On Friday the 11th of March I went to CeBIT 2005, the world’s largest hi-tech fair held annually in Hannover, Germany. The fair covers everything from the Digital World and is expected to receive around half a million visitors this year. After an overview this report mainly highlights yellowTAB’s presence and their new Zeta operating system.Next to being of interest to consumers, CeBIT is also an important meeting place for businessmen, traders and tech experts, an event where people can participate in various lectures, workshops, seminars and conferences as well. I attended the fair with the Dutch ‘ICT platform’ together with a few dozen ICT professionals representing their companies from northern parts of the Netherlands. This was a pleasant and interesting experience for me, being able to exchange ICT-related thoughts and ideas during the trip and an after-show dinner!
Some highlights at the fair included some novel new consumer electronics being displayed, ranging from the very small to the ultra big! Such as for example Samsung’s small 7 Megapixel Camera phone or their huge 102 inch Plasma TV! Further there was a clear converging trend to be seen with regard to hand-held devices as was already initiated more than half a decade ago in mainly Japan. Snapshot-camera, music player, GPS navigation and many other functionalities are finding their ways into the new generations of smart phones. And like was expected a few years ago the functionality border between ‘phone enabled PDAs’ and ‘phones offering PDA functionality’ is fading rapidly. The Japanese giant NTT DoCoMo was showcasing their 3G mobile phone services which are already widely in use in Japan, including videophone functionality, allowing live streaming video communications, or their FeliCa ‘Mobile Wallet’ service which allows instant payments and identifications.
With regard to operating systems, as could be expected, the large OS solution providers Apple, IBM (OS/2 Warp), Microsoft, Novell and Sun (Solaris) were all well represented. Apple announced that the company has joined the Blu-ray Disc Association and Novell announced a mid-April release for SUSE Professional 9.3, but other than those few sparks there wasn’t hot news to report about.
Regarding the smaller embedded OS vendors, none of them seem to have made it to CeBIT this year. There was no sign of QNX Software Systems (QNX Neutrino), Symbian, Wind River (VxWorks) or even PalmSource (Palm OS), yet there were many exhibiting companies presenting end-user products using their operating systems.
There was however some interesting news with regard to at least one alternative operating system. A small exhibiting STB company called AHT Europe recently announced their support for the free operating system AROS. I was told by them that they intend to back this open source OS financially in an effort to speed up its development and use the OS for their future products. The plan is to port AROS to their PPC based STBs by hosting the OS on top of LinuxPPC first, simultaneously help speed up development (possibly by offering bounties), port over AHT Europe’s own STB software and then create a fully native version.
AROS was already a hobbyist AmigaOS3.1 clone project since 1996, but has been making slow progress compared to the commercially backed solutions, AmigaOS4 and MorphOS. Previously, already significant parts of AROS have been used for the development of MorphOS, for which the MorphOS development team contributed bug fixes in return.
But IMO the true highlight of the fair with regard to operating systems was yellowTAB’s showcase of its almost finished Zeta 1.0 operating system! (Read details) Zeta is based on the BeOS operating system originally developed by Be Incorporated. BeOS at a time was seen as a potential threat to Microsoft’s x86 desktop OS monopoly and for some time Be Inc was even worth over one billion dollars! But Microsoft allegedly hindered PC makers to co-operate with the company and eventually the company went out of business. Something similar was rumoured to have happened when Gateway suddenly cancelled their Linux/Amiga plans when they owned the Amiga company during the late 90s. Years later an ex-Gateway Executive even testified how Microsoft allegedly “bullies” PC Makers. So hopefully yellowTAB will have more luck with regard to its Zeta efforts!
I already intended to meet with the yellowTAB team at a small Fun
of Computing 2004 event, which was held a few months before CeBIT, but sadly yellowTAB cancelled its attendance just one day before and I did not know about this until arrival! But luckily yellowTAB’s CEO Bernd Korz made up for this quite a bit by giving me an extensive personal demonstration and answering all my questions for one full hour (minus some short distractions when various ‘promotion’ ladies in miniskirts walked by ;-)).
My general impression was that the OS is mature, stable and still offers the same nearly unrivalled (except by AOS4 and MOS) desktop multimedia performance and GUI responsiveness many people loved from their BeOS experience, this even despite an alleged lack of co-operation from PalmSource, which apparently still owns BeOS source code used for the Zeta operating system. But IMO the BeOS user community should embrace Zeta as being the BeOS @ version 6 the community has been waiting for, for so long. Also I believe there’s no need for the community infighting or any rival hostility between the different BeOS inspired community camps as there’s already a similar relationship between Haiku (formerly known as OpenBeOS) developers and yellowTAB as there was between AROS and the MorphOS team for some time in the past. In fact even more so, as some people behind Haiku are even fully employed by the company! IMO without some commercial backing the Haiku project will progress as slowly as AROS did, which still isn’t a complete clone of AmigaOS 3.1 as it was originally intended to be and that’s an OS originating from 1993 and development has been ongoing for nearly a decade! Now please excuse me, as I will have to play with the latest beta Bernd so kindly provided me with! 😎
The Pictures:
World Cyber Games 2005
Hall 2, one of 27 CeBIT Exhibition halls
yellowTAB’s CEO Bernd Korz talking to an Opera representative
The yellowTAB Booth was drawing lots of attention
There was even a TV channel recording yellowTAB’s performance
Some images:
http://www.yellowtab.com/products/screenshots.php
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=223&slide=1…)+screenshots
That first link is busted
Zeta’s time has come!
