Bernd Korz, yellowTAB‘s CEO, was over here tonight and we had a little talk about the progress of the yellowTAB business and the upcoming Zeta 1.0 (screenshots included). Bernd told us that Zeta 1.0 is only a few weeks away and the current betas carry the mark of “goldenmaster”. Zeta pre-1.0 is a lot faster and feature-rich than previous versions we had previewed a year ago, while it’s also less bloated as most third party applications have been removed from the default installations. Here are some key points of the golden master version:
1. A new –better– installer is included, one that goes up to the point fast and easy. NTFS resizing is supported.
2. A new CD-burner tool, called Jaba is included (cdrecord front-end). It looks fabulous and it supports DVD writing as well.
3. A simple home video editing solution might be ready for 1.0 inclusion, but it’s not for sure yet. A PRO version will be available seperately.
4. Bebop supports iPods (no iPod mini support yet).
5. Firefox seems much faster/responsive than before. The kernel and the overall responsiveness of Zeta is much better than in previous versions.
6. Support for up to 2 GB RAM, but even if you have more than that the OS won’t crash like BeOS did (it will just use 2 GBs).
7. A new media player supports ffmpeg and other codecs. H.264 support is coming through ffmpeg.
8. A new ZetaPC-Info app is verbose showing your hardware info and can export to HTML for easy bug reporting.
9. WiFi support is now more robust (still not there fully though). Network profiles are implemented.
10. Metathemes allow for full transformation of the desktop (including Deskbar/Tracker settings, not just colors and wm themes).
11. Many BFS fixes. Better NTFS support, readonly ReiserFS support.
12. External USB driver booting and mounting support.
What’s not there yet: Full support for firewire (some camcorder support is there though), Bluetooth, samba mounting (the cfsmounter front-end does not work at all for me), no support for some Synaptics touchpads, no SiS-chipset motherboard support, some issues with SavagePro DDR cards, no SATA, no hardware OpenGL. Some of these issues will be fixed before 1.0, some in the next major version, some in the very distant future.
Bernd told us that there will be a version of Zeta in the future that will be fully 64bit-compiled and it will be using GCC 4.x (very possibly this version will not be backwards compatible with the 32bit versions of Zeta and its applications because of the way the BeOS/Zeta kernel is done). There are no plans for PowerPC support.
Regarding the business of yellowTAB Bernd appeared very enthusiastic and satisfied about the current sales and pre-orders. He told us that so far they have sold more than 80,000 copies and they expect half a million copies sold of Zeta 1.0. He told us that part of the success of the good sales lately (after January mostly) were the fact that the company hired 5 sales people and also because of the TV commercial. Bernd said that each time their infomercial runs, they sell about 1000 copies for the day, which is a good record for Germany-only.
If I may to make a personal remark: Bernd appeared much more experienced business-wise and more down to earth than when I first met him 1.3 years ago. He knows who his market is, who the competition is, he looks at the competition and tries to find a balance between the giants and his 35-employee company. He told us that “BeOS 5 is at least that faaaaar from Mac/Windows in terms of features today. With Zeta we have managed to make that distance significantly smaller. Hopefully, one day we will be able to have enough resources to innovate and offer unique groundbreaking features and compete head to head with Mac and Windows.” Bernd is a realist and this is always the first step to a successful business plan and product.
Expect a full review of Zeta 1.0 when it’s released.
Some shopping channels here in Germany carry Zeta and praise it as a full-fledged MS Windows replacement, including all important applications. Selling price is 99€.
I thought it funny to see the exuberant sales guys praising Zeta with little or no understanding what they are praising. I hope they will succeed with selling boxes – though i don’t really see the point when there are FOSS alternatives.
It’s amazing to see how transformed yellowTab are (company and public perception wise) compared to this period 6 months ago. Previously they were perceived as a 4 person company on a very limited budget, some even considered them hustlers and thought yellowTab had no access to the BeOS source and that all they were doing was binary hacks/patches. Today they have new offices, many more employees (35 – wow), and are beginning to show signs of quality and maturity. It’s amazing how fast yellowTab reached this phase, usually it takes 5-10 years for a company to learn how to stand on it’s own two feet.
