Alan Fisher has written a review for YellowTAB’s Zeta Service Pack 3. Alan is laying out both the good and the bad points he experienced by using it.
Zeta Service Pack 3 Review
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
No, I’ve learned my lesson. If you aren’t reasonably sure about “facts” you have found, don’t say them. So, no let’s not talk about wether they have the source or not. From what other people have said in the other topic thread, all they have done is add some patches to a modified R5 and from what the review has shown is that they haven’t really done a good job at all. Asking $100 for a piece of buggy software (although at least you get to upgrade to a hopefully not buggy R1 for free) is way too much.
This has just turned my whole perception of them around. I used to think that they might have a product that with a little work and bug fixing, might be pretty good. I might even have bought it if was reasonably priced. Now I pretty much have lost all faith in Yellowtab and I’m mostly going to follow OBOS. At least with OBOS it’s open source and isn’t going to suddenly die when they find noone is going to buy their overpriced buggy OS.
How since they can’t update the kernel the OS is doomed 🙂
I think the working theory is that if they sell enough copies, they will be able to purchase the source. So it is in their best interest to not reveal that they don’t have it. As soon as they can afford it, from the sales, they will probably purchase it and claim they had it all along.
LOL, you know they would have to sell a LOT of copies to be able to buy the source, especially since Bernd travels all over the world to show of Zeta in a room with 10 geeks who would have bought it anyway.
If that was the case, it would have been better to be honest about it. You never gain trust with lies, and you never gain trust by not listening to the customers/community.
YT aren’t doing a good job in gaining trust.
palm just should acquire yT and offer it cheaply to damage windows. If something hurt microsoft-anything-it would benifit them. Since there is little work that can be done.. why not?
Oh yeah, I don’t think Palm is that smart regarding competition. They are just people that make a really really good embedded OS.
palm owns beos, why would they buy it again. Heck I dont know why they even bought it in the first place, I guess to toy around with the idea of useing it for pocket computers, not just a pda but more wince like as fully functional OS. Of all the companies out there that could of used beos, why did palm buy it and not do anything with it. Be had a great product its a shame they mismanaged the company to death
“palm just should acquire yT and offer it cheaply to damage windows. If something hurt microsoft-anything-it would benifit them. Since there is little work that can be done.. why not? ”
First, as Square said, they already own BeOS, so what should they buy ??? Second, let say you’re stuck in a forest with a grizzly. You have to share the food around with him, which suck, and it may be stressing to live in the same territory as the grizzly. But is sticking a tootpick up his ass will help your situation in any way ? I don’t think so … unless you want to die. And quick.
“Heck I dont know why they even bought it in the first place, […] Of all the companies out there that could of used beos, why did palm buy it and not do anything with it. Be had a great product its a shame they mismanaged the company to death”
They didn’t paid to get BeOS, they paid to get the engineering workforce at Be Inc and move them in their Palm workforce, plus few tech patents here and there inside BeOS. But the OS itself, they never had any interest in it.
>Of all the companies out there that could of used beos, why >did palm buy it and not do anything with it. Be had a great >product its a shame they mismanaged the company to death
IIRC Palm DO use BeOS within their PDA as part of PalmOS, they don’t need to release a “x86 BeOS” to benefit from their purchase, they just take the bits they want and embed it in to their own technology.
I’ve never really heard any elegations of mismanagement at Be, on the contrary, all I ever heard was how Microsoft crippled Be by locking vendors in to contracts that prohibited them from despatching Be with hardware, as an OS company trying to make a living, thats a hard thing to swallow… Just ask IBM how hard it was to compete in the OS market in those days (and now), even when you have just as much spending money as MS does.
