YellowTAB announced today that their forthcoming Zeta OS will have full support for all three kinds of USB (on both USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 speeds): OHCI, EHCI and UHCI. BeOS 5 and Dano OSes from Be, Inc. only had limited USB 1.1 support, mostly working best with Intel chipsets. Additionally, the company announced that they internally moved to Perforce from CVS.
USB 2 on YellowTAB’s Zeta Underway
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Nice to see Yellowtab giving the public more frequent and detailed news about the development of Zeta 1.
Wish I could order my copy though…:)
Yay. There is so much anticipation you have no idea. I hope everything works as well as promised. I am looking into their developers edition for the mere price of $99 US.
I dunno, I kind of liked the ‘ol “promise less, deliver more” strategy of Be… well, when they actually followed through on the “deliver” part of the equation. The new features were actually a pleasant surprise, rather than “meh, I’ve been reading about this for the last 8 months – next.” Major OS releases never live up to the hype – remember when 10.1 was going to be the release that fixed all the speed issues in OS X?
I’m afraid that Zeta might fall victim to the “Mask of Zorro” effect. That movie was hyped for something like a full year prior to release – when it finally hit theatres, most people I know didn’t care anymore.
If you must, just say “It’ll be released when it’s finished.” Playing the RSN game just pisses people off – or, worse, makes them apathetic. Creating awareness of your product is great, but it helps if people can actually buy it.
I’m bored sh*tless hearing about this now. Sorry for the profanity, but its true. I bored reading about how good something is going to be and never really seeing anything substantial at all. What I have read didn’t really do much to set my curiosity on fire. Like the guy above said, if this was a movie I feel I know the script backwards by now, even though I haven’t yet seen the movie.
Oh well, maybe in another year or two we can get to a final release, then we will see if all the hype was worthwhile. Somehow I doubt it.
Q
You know guys, you really don’t know what you want… Lycoris also has a very small team, and their final update was supposed to come out last December, but they are still having betas to this day. Put that in your skulls: OSes are not mail clients or image viewers. They are complex beasts and require LARGE teams. Something that YellowTAB and Lycoris do not have. Therefore, cleaning up for a release a whole OS, is a long process.
The fact that YTAB has these news items every few days is VERY encouraging. When YellowTAB was not having news on their site, everyone was crying foul. Now that they do, you again cry foul. You really don’t know what you want.
Tip: Don’t listen to some of BeShare’s uneducated fanatics.
to work for YTAB =] I’ve wanted to work on an OS with a small team, going fun low-level kernel and driver stuff for some years now.
This is fantastic. In the past few weeks we have seen a load of screenshots with some new apps; found out that they are integrating KHTML and webcore to give us a new and greatly improved Net+ browser; and now full USB 1 & 2 support! This really should be the R5 upgrade we were looking for.
In other related news – it would appear that Frans Van Nispen is back in the saddle over at Xentronix so we should also have a great audio editing app and graphics app when Zeta launches.
Bring it on!!!
Well, the ship is sailing, no complaints there. YellowTab have been able to suprise everyone quite a number of times – ie. no one expected Webcore, KHTML, and now we get a very promising USB2 stack. Apparently, there are still a few secrets left before the ship sails into harbour. Well done yellowTab.
Congratulations YellowTAB!
Yes, I remember when Yellowtab had a ***ROADMAP***. This is starting to look like the wait for Xandros Linux, a long year with no less than three schedule delays, great expectations that ended up in a great deception, like going backwards.
I fear something similar, a bloated OS with “everything and the kitchen sink”, no capable Internet browser working properly, plus a dated GUI that would make you miss Windows95 neat&clean uniform design (sic). Why is UI design so commonly understated? The Zeta Deskbar looks dreadful.
Anyway, YellowTab is trying hard, Deskbar and all. Perhaps that’s the most depressing thing, not even trying that hard -anybody- seems able to deliver an alternative, pretty [***UNIFORM GUI***, neatly designed] and fully functional modern Desktop OS. Waiting here for Longhorn to come.
The GUI is pretty ugly, and very important for end desktop users. I hope they hire a skilled GUI designer (and not a programmer who claims to be an interface Guru – programmers rarely make good designers).
so when can we get our hands on it?
too bad IZ Corp will never sell a stand alone version of the software that runs radar. If they sold that in combination with their A/D, D/A converters for existing PC users (as opposed to within radar) then yellowtab would be in the green.
regardless is still want this yellowtab thing
Well mate, how about checking http://www.openbeos.org and you can work with a small team on a revolutionary kernel and do drivers amoung many other things.