Here’s something OS enthusiasts should consider – Haiku have 35 employees working for them. Most OS distros (other than the top 4 – Microsoft, Apple, Redhat and Suse) appear to be run by 3-4 people max. Lets face it – for a quality release, you need a good leadership team, and enough man power to polish and make a solid release (with acceptable quality). Other than the 4 mentioned vendors, all OS distros feel like a patchwork done by a few enthusiasts from their study/bedroom/basement. yellowTab seem to be positioning themselves as the number 5 OS vendor. Sweet.
HW OpenGL is coming, Java is coming, Haiku is coming. All in all, good things await the ex-BeOS community.
if only zeta be on PPC g3-g5, i will buy old ibook and zeta and install it…
It won’t. And there are good reasons for it, as we discussed with Bernd.
> Other than the 4 mentioned vendors, all OS
> distros feel like a patchwork done by a few
> enthusiasts from their study/bedroom/basement.
This is the typical kind of trolling that is always present in OS discussions. Why? Your opinion is respectable (altough I do not share it) and your argumentation is very consistent except for this sentence. Was this kind of trolling necessary? No!
Let me tell you that e.g. Ubuntu feels very professional and consistent although it is not made by a company, but you are right, Zeta is actually getting better these days (although there are still too many things missing for me).
Correction – (OSNews needs an edit option) – I meant to say yellowTab have 35 employees (not Haiku).
Also, before the irrationals join the thread:
Supporting yellowTab = financially supporting OS alternative = showing developers that there is a 4th player = bringing more quality apps to BeOS world = more users = more drivers = supporting Haiku.
Not supporting yellowTab = showing no money in BeOS = no commercial developers = no commercial applications = less users = less drivers = Haiku takes longer to become desktop replacement.
If people want a Mac like OS running on x86 hardware, your best bet is a BeOS successor. Supporting yellowTab = supporting Haiku.
I need native sata driver for BeOS/Haiku. What good is an OS that i can’t install on my HDD.
Go Zeta! Go Haiku! =D
Eugenia, do you know if will be a VideoDemo (like for BeOS R4) or maybe a LiveDemoCD for Zeta?
Thanks
Can you tell as about those reasons?
Oops… as = us
Sorry
> no FTP/telnet server front-end (removed),
Well, in the build I have there is still telnet and ftp listed (though off by default), and a “Modify Services Login” button, so… but yeah ssh is better I guess
Your probably right, more users will attrakt more developers and hopefully some of those developers will contribute to the Haiku project. It’s not that i disslike Zeta but i like Haiku more. And there has been a lot of fuzz around YellowTAB about if they have or dont have the BeOS source code…
http://bitsofnews.com & http://tech.bitsofnews.com
Eugenia, please try NFS, should work much better now that it doesn’t loose packets like in R5
mmu_man, is that the difference between the latest available NFS on R5/BONE7a compared to the included NFS on Zeta? Because the former is what I’m using, would be nice to get faster NFS!
Zeta R1 is looking pretty good. Has webcam support been added though and if so does Whisper support it?
nfs: I just fixed an ugly bug, didn’t have time to support NVSv4
webcam: I started a driver for my webcam, but it’s one fo the many things I had to postpone to get R1…
Eugenia,
Can you tell us who has bought the 80000 copies of Zeta!!? I’d like to know if there are some major organizations/business buying it or if the sales were mainly made to end consumers.
Maybe there’s a niche market that yellowtab has caught that can keep it going on like that…
@ Raven
“YellowTAB” = false
“yellowTAB” = true
It’s quite nice, but I think we can do much better eventually. (Things that *could* be done for Zeta 1.0 is removing the lib-stubs and load libraries as real addons, although that would require a different library loader for Zeta.)
I think this is good news. I was a big opponent of YellowTab, and reading about them taking a less bloated and more down-to-earth approach lessens my feelings that YellowTab is totally ruining and fucking up the beautiful BeOS. I still won’t buy it, but reading these changes Zeta seems like a more reasonable end user OS in the BeOS spirit. They still have got to fix the preferences app(s), though.
Well, I’m glad to see progress. The big question I have is whether you can move the tabs like you could in r5, serously, it was one of the neatest features of the wm. And as much as im glad to see progress, everytime i see anything about BeOS in the news, im saddened at the same time. Only because just how advanced it was for its day and becuase there was quite a community around it. I guess it was just too advanced for its day. But, I will look forward to seeing Zeta make a 1.0 release, and then it can really begin to develop.
