“I’ve been working off-and-on writing a review/overview of the Zeta LiveCD, but one topic in particular kept distracting me: the question of whether or not the demo CD can be installed and run from a hard drive partition. My experimentation ended up growing into an article of its own and the short answer is ‘no’. For all the gory details, read on.”
Just stop trying to hack the bloomin’ thing and pay them for the work that went into making the OS?
Don’t want pay good money then why not Spend the same time in helping to make the open altrnative.
Edited 2006-01-09 12:18
Just stop trying to hack the bloomin’ thing and pay them for the work that went into making the OS?
Yes, I’m certainly am capable of that. What gave you beliefs to the contrary?
An old BeOS fanactic I know bought it a few months ago and I played with it a bit (~ an hour).
I was not impressed at all. It was buggy, limited and looked completely outdated. I personally think it’s a waste of money to actually pay for it. You can just get Linux for free anyway because it’s not like Zeta is a completely new OS: it’s just a recycled BeOS that includes all the GNU tools as usual.
My 0,02$
Nothing new in ZETA? Well, aside from the huge number of bugfixes, they’re switching to GCC4 this year (probably). That means both breaking binary compatibility with BeOS R5 and a plethora of new possibilities. They’re also porting OpenOffice and hacking away with Translators, Mediakit, etc.
Besides, comparing Linux to ZETA is like comparing Windows to Linux. They are different, even though both contain GNU utilities and both have a GUI.
It’s logical I guess, but a bit disappointing nonetheless. Besides the fact that thay obviously expended a lot of energy in developing this copy protection that could have been better spent on the OS itself, I think it is good to let people hack your product up a little bit. If nothing else it gets people (well, geeks) excited about the product and get’s them actively exploring its internals, that can’t be a bad thing right ?
Actually I am pretty sure R1.0 and R1.1 had their activation methods hacked within a week. I’d say if you like the product, buy it and support future development.
I agree with your sentiment to a degree, but I also think that an important consideration is the reason for expecting the Zeta demo CD to be less restricted. In my case, I think it’s largely because R5 PE was so unrestricted – so there’s a sense of “they’ve deprived me of something I value.” Other than that sense of having lost something, I don’t think there’s much reasonable basis to expect the demo CD to be as unrestricted as PE was.
PE was a product of different times, circumstances, and people than the Zeta demo CD. The Zeta live CD is a tryout demo of YellowTAB’s main product, while PE was a free-for-non-commercial-use version of a product that Be had shifted-focus away from and supported primarily as a development platform for BeIA. I’m not saying that it wasn’t magnanimous of Be to leave PE pretty much fully-functional compared to Pro, but I do suspect they wouldn’t have done it had the focus-shift not happened. Be did sell a similar demo CD of (IIRC) their first x86 release (R3.5?) – I never tried it personally, having started with R4.5, but as far as I know it wasn’t installable either.
Without having tried Zeta proper, I will say though that they would deserve criticism if they limited functionality in the full OS (E.g., the ability to move an install by just copying the files from one partition/drive to another).
> Without having tried Zeta proper, I will say though
> that they would deserve criticism if they limited
> functionality in the full OS (E.g., the ability to
> move an install by just copying the files from one
> partition/drive to another).
No such restrictions exist in the full version of ZETA.
They really need to drop that price some.
Agreed. Most are simply NOT willing to shell out so much cash for Zeta.
I can go buy BeOS 5 pro for $20, on a CD, with manuals.
Zeta simply hasn’t proven it offers anything different besides some new/updated programs and drivers. Only the most die-hard or financially able BEOS fans/interested users will pay.
Zeta – give us a personal edition or something. A demo?
Or a decent liveCD, one that’s freely available (on all their sites and torrents), released as a standard .iso, and with something interesting to go with it.
At it’s present speed and course, Zeta isn’t getting anywhere. Haiku will be far superior in a shorter period of time – and Zeta has had EVERY advantage (except perhaps Open Source – some will feel it’s an advantage others not).
Anxiously Awaiting a modern Be,
Todd
Zeta simply hasn’t proven it offers anything different besides some new/updated programs and drivers.
Compared to R5 Pro? There’s (stable, not Dano) BONE, localization support, updates to Media Kit, a new USB2 stack (including support for booting from USB sticks), a faster kernel that knows dual-core, Hyperthreading and more than 1GB RAM and active support (try calling a hotline for R5 Pro).
Agreed.
Yes Be Inc did put out a demo CD as of 4.5 or more likely 4.5.2, not sure about 4.0. It was $10 US, x86 only, and would not install. That’s what got me started using BeOS.
What I see happening though is a lot of effort going into locking you into yT’s pocket while some critical parts and functions of Zeta are either ignored or glossed up to look nice while no real change in functionality has been made. It’s very reminicent of the MS way of doing business where they grub for every nickel they can get out of the consumer.
The whole world does not have broadband internet connections yet, but I find Zeta’s handleing of dial-up settings to be inferior to stock R5’s from what I’ve seen of it so far. There are also several areas that could stand more documentation to clarify things for a new user. These are the things that will help expand their market, not making things more difficult with excessive activation schemes that just frustrate users and help spawn less than enthusiastic reports between users and potential users.
Both my friend and I have tried the demo disk on our laptops. Mine is an old Dell CPI, it works a little better than BeOS but not enough for me to buy it. I am glad I had the demo disk to test my machine first.
My friend has one of the latest Toshiba WideScreen machine. He found a lot of hardware that he can’t get working in BeOS or has problems working together works with Zeta’s demo disk so he is ordering the OS.
The demo CD does the job it was designed for – testing your hardware.