And luckily for me the windows are fully customizable. One thing I did not like about BeOS’ default look was the varying title bar size depending upon the amount of text written within them.
Personally I prefer a full size title bar to easily drag the windows around using this bar. Also then IMO you more instantly know where widgets are located. Zeta includes some nice presets such as a MacOS X look, but windows can be of any non-square shape as well (not that I think that option really adds useful functionality, but it does add user choice for some optional eyecandy).
I have always been a huge fan of BeOS, and am very excited to see Zeta taking shape. I’m just worried that Yellow Tab is going to drag their feet with the release of 1.0. Also, I’m not a big fan of the new window decor (also seen in the BeOS 5.1 beta) I was quite fond of the simpler look from 4 and 5.
Good work, nonetheless, and I am ready to buy it for all my PCs once it comes out.
Hi mike can you give us the meat on the RAM once and for all:
The question that kill, did you see the PC running with let say 2G of ram and using all the 2G?
Hey, the biggest Amiga fan in the world (as far as I know) is reporting about Zeta 🙂 And he has pleasant comments, too 🙂 My hope for humanity is restored 🙂
Seriously, Amiga was my first OS love, BeOS the second. And regardless of naysayers, I think yT are doing amazingly well, all things considered (heck, most of us thought they’d be out for the count by now, but they look stronger than ever. Hope they’ll survive long enough to be a Haiku distributer.
Does my heart good that a patched up 5 year old OS can still win over THe M$ crowds at a big trade show,one can only imagine just how impressive the original BeOS must have looked running alongside Win95 and 98 in shows past
Please link to another modern BeOS. (Works with XPs and P4s, more than 512MB, current drivers, etc.)
Wait, there isn’t one.
YellowTab is the best thing BeOS has going for it.
@ AlienSoldier
Running with more than 1 GB of RAM installed seems to work without problems at the fair. However I was unable to test myself if all of this RAM could be used, but I would really be surprised if this was not the case. My home PC only has 512 MB of RAM.
@ Zenja
> Hey, the biggest Amiga fan in the world (as far as I know)
> is reporting about Zeta 🙂 And he has pleasant comments,
> too 🙂
Well the BeBox was promoted to be new Amiga when Commodore had bankrupted two years before. In fact most of the early adopters were Amigans. Both systems share many common philosophies, especially when it comes to GUI performance and multitasking (including the configurable prioritized sheduling of software).
I showed yellowTAB’s CEO a video of AmigaOS4 being demonstrated on an 800 Mhz AmigaOne and he was very impressed and stated that it was as if he was looking at Zeta.
IMO also some of Zeta’s and BeOS’s most impressive features were originally inspired by AmigaOS. For instance some things he picked to demonstrate me included:
Workspaces – This is very similar to Amiga’s Screens. What I like better about the BeOS/Zeta implementation is that you can drag Windows onto different workspaces. What I like better about the Amiga implementation is the default depth gadget every screen has for switching.
Overlay – An Amiga feature I heavily used in the 80s and early 90s (genlock) to combine video with computer graphics.
Default systeem and software wide multi-laguage support – The support for different languages in AmigaOS4 and Zeta seem to be almost equivalent, except for Zeta’s support for Chinese and Japanese languages.
Drag and drop and desktop fuctionality – In Zeta you can simply drag and drop images or highlighted text straight onto your desktop and the OS will create a new text or image file with an icon on the icon on the desktop. AmigaOS and most applications do also have good clipboard and drag & drop support, but dragging such content onto the desktop doesn’t work.
Add to this Amiga-like efficient memory handling, effective preemptive multitasking and datatypes support and it’s easy to understand that there’s a lot implemented in Zeta/BeOS for Amigans to like. 🙂
I was there, and i saw the promotion and the demonstration of Zeta….
A lot of people is talking wether yellow tab has acces to the source, or zeta is build on Beos PE 5…
I dont give it any thoughts, as what is under the hood.
Zeta was really amacing to see in action, as they were sragging a frame right of the media player, and INSTANTLY placing it inside an open textdocument, as an immage..
Furthermore they marked a piece of the text, and placing it as a file on the desktop… (Still with lightning speed).
Then they showed that they had like 12 virtual desktops running in the background, at the same time.
All this and even MORE work in real time, with an 1600mhz processor and 512 megabyte of memory.
I say this system kicks ass, no matter what’s under the hood.
It looks and acts just like BeOS…
Well done Yellow Tab.
As far as i know if your machine contains 2GB Ram the R1 will use 3/4 of it. The thing yellowTAB did is not kinda patch/hack. It is well done
I wouldn’t call 3/4 of 2GB RAM “well done”, however it’s certainly better than previous results.
102″ Plasma TV…i have to get me one! perhaps a third mortgage…
Look at BeOS Max, a bit like frankenstine (cobled together out of parts), but no more then Zeta.
See http://www.bebits.com/app/3892