BTW, I had never seen a picture of Bernd before, and I was a little taken aback by it. I didn’t picture him like that. Actually, he’s a dead ringer for an old neighbor that lived near me when I was younger.
Cheers,
Michael Moran
“Let me tell you that e.g. Ubuntu feels very professional and consistent although it is not made by a company”
And your point is? Ubuntu has a lot of resources anyway. And why do we have to read about Ubuntu even in a BeOS thread?
The price feels a bit stiff. I hope that there will be at least a LiveCD.
And does anybody know if the issue of the source code has been solved? Do they have it? I hope so for them.
I notice a bunch of people asking why no PPC support, but no reply. What is the reason(s) behind this decision?
just awesome!!!!!! i can’t wait!
great job, yT.
http://www.yellowtab.com/support/faqs/show.php?id=12
@mmu_man
Cool, maybe webcam support in like an SP update or Zeta R1.5 or 2.0 I have some strange obsession with webcam support
If you read the FAQ, you would know:
http://yellowtab.com/support/faqs/show.php?id=12
Personally, if I were to make a new commercial OS, I wouldn’t consider the PowerPC either. Double that sentiment if the x86 is already supported. Why?
There is a much more limited install base of PowerPC based machines. The vast majority of those machines are designed and produced by one vendor. That vendor has their own operating system, and has very little interest in seeing competing operating systems on their platform.
The remaining PPC based machines are produced in rather small quantities. In some cases the vendor is only concerned with large corporate clients. In other cases the vendor has a flimsy business plan. In some cases those vendors have their own operating system anyway.
Another reason: supporting two different processor architectures is a pain. Vendors have to build applications for two processors. If they don’t, it complicates matters for the consumer.
I fully agree with Bernd Korz that ZETA isn’t an alternative for Mac or Windows.
I can see some minor fixes compared to BeOS 5 like that you can use 2 GB of RAM (with Mac or Windows you can use 4 GB and even more on some systems) but nothing that would really close “the gap”.
I like the BeOS GUI, cause it was well designed and a good piece of work for it’s time. ZETA looks like some kids painted something with paintbrush during breakfest.
I can’t really believe that anyone with a sense for good software would recommend this product.
And by the way, yellowTAB always promises that there will be “R1 in a few weeks” since October 2003 – I’m fed up with those guys. It’s a shame that BeOS was taken up by them. Death would be better than that.
>Eugenia, please try NFS, should work much better
> now that it doesn’t loose packets like in R5
I don’t have nfs servers, i just have a smb share from winxp. That’s what I need to work.
Just wanted to say that I had a demo much like the one that Eugenia has seen and I will tell you that it is a *very* nice setup. I had two very minor complaints about it that Bernd said he agreed with and would get fixed. Other than that, it is, IMHO, a *very* excellent version of R6. I can’t wait for my copy. 🙂
>Supporting yellowTab = financially supporting OS alternative = showing developers that there is a 4th player = bringing more quality apps to BeOS world = more users = more drivers = supporting Haiku.
>Not supporting yellowTab = showing no money in BeOS = no commercial developers = no commercial applications = less users = less drivers = Haiku takes longer to become desktop replacement.
>If people want a Mac like OS running on x86 hardware, your best bet is a BeOS successor. Supporting yellowTab = supporting Haiku.
I like this logic!
I have a question. The Zeta Shop shows prices both in Euro alone and in Euro+VAT. Who pays VAT and who doesn’t?
Thx, –Tech
Please, oh please, don’t reduce this to the battle of colours seen on by the inheritors of another “dead” platform. It is a wasteful distraction which, quite frankly, drives people away. After all, who wants to be part of something which is continually trying to self-destruct.
From what little I’ve seen of BeOS, it is a wonderful operating system. It does not deserve to be die because of the petty bickering. It deserves to thrive. If that means that there are several inheritors, so be it. They will do better if they maintain peaceful relations than if they try to kill eachother off so that only one takes home the prize.
It doesn’t seem so professionally designed, the look and feel, it is not so tight and matching and clean as BeOS – it looks mismatched, the applications and unprofessional.
Doesn’t anyone else think that this BeBop app looks really really ugly? Especially next to the “goldenmaster” message. If anyone’s caring about his business he shouldn’t allow such screenshots to be posted.
The GUI could be indeed much more (be)autyful, but i think that at the moment there are enough other bugs/things to fix.
It’s done when it’s done.
