wow wee new preference interfaces. BeOS had it’s day, and that day was several years ago, time to move on folks
According to Bernd … see
http://www.yellowtab.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=3027
… ” Memory bug is fixed, that i can say.”
Yt make a good Job… Let hope make BeOS with “Zeta” to the old glory
> Sources…
> Zeta is dead in the water
<SW Ep1>Your ability to speak doesn’t make you intelligent</SW Ep1>
No need to tell anything if you don’t know anything.
> Live CD
Every BeOS CD is a live CD, just hit ctrl-alt-del and click “Restart the Desktop”… Been that way for a decade, way before Linux distros tried themselves at it.
I don’t think YellowTab has the kernel source, either. But it’s absolutely not true that supporting more than 1GB without breaking compatibility would be trivial if they had it. Why do you think the 1GB barrier was there in the first place?
However, it would probably be trivial to ignore everything above 1GB instead of crashing.
> However, it would probably be trivial to ignore everything above 1GB instead of crashing.
No it’s not. Where do we map the PCI memory then ? can’t map on existing RAM…
I know that you can use every BeOS CD as a Live CD (I’m a BeOS user since the early R4 days), but to do that with Zeta I had to pay for it first, and I want to try it out before buying. There’s a german proverb saying “Never buy a cat in a sack”.
I really like BeOS.
I have money to spend and I look forward to competing products from both the Haiku group and the yT group. I intend to support both strongly as well as new applications.
If yT can spiff up Zeta and fix/patch some existing problems then all the better. I have been using the Zeta releases for my everyday use and am happy with them. They are not perfect but they work pretty well and most important they could install on my reasonably current DELL box without a lot of work. Nice!
There a some really great folks working on making/keeping the Be computing legacy moving. I thank them all …. from the folks who are continuing to release driver or work on Java or Firefox to those that are working on either Zeta or Haiku. This is all great.
Ok, I guess you’re right… I’m absolutely no expert.
I remembered that strange patch for BeOS and thought, if some people can patch it without the source (non-trivial), it should be trivial to achieve the same thing if you have the source code.
Well, this is indeed good news. At long last, version 1 is being released.
Something tells me yellowTab already has access to the source code by now, and now they need to spiff up on resources to bring the whole thing more up to speed. (However, I don’t think they would make press releases on it. That would mean openly admitting they didn’t have it before, or that what they had wasn’t complete).
Long time Be users will be hard to satisfy though, because Be Inc. made us all have really high expectations at each release. (Though we sometimes seem to forget many big “glitches” still existed on every release).
I guess many of us wish that yT would implement razzle dazzle features like crazy like Be used to do. On the other hand, it seems yT might have more success at just expanding hardware support, since from the looks of it (New Preferences Panel, Media Player), yT still has a long way to go.
In any case, I do congratulate the team who has been working at bringing version 1 through!
Now, to some of the posters:
*Every* BeOS/Zeta CD is also a live CD. That has been like that long before Knoppix was born. They practically invented it.
Something that apparently has not been mimicked yet by other OSes is the ability to install it without needing to go through all the partitioning hassles.
(Wait I take that back, I just remembered WinLinux 2003 does that. Oh yes and all the vmwares and bochs things too).
I for one, be definitely supporting both Zeta and Haiku, to help better things to come.
This is just an exercise in whimsy, but what if you had what YellowTab has (BeOS 6) and no source code, but had tons and tons of money, had 75 top notch BeOS loving programmers working full time under one roof, everything being coordinated together, everything in sync – what do you think they could come up with? What really cool things could they do? What, having no source code, would hamstring them no matter what they tried to do?
Are you crazy? Not even Be Inc. had 75 programmers, even at their peak.
I’d be surprised if yT had more than 15 programmers on staff. Sheesh, not even many big ‘uns in PC-land have 60 programmers.
[You won’t find specific numbers at their website, though. The most you will find is that they are a “small team”.
http://www.yellowtab.com/company/about.php ]
I do agree though, that 4 years has been a long time for them to just come up with a feature here and a feature there.
SkyOS has done much more in that timeframe.
While I do agree having the source code is importanat, the most work in an operating system is not needed at kernel-level.
Many are tricked into thinking that due to the big spotlight that is shown for Linux, where Torvalds spends his waking hours at.
As I said, it is a whimsical question – not real.
…looks like the same mistakes MS made/make with Windows.
And some really common hardware in Europe are not supported:
AVM passive ISDN cards
Technotrend/Haupaugge DVB-S cards
(works like a charm in Windows & Linux)
And some really common hardware around the world are not supported:
Bluetooth
WLAN
(works like a charm in Windows & Linux)
BeOS is _really_ a _very_good_ study about Operating System design, but sorry, it’s dead.
Net access with admin rights is a downside, however it’s slightly less dangerous when compared to some versions of Microsoft Windows.
There are a few WLAN drivers that I believe even work in BeOS (not just Zeta), although I think I have yet to read about encrypted WLAN access (WEP or otherwise).
There are two drivers for common, modern 802.11x chipsets, Intel 2200 and Intersil Prism, both support WEP. Neither support zeroconfiguration, etc, however.
They are third party, closed source, and written for BeOS R5. Coincidentally, they work on Zeta, as some network drivers for R5 don’t.
Marcus Overhagen is working on a driver for Hauppuage DVB-S cards. Not YT but a third-party developer working on Zeta this time though.
Bluetooth – theres a proof-of-concept stack about. Nothing more… As most Bluetooth adapters are USB, a safer and easier to work with USB stack is needed first.
the point about releasing a live CD was not ‘we need Zeta to be a live CD and it’s not already!’ but ‘we need an easy free way to preview Zeta and decide whether we want to buy it’. Fine, every Zeta CD is a Live CD already, woo hoo. That still doesn’t address the original author’s point, though, so long as the only legal way to _get_ a normal Zeta CD is to pay $100 (or whatever it is) for it.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Yellowtab has managed to accomplish with Zeta. I know some of the developers who have been working on parts of it for a long time, and it was looking impressive. There is no doubt in my mind that they have access to the source code, and that will let them fix what needs fixing and make the necessary improvements.
Whether or not it will be worth purchasing is another matter. Looks like we’ll have to see how it works, what new hardware is supported, and the price that Zeta chooses. If they’ve made some good decisions, BeOS may have a minor resurgence in popularity. If not, then at least they made a good stab at it.
All the trolls and naysayers should shove off and let YT give it a shot. If it turns out to be crap, then so be it. But don’t try to knock them down without even giving them a chance – that’s just plain rude.
Couldn’t be said better.
They said that they will be show it off, does that mean that it will be released latter? I cound not find anything on their site about when it will ship.
Thank you, MYOB.