Zeta is more of a hype than an OS, they haven’t solved some of the crucial problems which people wanna see solved by now. Amoung many things the 1gig ram bug.
Zeta is vapourware and buying it doesn’t really help anything to the BeOS community. So far Zeta has been eating promising projects which could be public on the Be platform and turned them into a part of the OS.
USB bla bla, how about dropping your ML Donkey and some Core and some other projects which doesn’t belong there and do some serious development instead.
>Amoung many things the 1gig ram bug.
First of all, it is not a bug. It was designed to be that way, back when people didn’t have more than 4 MB of RAM.
Second of all, if you fix this “bug”, you lose binary compatibility. This is why Be never got aroudn to fix it. Too much work to go around it and with possible loss of compatibility.
It should eventually get fixed, for for a Zeta 1.0 you might not wanna touch it, as there is already a lot of work trying to get the OS up to speed.
I played with Zeta when it was on display in Tokyo in early July and, contrary to what some people are saying here, it was quite pleasing to the eye. There were some artifacts that needed cleaning up but yT is focusing more on the REAL bugs.
If you want BeOS now download BeOSMax. If you can wait then keep your eyes on Zeta and the various OBOS projects. Simple as that.
I for one will value full USB support in Zeta. It will also allow more drivers to be developed (finally!)
Most folks, in my experience, have between 128 and 512 MB of RAM. A 1GB limit is not a huge drawback, in my book. Yes, it’ll have to be addressed eventually, but I think that’s an issue for Zeta R2, or maybe even R3.
I think I’ve been reading about Zeta for “years”. But there are nothing to be used yet. Several version of Widows already come and go but sadly Zeta remain as it is
Zeta as a not-1-person-show but as a real team project started just last year.
“Several version of Widows already come and go but sadly Zeta remain as it is”
Funny, Windows 2003 server doesn’t seem like “several” versions of windows to me. Not to mention it is a server OS, and not even close to what we are discussing – a desktop OS.
Next time think for yourself before jumping on the bandwagon with all the other sheep.
that certain is good news for those moving forward – however, how many of you actually have USB2 devices ?
I dont have one – I’ve only ever seen a 2GB HD that used one.
My Palm, Bluetooth adapters, Webcam, etc all use 1.1
Out of the 6 PCs I own (2 x P4s, 3 x P3s, Celeron) I dont even have a USB2 port.
Well I’d be pretty pleased to see USB2 for external HDs.
Even more so if it could boot from USB2 (are you listening guys). Thats not something I ever expect to see from Windows, but it would get me off Windows/BeOS multi boots that always seem to get damaged by you know who. And I have to wonder about the performance, will wait and see, I am so used to poor BeOS file IO I’d like to know if Zeta will catch up some.
Hope they can also reccomend some better HW that it will run on like perhaps a Shuttle cube with near 3GHz cpu, I am ready to upgrade.
Looking good!
Sikosis, I am lucky enough to have a combi USB2/FW external.
The HD was a $100 CompUSA holiday special only 40G/5400 and performs like a charm. Even still under W2K the USB2 seems to avg 5MByte/s, on USB1.1 its only 1MByte/s (not bad considering) and under FW its maybe 7MByte/s 20% faster than USB2. The test was a 1GB dir backup probably WinNT. Huge files probably go some faster. My internal IDE HDs don’t seem to be any faster IIRC at 5400rpm. 7500rpm should go 20% faster.
I can’t think of any other USB2 device I would like to see except perhaps a next gen 4MB camera or Flash storage, buts thats in the future. My current med rez camera is so slow at USB1.1 downloads, that would be nice to speed up.
BeOS R5 doesn’t see either the HD or Camera, hopefully Zeta will & boot from HD with a new mobo.
Perhaps yT will recomend some USB2 cameras if they get to that, Flash too. yum yum
Maybe you should check your drive. 5MB/s is waaaay too low.
USB2 can (supposidly) go to 60MB/s, which is obviously faster than most HDDs out there. Even at half that, thats still way too low. Maybe you got a 1.1 version and didn’t realize it 😉
I have an iMac running YDL 3.0 but I am buying a laptop just to run BeOS. i can not wait !!!!!!
congratulations BeOS.