Things take time, no OS is fallen from the heaven.
Beauty comes after functionality.
Go on this way, yellowTAB! (one thing: don’t promise what you don’t reach in time; the effect is better when you suddenly have something new then let people wait).
Paul
http://www.iltuosistema.it/news2/bebop_zumi2.jpg
If Zeta release has exactly same All-in-One Preferences app,
i disagree to call it polished or well-designed
@Technix: generally, if you buy something from EU-based company, you pay VAT if you are living inside EU and you are a final customer (you are not a company who wants to resale it, use it for your enterprise needs, etc.). If you are living outside EU, you don’t pay VAT.
Techstorm, not Technix
I take it this is still not multiuser? It’s a shame if it’s not, it’s starting to look pretty good otherwise. If there was a freebie liveCD I could download or something to try it I would, but I’ll probably grab a torrent of it to give it a test spin and buy a legit copy if I intend to keep using it. I wish them luck, though. I look forward to there being another good contender in the OS game and I hope these guys can pull it off.
Bernd told us that there will be a version of Zeta in the future that will be fully 64bit-compiled and it will be using GCC 4.x
That would be *very* cool, and definitely prove to users that YellowTAB has the ability to make real advancements to the OS, not just minor improvements.
Although, it is depressing how they’ve beat BeOS R5 with an ugly stick… Those who use Zeta — is there any way to return to the R5 or Dano skins?
> If Zeta release has exactly same All-in-One Preferences app,
Well, the big-useless-estate-eating images are gone :p
> I take it this is still not multiuser?
Well, BeOS itself is multiuser for most of it. IT’s just that some small parts make it tricky. but in R5 you can actually enable multiuser.
It’s planned but won’t be there for R1. If only ppl could start coding apps correctly at least (like not putting logs in the apps folder since they aren’t supposed to be able to write there…)
We could enable the multiuser support in Zeta, but you’d have to fiddle with attributes anyway to add users manually…
> is there any way to return to the R5 or Dano skins?
Just dropt Dano decors in /etc/decors/
Great job.
This summer i plan to write some usb drivers for Beos/Zeta
There will be a LiveCD which is coming in the same time you get Zeta R1. It is a fully working DemoCD and you can use every app direct from CD incl. Webbrowsing, email, messagangers…
I think an effort should be made to port QT or GTK to Zeta.
I have Zeta Neo and I really like it my only disapointment was I could not get wireless working and that is supposed to be improved in this version. I can’t wait to get a copy.
ugh well I spent enough hours on that livecd for it to come
There will be a LiveCD which is coming in the same time you get Zeta R1. It is a fully working DemoCD and you can use every app direct from CD incl. Webbrowsing, email, messagangers…
Cool! I look forward to trying it out. It’s always fun to play with a new OS, doubly so when it’s usable and practical.
you get all my (moral) support to make a native GTK or Qt port. Don’t haev time for that (used to eb on my todolist).
Actually I think someone started on GTK… ask around in beshare.
Qt is actually very close to the BeAPI (so much it looks to me as a rip off…), that should not be very hard to do, in fact I think there might be some parts done already somewhere…
Oh, and don’t forget Tk and wxWidget, I won’t have time for those either
My experience with samba is slightly different than Eugenia’s. I can pretty consistently get my samba volumes mounted, but trying to access any files on the server will cause BeOS to crash. This is a huge problem IMO, and one that I hope is fixed ASAP.
Adam
> I need native sata driver for BeOS/Haiku. What good is an
> OS that i can’t install on my HDD.
I’d bet that SATA and firewire support would be fixed in time for the first release.
Let’s keep BeOS/Haiku free for GTK and QT!
Another reason: supporting two different processor architectures is a pain. Vendors have to build applications for two processors. If they don’t, it complicates matters for the consumer.
So they don’t plan to support MMX, 3DNow, SSE, SSE2, or SSE3 then, huh? Funny, I read that they plan to have a 64bit version… 32bit, 64bit… Hey! That’s two different processor architectures!
Don’t bother with excuses like that when yellowTAB already gave their own – there’s not enough money in it for them. Anything else is just trying to spin it to avoid looking bad.
I just really liked the name of the media player
Do you mean make Zeta/BeOS open source? That’s not going to happen! At least, not with anything (for certain) that yT didn’t put in there, whether they wrote it themselves or grabbed it from Haiku, as they can’t.