I know that in the end days, Be started to look at the idea of Internet Appliances, but to be honest, I really see this as grasping at straws as a last ditch effort to survive, and no one can blame them for trying to find a lifeline in one form or another.
the whole switch to beIA was a clasic example of mismangement. There was very little market for it, and just about everyone knew it. Insted of doing cutbacks and keeping enough devs to keep updateing beos5 untill they got back on thier feet they dumped all the money into beIA. It was hardly MS fault for the death of beos it was a simple lack of basic aplications that did it. It doesn’t matter how good the OS is if it doesn’t even have a useful webbrowser, net+ was far too primative and opera was unstable. what would cost less? updateing net+ or rewriteing beos into beIA. Saying that becouse of MS locking vendors into windows only doesn’t change much. as of now HP/dell/gateway ect can install linux but they don’t. they had the right idea of when they made beos 5 pe free but they screwed up and made it possible to make a cd out of it and installable on its own partition. There was little reason to buy pro other then what realplayer and a few minor things( I did buy pro ). Another area they screwed up was advertising or lack of I should say. I only found out about it after seeing beos 4.5 for sale at bestbuy I remember looking at the box looking to see if my hardware was supported IIRC it din’t say much about it on the box, when I got home I looked it up and found out it did work with my hardware and picked it up a few days later. they only time I saw it advertised was the free download of beos 5 what was it like 1 mill downloads the first day later that day instructions for how to turn it into its own bootable cd apeared and most people are not nice enough to buy pro just to support be
Opensource projects will have the time by their side, they can do their work right. A little dubious firm like YT want to make fast money with all the beos fans around the world.
If this would be a fair company they would sell a zeta version without gobe productive for beos user who have already a copy of this office program. But this is an selling argument for their high licence price.
They can’t do something important at the system so they downloaded software from bebits modified the opensource tracker and deskbar and sold it all for 100 Euro. This buggy, ugly bunch of software they called “Release Candidate” and “deluxe edition” cool name for an alpha or beta version.
I can buy for the money a good old P3 System to play with the original R5 Version wich is really legal, stable and also fast.
I am sorry to say that I have given up on Zeta. After Sp3 still can’t get my Realtek nic to work. The prefrences app doesn’t even come up on my computer, among a host of other problems. Even long time supported hardware doesn’t work. It is a real mess and not worth even bothering with. What a wate of money. Yes, I bought it. Boy, was I a sucker. I have no hope of this OS ever being really useful.
I don’t know which chip you have but have you tried any of these?
The patch works great with my D-Link card.
http://www.bebits.com/app/2067
http://www.bebits.com/app/2116
I bought RC2 and I love it.
Yes, I am using a different NIC that a friend gave me and a soundblaster card that was $10. But it’s great!
My take about the system sources is than they have it :
– yT probably acquier the licence of BeOS prior to Palm buy out, it’s not a contract with Palm..
– Palm have no interest in desktop OS
– Bernd state yT won’t use OBOS kernel
– He’s not 100% stupid
– Bernd came visit Eugenia and Eugenia know, i’am sure she know and she don’t post news about dead OS on OSnews
– yT don’t want to be 99% compatibility with R5 for Zeta R1 and enhancement will broke up compatibility
– I assume they don’t have the workforce/money to work on the kernel
That’s just my opinion..
i mean : yT want to be 99% compatibility with R5
jeanmarc, what makes you think that they have access to the sourcecode?
if they have the sources they are very poor coder. Who spend his time with creating new skins, when so much trouble with actual hardware is under the hood.
Don’t forget you have nothing to expect this is their “Release Candidate”.
So people would recommend Professional edition of BeOS 5.0? Also has anybody had problems when booting into BeOS personal of the computer rebooting repeatedly and never actually loading BeOS? Could this be a SP1 thing?
I wouldn’t really recommend it. The most important difference from PE is the license. If you want an outdated realplayer then sure, it’s worth it.
As for your problem with PE. Could you give us some more info? Is it installed on a BFS partition or do you run it off a windows partition? What kind of hardware are you using?
Sorry. It’s off XP with the SP1 installed on an Emachine. It’s on the Windows partition.
Ah, foolish me. Think I’ve got it. Didn’t notice this at first:http://www.bebits.com/app/3390
>Don’t forget you have nothing to expect this is their “Release Candidate”.<
Pay $100, but don’t expect anything. Hmmm…
btw, it’s very obvious by now that yt does not have the source code, and is unable to fundamentaly improve the OS.
yT is actually working on BeOS, thats why. A Small dedicated workforce can someones be greater than a huge one. Take skyOS for example.
I mean “Release Candiate” stands for a feature ready product. Look at the RC’s what Yellowtab understand under the term. R1 will be another buggy piece of patchwork. Stable will be unknown at YT.