– 2501
First of all, it is not a bug. It was designed to be that way, back when people didn’t have more than 4 MB of RAM.
Second of all, if you fix this “bug”, you lose binary compatibility. This is why Be never got aroudn to fix it. Too much work to go around it and with possible loss of compatibility.
Honest question:
You say this was designed this way back when people had 4MB of RAM. Fine. However, Be broke binary compatiblity a few times, most recently at a time when 1GB of RAM didn’t seem so outrageous. So why wasn’t it “fixed” then? Also, if it was designed this way instead of some other way, perhaps there is some advantage to this method?
One last question: Is the VM able to give a process more that 1GB of memory?
Thanks for replying.
Honest question:
You say this was designed this way back when people had 4MB of RAM. Fine. However, Be broke binary compatiblity a few times, most recently at a time when 1GB of RAM didn’t seem so outrageous. So why wasn’t it “fixed” then? Also, if it was designed this way instead of some other way, perhaps there is some advantage to this method?
The advantage was simplicity of design, nothing more. As for why it wasn’t fixed, time and manpower. As was pointed out previously, fixing that and various associated kernel issues would have taken on the order of 1-2 years for a few dedicated kernel engineers who knew what they were doing. Not a trivial undertaking.
One last question: Is the VM able to give a process more that 1GB of memory?
That’s kind of moot considering you can’t put 1GB in there to give the process anyhow, but I doubt it. I’m not certain on that one though.
interesting facts. how do you know this, if I may ask? ;o)
That’s kind of moot considering you can’t put 1GB in there to give the process anyhow, but I doubt it. I’m not certain on that one though.
the amount of virtual memory allocated to a process has no relationship to the physical memory present in the system, hence my question.
I think a message in http://www.BeOSjournal.org mentions some issues which we want to be solved in BeOS (I think OBOS adresses these faster than Zeta though)
http://www.beosjournal.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=643&postdays=0&pos…
The guy who wrote the post is abviously very critic, and I also understand why, read this before expecting anything from VapourTab
Perhaps there was too much talk but, on the other hand, people also don’t like it when developent teams don’t say hardly anything (like OBOS was doing). So, you can’t win. At least Zeta is a tangiable thing and, unless there’s some forseen disastor, it will be available one of these days.
interesting facts. how do you know this, if I may ask? ;o)
From talking to various Be engineers. Besides which I believe JBQ made a note of that in a comment on another one of OSNews’s stories at some point because someone asked.
the amount of virtual memory allocated to a process has no relationship to the physical memory present in the system, hence my question.
Indeed though trying to seriously manipulate data in that size range when you’re incessantly hitting swap would be a less than productive experience as I think you can agree
I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to this one unfortunately, though there are apps such as SampleStudio that use their own custom virtual memory systems to be able to work with > 4GB sound files. Looking at its code might yield some insight into this, though I’ve not yet done so myself.
“The Zeta Deskbar looks dreadful.”
why? it’s no diferent than open deskbar in functionality. If you refer to color sheme, this is all decorable. All those telling the GUI is hugly and don’t talk about FUNCTIONALITY you are just spam, noise, fly fart… For me the overall icon set in SVG is far more worrying, not what zeta will provide but how long until all develloper do their icon for all app in SVG?
For me so far, only font spacing in screenshot worry me. My personal feeling is that this is marketing ploy to make day before release shot look magical being fixed, just to generate last minute hype back
The 1M limit, and does NewOS or should i say the forked one for OBOS will have more? And so how will they maintain compatability?
On the real subject, USB is not good news, it’s not extra. It’s stuff that an OS company need in is first release. Then you have other concern, will it work with all mobo? will is work with USB port on PCI card? At least it’s one thing to remove from the floating feature list.
By the way will we have a working Paralel Port this time?
Knowing when/if to release info about upcoming products is a tightwalk best left to marketing experts. You want folks to know you’re not dead, but at the same time you don’t want people to get bored or tired. You’re never going to make everyone happy… In my opinion, early on you’d only want brief and occational releases. Just before release, wham, you let it all go with as much detail and hype as possible.
As to whether it’s vapor-ware or not, only time will tell. At the YT forums there is a link to download an interview with Bernd in which he says Zeta will be ready December 2002. One theory, perhaps the new investor/YT buyer added enough money to address issues that weren’t part of the original plan.