As to Haiku, it’s under the MIT/BSD license, and I’m not sure what licenses GTK/QT require of the underlying system.
Besides, unless GTK and QT have a separate thread per window as BeOS does in all cases, porting them will be a real pain, and will be a bastard solution at best. Chances are, a lot of applications that use GTK/QT aren’t pure users of only those frameworks: probably a lot of them use system-specific calls that make porting those applications rather interesting anyway, so it’s most likely easier to just write a native application, assuming you’ve got the GUI logic properly abstracted from the engine.
I think he meant “free of GTK/Qt”.
> Besides, unless GTK and QT have a separate thread per window
That’s a moot point, it just makes things a bit more complex, but it is very possible to port monothreaded GUI apps/frameworks.
I did that for XEmacs and it works very well:
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/shot_xemacs_native_gnus.png
I explained some tricks used some BeGeisterts ago:
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/BG13_Porting_Apps_to_BeOS.gp2.z…
Of course it won’t fill as responsive as multithreaded native apps, but at least it should work, and it’s all we ask to them, to work as well as they do on their soruce platform, as it’s basically only for very specific apps we do’nt want to make native versions or don’t have time. Actually XEmacs though not finished already looks better than under X11, don’t you think ? If only I had time to finish that either
> I’m not sure what licenses GTK/QT require of the
> underlying system.
Irrelevant, it’s not the GTK app that provides service to Haiku, but Haiu that provides services to them, so it’s the app that link *to* Haiku.
> probably a lot of them use system-specific calls that make
> porting those application
Not more than CLI apps, and there aren’t many CLI apps I gave up porting yet.
QEMU is staled but it’s because it is so picky about gcc versions it supports.
Besides, correctly written GTK apps use GLib for low level stuff, and that one is already ported AFAIK.
BeBop isn’t the media player, it’s the app to use with iPod.
I meant free of GTP/Qt
Im not a fan of using those. I see what the result is on Linux/Windows .. Inconsistency, Inconsistency and Inconsistency!
Please lets stick to the BeOS way of creating apps!
Fixing typos only creates new ones..
FREE OF GTK AND QT!
As the BeOS had a powerpc port already, the real problems are as follows:
1) Bootstrap – the OldWorld Mac bootstrap is a complete hack. It will *not* work for New World machines. The bootstrap relies on working out what devices are connected to the Mac’s PCI bus etc, so without work on all the powerpc drivers, this isn’t just a simple recompile.
2) Compiler. A lot of people seem to be scared of mwcc; but without it powerpc is completely lacking in apps. There is no drop in replacement PEF capable compiler.
3) Apple PCI BUS design, quite frankly, sucks. Dunno if the New World improves things, but the Grand Central IO of the Old World Mac makes it nigh on impossible to support a lot of things easily. Hence USB never made it to Mac (though the USB stack theoretically works for BeBox.) And a lot of powerpc drivers are missing.
4) Lack of BONE. BeInc stopped compiling BONE for powerpc very early on in BONE’s development cycle. AFAIK there was never any public BETA of powerpc BONE, and mmu_man can probably confirm that their BONE source tree, at yT,, probably hardly mentions powerpc.
5) By the time BeInc’s assets were taken over by Palm, the powerpc code was pretty much gone from the source tree, as was the remnents of the Hobbit, the ARM and the Hitatchi SH port. If yT have any powerpc code, they probably didn’t get it from Palm 😉
So basically, if yT have any powerpc code, their market would be OldWorld Mac users and BeBox owners… um… not worth it. Anything else would take a massive investment. They’re, honestly, better off consentrating on 64-bit.
However, there *is* a powerpc port of Dano kicking about. It doesn’t have BONE, but it has almost everything else.
really? Well, that sucks… why not just build the support into the media player.
Anyway… I thought that it was just a cool name, incorporating the Be and yet using a musical term.
Originally posted by “In the knowledge”
If yT have any powerpc code, they probably didn’t get it from Palm 😉
Mystery finally solved. Thankyou.
Deduction:
Everyone, yellowTab got BeOS source code recently from Palm!!!
Now the only mystery left is – who are yellowTab financiers. I remember reading that a known german soccer player contributed a bit at the early stage, but who are the newest financiers, since yellowTab seem to have a lot more money available. Anyhow, the more they sell, the more they’ll have, and the better Zeta will be.
cant wait to buy it. . . . great job bernd
Yes, OldWorld Macs are painful to program at a system level. That’s why most linux distros dropped support for OldWorld. It’s no big deal since those are ancient and slow machines anyway. It’s the x86 equivalent of 386AT machines.
Mac made a clean break for NewWorld – NuBus got replaced with PCI, Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) got replaced with USB, SCSI got replaced by IDE and FireWire, and the old system of booting was replaced by OpenFirmware and BootX. Finding and using devices on a NewWorld machine is easy. Linux had no trouble supporting NW Macs.
Why do you need PEF for PPC code? Just go with ELF. ELF has quickly become the standard for everyone other than MS and Apple. Then you can just use gcc. Gcc turns out rather good PPC code these days. Go try Ubuntu or FC4 on an old iMac… it really works nice.
Funny article …. specially when the same person that actually wrote this article was telling me 6 hours before that none of all BeOS relative systems are going somewhere (included Haiku, SkyOS and Zeta) and gonna be successful in any way.
> ” (…) Hopefully, one day we will be able to have enough
> resources to innovate and offer unique groundbreaking
> features and compete head to head with Mac and Windows.”
> Bernd is a realist and this is always the first step to a
> successful business plan and product.
So you seem now agree with what he said. From a company that is not going nowhere, we have now, 6 hours later the fifth OS company. Well dude …
> Everyone, yellowTab got BeOS source code recently from Palm!!!
Eh eh … you are still wrong dude, on part of your sentence is IMHO still wrong. It doesn’t mean that yT doesn’t have rights to make kernel modifications (it would be the silliest thing to do), but there is a thing you misunderstood …
Not all NewWorld macs have no ADB, not all OldWorld macs aren’t PCI. I have an OW here, running BeOS. The trackpad in my iBook is… ADB.
BeOS/PPC is PEF. All the way to the kernel. The bootloader from MacOS can only load a PEF binary. All the existing apps are PEF. An ELF loader, say as a kernel driver or a kernel mod, would be extremely hard to implement, as would porting gcc with only mwcc to compile it. Moving to ELF (if you had the source, that is) would break every app with a PPC port, and in some case, such as Gobe Productive, fatally (no chance for a PPC/ELF port)
Also, the post that the EXP/Dano source had no PPC source is correct. By EXP/Dano, which is what YT are basing Zeta on, Be had x86 and x86 source. The other ports were gone. Even if they have full source from EXP/Dano, it’d be the same as a totally new port. PPC never had BONE, the new OpenGL, the new USB stack… or support for modern machines.
There were a couple OldWorld models that had PCI, and a couple models of NewWorld that had ADB, but for the most part, what I said holds. Oddball models don’t count.
I wasn’t concerned about running old BeOS PPC apps as they are old and out of date. Run them in an emulator. I was talking about a NEW release of OpenBeOS or something like ZETA PPC. I’m sure that some industrious 3rd party programmer would come out with a PEF loader for it in any case.
You can use YABOOT or 3rd party BOOTX to load ELF kernels… that’s what linux does. My iMac is set with YABOOT to boot Ubuntu, OSX, or off the CD. ZETA PPC could do the same thing. It’s easy.
Old World Macs are certainly NOT the equivalent of 386AT on the Intel side. That’s totally idiotic. There were 200MHz dual-processor and 350 MHz single-processor Old World Macs out there. Show me a dual-processor 386 with 200 MHz… 😀
(And if you count processor upgrade cards, there are even 800MHz G4 models out there.) You certainly won’t find any 386 mainboard with 6 PCI slots, 8 DIMM slots (I’d guess you won’t even find any 386 board with just one DIMM slot) and a compatible 800 MHz processor that will run on that 386 board.
[quote from Buck]
Doesn’t anyone else think that this BeBop app looks really really ugly?
[/quote]
Man, you made me so sad, this means that I waste a part of my life to draw those icons
http:/xoomer.virgilio.it/zumi/bebop/
OK, I ain’t the developer, I only made some svg icon for that app, requested to me by the original developer, that some day later sold this app to yT in a beta stage…he told me that yT wants to change everything in that GUI, so don’t worry, you’ll have a good looking app soon!