For people wanting Zeta to be a primary operating system to completely replace Windows on the very newest hardware, they’re going to be disappointed. For other users, such as myself, looking for a secondary or tertiary OS, Zeta just needs to get the basics done. By basics I mean sound, graphics, modem, and a decent software selection.
Best Wishes,
Bob
First of all, it is not a bug. It was designed to be that way, back when people didn’t have more than 4 MB of RAM.
I don’t think that makes it any less of a bug. Zeta, in that regard, does not function the way a user would (and should) expect it to function in this day and age. Maybe 1 Gig of RAM was a lot back in the R5 days (and I would argue that even this isn’t true), but it sure isn’t a lot of memory today…
And today is when Zeta is being marketed, not 5 years ago. A 1 Gig limit is unacceptable.
Adam
Does the 1GB limit actually crash the system? Or does BeOS only utilize the first 1GB?
It’s not the end of the world if you’ve installed RAM that’s not being utilized…
-Bob
@Adam
I don’t think that makes it any less of a bug. Zeta, in that regard, does not function the way a user would (and should) expect it to function in this day and age. Maybe 1 Gig of RAM was a lot back in the R5 days (and I would argue that even this isn’t true), but it sure isn’t a lot of memory today…
It’s not a bug. If something operates exactly as the designer intended it is not a bug. It just doesn’t operate how you want it. You can’t spin that to say what you want no matter how hard you try.
And today is when Zeta is being marketed, not 5 years ago. A 1 Gig limit is unacceptable.
It’s funny that you say that because rather recently Intel produced a chipset that hardware limited the system to 512mb of memory :]
Anyway, a 1GB limit is *more* than acceptable for a consumer OS. It may not be in your *opinion*. But it is quite acceptable *statistically speaking*. Most desktops have 128mb or less of memory. Now I’m talking about desktops in general. Obviously those statistics are completely different if you only applied them to consumers of BeOS.
>Does the 1GB limit actually crash the system? Or does BeOS only utilize the first 1GB?
It will actually crash the system. Read more here too:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1478 (and the comments)
It’s not a bug. If something operates exactly as the designer intended it is not a bug. It just doesn’t operate how you want it. You can’t spin that to say what you want no matter how hard you try.
Nice try. If something doesn’t operate exactly as a user expect it to, then it is a bug. It doesn’t matter what the designer or programmer thinks (and I’m saying this as a software developer). All that matters is what the consumer thinks since they’re the ones that make the final decision in using an application (or, in this case, operating system). And you can’t spin that to say what you want no matter how hard you try.
Most desktops have 128mb or less of memory.
Mind telling me where you pulled this statistic from?
Even if that’s the case (and I’d still like to see proof), what matters is how much memory is going to be common in desktop systems for the time period after this initial version of Zeta is released and before the next version of Zeta is released. As an operating system vendor, Yellowtab needs to take into account support not just for current hardware but future hardware.
Also bear in mind that it’s not just 1 Gig of system RAM… It’s system RAM + video RAM + … that has to be less than 1 Gig. If I want to use R5 on my desktop machine (with a 128 meg video card), I have to make sure there is less than 640 megs of system RAM in it. To me, this is unacceptable and unless Yellowtab fixes this bug, I will not be purchasing Zeta.
Adam
These people should be banned from making any more anouncements until they actually release something.
Sorry, but I really don’t agree with you.
If something doesn’t operate exactly as a user expect it to, then it is a bug. It doesn’t matter what the designer or programmer thinks
My car doesn’t bring me where I want, I have to drive it. I didn’t know my car was buggy…
Also bear in mind that it’s not just 1 Gig of system RAM… It’s system RAM + video RAM + …
… + what? sound card RAM + level 1 cache + level 2 cache + HD buffer + CD-Burner buffer (unless it’s BurnProof)???
It’s just system RAM.
> If something doesn’t operate exactly as a user expect it to, then it is a bug. It doesn’t matter what the designer or programmer thinks
Actually, I completely agree with this assertion. Adam is absolutely right there.
>+ what? […] It’s just system RAM.
No, it is not *just* system ram. You did not seem to have clicked the link I provided earlier: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1478
My car doesn’t bring me where I want, I have to drive it. I didn’t know my car was buggy…
Errr… No offense, but if you expect your car to bring you where you want without having to drive it (or having someone else drive it), then your an idiot. In 100 years, when/if cars commonly do that, and you purchase a new car that doesn’t, you might have a point about your new car being buggy.