B: Yipee, look at these glowy, shiny decors! Remember the days when computers were like slow and uhm old? And decors were flat and boring? But now we got them glowy, shiny – got to show them to the world! Make them default…
A: Those old decors were “boring” for a reason – they were not the point. It’s just title bars etc. goddamit, they have to bu unobtrusive. Besides. it is called *elegant*. You know, with *class*?? Not like this Tele-tubbies crap.
B: But they are bumpy and shiny and and …
A: Forget it …
it’s really just the plain yellow background that jumps to the eye, the icons are quite nice.
I like the icons. I also don’t mind the “shiny” “glowy” default decor.
I used BeOS from R4 on and had high hopes for Zeta back when YellowTab first announced they were working on a new BeOS. Like many people, I lost that hope over the next couple of years.
Things really seem to have turned around though. Zeta R1 looks like it will deliver what we were hoping for all along.
Kudos to Bernd and company.
…. he looks like the guy from the british series “the office” lol :p
99 euro is a bit too much to spend at the moment for me
although I do want to get it at some point
tnx François, now I can stop to cry!
J.F – you are completely wrong…. Most OldWorld Mac’s after the initial run were PCI only. It’s only oddball Macs after the x100 range that have NuBus. The 7200, 8200, 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8600, 9500 and 9600 (which is pretty much all of the regular Mac’s – anything else was dirt cheap or quirky in some way) use PCI only and most have an upgradable processor card too (save the 7200 and 8200.) Most of the quirky Mac’s were 62XX, 63XX or 54XX and 55XX lines. The 4400 was also quirky, but that’s another story.
BeOS PPC doesn’t even *run* on any Macs without at least a PPC603 and PCI.
As for PEF – PEF, as MYOB ststes, is ingrained intot he powerpc kernel.. both joe and mac rely on the same PEF loader. Joe is also cripples in so far as the NUB of the BeBox ROM expects the kernel to be PEF. Any ELF code in the BeOS is specific to IA32 ELF, and would need to be altered substantially to support powerpc ELF binary format. Not to mention the tweaks Be did to ELF anyway (all to do with the loader IIRC.)
Only by using OpenFirmware 2.x and not 1.x…. the 5400/5400 are normal PCI Mac’s in every other way. They’re damn slow for BeOS, but thats down to the wimpy bus and frambuffer graphics….
what were some of the legacy or design errors on beos?
personally i’d like to see a new os, incorporating mistakes made by beos, and completely re-written for the athlon 64.intel emt64 architecture.
Well, d’uh.. It’s not like you write BeOS applications, servers or even drivers in x86 assembly code. All you really need to “completely rewrite for 64-bit archicectures” is the kernel.
… and even then, it’s mostly about managing memory (i.e., the VM), which is actually more of a design philosophy (now that you can directly map enormous amounts of memory directly).
Completely rewriting a system every time the platform changes makes no sense. Because when AMD64 is replaced, you’ll just have to rewrite the damn thing again. Moreover, it’s a sign that your design abstractions were inadequate to begin with.
“Funny article …. specially when the same person that actually wrote this article was telling me 6 hours before that none of all BeOS relative systems are going somewhere (included Haiku, SkyOS and Zeta) and gonna be successful in any way.”
Nothing against BeOS, but SkyOS is not related to BeOS in any way, other than sharing a similar file system.
well i read that beos had specific legacy design flaws, such as 2gb and buffer overruns.
my point is that since amd64 offers a superior programming environment, and will be around for a long time, a “new” os should be designed from the ground up and optimized for this.
It’s not a design flaw as such, it has to do with where the VM allocates memory for the kernel, applications, add-ons and shared libraries. Not very difficult to fix if you have the source.
I think you should read up some more on software design/development before saying anything about it.
And really, what would be the superultracool benefit of having a native 64-bit operating system, except for the memory thing? Speed? Pfa, there’ll be something faster out soon enough anyway. Are you really going to have any use of those 2% speed increase you’re going to get?
more GP registers, flat memory addressing, sse registers, multicore
Right. There’s already SSE/SSE2/SSE3 optimizations in Zeta. Multi-core isn’t any different from SMP, which BeOS has supported since day 1. Really, what’s your point?
I don’t see that much in Athlon64 that will turn the world upside down enough to warrant starting over.
Sure it has more registers, and wider too but is essentially a minor archetectural improvement to tons of existing improvements. It does seem to have the performance/$ edge for now as well.
The issue of register starvation is not always as bad as it seems, IIRC most Pentiums have closer to 40 odd data registers internally with only 8 of them with user accessible register name. The way most SW is written & compiled, executed, the cpu can fake the effect that more registers than 8 exist with the renaming HW. Further, the L1 cache is effectively fast enough that a reg,mem operation gives effectively the impression of thousands of fast operands having only a 1cycle penalty over a pure reg,reg code. Is the architecture ugly, sure it is, I’d still rather have 32 to 64 registers to play with 3 in each opcode.
Remember BeOS was already designed with these things in mind since it came from the the orginal Hobbit and PPC 32bit clean RISC cpus where it had 2 or more cpus, and lots of registers and when 32bits looked absolutely vast back then (early 90s that is) when Macs and PCs were still struggling with much smaller issue.
To justify a fundamentally new OS rewrite would need far bigger cpu changes than we will see from Intel/AMD/IBM. As always those things will come from some little outfit.
Still if you ignore all the device driver issues for newer HW (which I guess are getting fixed now), BeOS/Zeta doesn’t look too crufty at all.
Still it will be pretty awesome to see BeOS running on a dual core cpu, won’t have to go looking for oddball 2 socket mobo that always had less PC features. And I’m sure I won’t have to pay for 2 licensess unlike other OSes out there.
I still promise to buy a Zeta one day even if Haiku does ship.
Now is Zeta starting to help Haiku out with $ in return for some of the improvements already made? I read M.Phipps and others were hoping to make the Haiku into their permanent job positions.
My big wish would be to get Wine/Crossover on it as a stop gap, and whats up with the Java port already.
The interface (especially on the first screen shot) looks so much unfinished. Different lines not belonging to anything or spaces in the middle… It doesn’t make a feel of a consistent environment ; moreover when compared to the interface of beos 5. And the tabs are simply awful!
bottom line: yellowTab definitely needs to hire a design professional.
It has a monitor embeded in the case….. is that not quirky? Doersn’t it use a COMMS card too for the ethernet? And no AAUI port? Compared to other Mac’s it has really stupid upgrade options too. Not as quirky as the 62XX and 63XX range though.
Well OK to summ it up;
1. Sliding tabs; a very nice thing to have if you use multiple fullscreen windows on your desktop!
2. The interface; my recommendation; stick with the R5 decor but pollish it a bit (the Zeta ones on the screenshots are nice too but also polish) and add new features like changing the size not only at the right down corner but at the sides as well and window dragging not only at the tab and hard to ‘point-on’ small sides : )
3. Bebop , wasn’t that the name of an old bebits app? please clarify
4. laptop/notebook support, would be great to use powersaving features on Centrino
5. Wifi ! I’d very much like to have Wifi USB or PCI drivers.
6. XRS; why didn’t anybody mention the new 1.4 version??!?!
7. Source, OK a lot has been said but I’m realy interested about the truth but I’ll buy and use Zeta anyway so it’s not really my concern other than for YT to stay in business.
8. Gobe Productive, I’d really appriciate having 3.0 for ‘a’ BeOS version and pay for it.
I wish YT best of luck and I hope seeing BeOS as being the 3rd alternative between MacOS, Windows and Linux (how about the windows replacement? a life without windows sigh)
Did i miss something?When did a new version of XRS come out?
I’ve been one of the more vocal people when it came to bashing yellowTAB in the past. I have my reasons, and the scars run pretty deep.
Needless to say, I am relieve and impressed with the way Bernd and indeed the company has been handling himself the last six months or so.
I’ve watched them bungle things left and right in the beginning, make outrageous claims, support behavior from developers that I find atrocious, and claim things only to never deliver the goods. Seeing them finally be able to fix some of the limitations in the kernel, fixing many of the things I was skeptical about has only proven to me that they might pull something off yet. I figure they’ll be in business another five years or so, tops. :-p Not for lack of trying, mind you.
Bernd’s heart has always been in the right place, it’s just that occasionally when it comes to dealing with the community his head seems to be stuck somewhere else. This is not a personal affront. I too have my head stuck somewhere quite often.
Is a scan of your college ID sufficient when ordering the School Edition?
> When did a new version of XRS come out?
It hasn’t. Ytab has a version of it internally.
@soeb:
>Is a scan of your college ID sufficient when ordering the School Edition?
Should be. That’s how I ordered my copy of NEO. YT accepted an emailed scan of my ID, no problem.
Just make sure it has the attendance year on it.