And thanks for backing me up, Eugenia 🙂
Adam
[/i]My car doesn’t bring me where I want, I have to drive it. I didn’t know my car was buggy… [/i]
That’s like saying “oh my god internet explorer didn’t bring me to the exact website I wanted to go to as soon as I got on the computer, I actually have to open the browser and type the url into there! it’s so buggy!”
Obviously this 1gb ram limit is becoming an issue. Anyone working with media stuff in any other operating environment has to remove memory to run Zeta. Oh my, isn’t that special???
Besides, I thought Zeta was partially target for Business users? Guess they can drop that market.
Oh and people working with video stuff they can just forget I guess…. whatabout audio? Well that’s pretty much what they have left then.
DO they really have source code access or is this like BeOS Max just that we have to pay for it?
Sorry, but BeOS MAX does not do any engineering. YTAB does.
Yes, the 1 GB limit should be fixed. It is just that it ain’t a trivial fix. It is a VERY difficult fix (if you care for backwards compatibility).
The 1GB ‘bug’ is this:
If you have more than 1GB of ram in your system, BeOS will not boot. Period.
If you are using BONE or Dano, the situation is even worse. BeOS will not boot unless you hvae LESS than 1GB of ram.
This is why my system only has 768MB, for that is the maximum you can (safely) use under all variants of BeOS.
And even that would be possibly unbootable, if I had a 128MB AGP vid card.
To prevent this, I use cards with very little memory:eg. Matrox G200 with 8MB, and Voodoo3 with 16MB.
In this day and age, such a 1GB limit is a defect.
As well as being a quick and dirty hack.
Well said Meroveus. This is exactly the case today.
“DO they really have source code access or is this like BeOS Max just that we have to pay for it?”
Yes, apparantly they have access to ~some~ of the BeOS source code, so they should be able to address some of the old bugs.
If the RAM limit actually causes the system to crash, then it certainly is a *bug*. How could anyone argue otherwise? What would be the practical purpose of such a ‘feature’ if it was done on purpose?
I don’t think many home computers have more than 1 GB of RAM, so it’s not a vital issue this release. But if not fixed, it will be a serious problem within a year or two.
Excellent quote from ELQ’s link:
“Oh, and don’t throw away that old PII or PIII you have if you want to continue using BeOS in the years to come.”
These older PCs are being tossed out or are sold out on eBay for practically nothing. Why not avoid the 1GB limit and buy one? They’re cheaper than price of Zeta…
-Bob
I’m wondering what everyone would be running on BeOS that would require 1 GB RAM?
I use BeOS as my main OS for media production. At the same time, I have open Blender (3D modeling/rendering app), eXposer (cel animation/stop motion/line tester app), Becasso (photo/paint editor) and ColdCut (audio editing app) on a 1 Ghz Athlon with 768 MB RAM with a GeForce 2 w/ 32 MB. I don’t experience any lag, slowness, interruption while I am going from one app to the next or when I editing my animations or sounds. So, I’m quite curious what applications for BeOS are you running that would require 1 GB RAM?
Right now, none. However, you forget that 99% of the people who are using BeOS, they are using it as a second OS or as a dual boot. And they might NEED their Windows or Linux workstation to have more than 1 GB RAM. That’s where the problem really lies.
Not everyone runs BeOS exclusively. I dual (sometimes triple and quadruple) boot my desktop machine. 1 gig of RAM certainly comes in handy with other operating systems. Unfortunately, my choices are to either run BeOS and all these other OSes with 512 megs of RAM, to not run BeOS at al, or to pull out memory every time I want to reboot into BeOS. None of those options sits well with me.
Adam
Yup, I know a lot of people who run on 1 or even 2 GB of memory, mostly developers who don’t want to hit the disk when compiling large apps. Also Mac users are maxing out their computers. Why? Because they can. RAM is so cheap these days and more memory, the merrier.
So, indeed, Zeta needs to address this problem.
I think yT could benefit from waiting for obos to solve this problem. Perhaps they can use the OpenBeOS solution for Zeta r2 and get support for more ram. Most BeOS users will probably buy r1 anyway, despite this draw-back. When r2 comes out all users in need of more ram would have to buy r2 as well from yT – and yT wouldn’t have to produce all the code by themselves. This IS a commercial company after all and they should do what is most economically beneficial for them.