No, BeOS is not dead as many will speed to the forums and proclaim. YellowTAB‘s Zeta is the true inheritor of BeOS 5’s fortune, as it is based directly on Dano/EXP’s codeline (which was supposed to be BeOS 6 but was never finished as Be sold its IP to Palm). At last, I got my hands on Zeta Beta-5a, and here is what I found and think of it so far. You might need to have some experience with BeOS in order to follow this article, but screenshots are included to make it easier for everyone.
Installation
YellowTAB rewrote BeOS’ installation procedure and the result is called the “ZetaInstaller”. It is similar to the BeOS installation application except for the fact that you have a few more options to take care of and manually tick, for example, selecting which kinds of applications you want installed (emulators, office, development, games etc.). There is also a new button named “language,” which loads a window with rather weird options for an installation procedure (I still don’t understand what this “Strings” tab does). Check the first screenshot regarding this new window. (Update: I got word that this will be replaced by a simple drop-down menu for language selection – better that way).
It takes about 15 minutes to install Zeta and it is not difficult at all. However, it is more involved than Be’s original Installer and in my opinion, it shouldn’t have been. The fact that the user has the ability to select applications one by one to be installed might seem as “power to the user” to some, but for me it is completely unnecessary and it brings a dreadful Linux-like feeling to the installation (the whole OS is less than a gig when installed anyway, so I see no reason for such selections).
With this new installation, YellowTAB fixed something that didn’t need fixing and left the real install limitation of BeOS still unfixed: during installation, the user can only “initialize” partitions as BFS in order to install BeOS, but can’t create, edit/resize partitions. This is a huge limitation for most new users and plagued BeOS back in the day, and it will continue to do so, unless the user already has a free partition waiting for Zeta. YellowTAB should have concentrated on fixing this limitation of BeOS’ Drive Setup instead of adding useless features like “Stings”, application selection and “GCC version choice” that only bloat the installation and do not follow the paradigm that Be had and everyone loved: “keep it simple”.
Another thing with the new installer is that it doesn’t (yet) support point to point installation as the older installer supported. This feature allows a user, while booted into an already installed BeOS, to set as “Source” the CD or any BeOS hdd partition and as “Destination” any partition and BeOS would automatically get installed to the new partition without needing to boot from the CD. This feature was as life/time saver for most users!
Overall, the installation IS good and simple, simpler than most Linuxes and Windows that is. But not better than the original (except the language setting which is indeed useful).
First Impressions
The Zeta boot screen is a bit different than BeOS’; the same really, but with Zeta’s logo. However, what is immediately disappointing is that Zeta takes 23 whole seconds to load on this machine (a machine which has had BeOS 5 on it forever and loads it between 9 and 10 seconds). I did a little research and found a few of the reasons for this slowdown. First and foremost, Zeta comes with some 400 fonts. Personally, I find this ridiculous. BeOS/Zeta never even had a DTP application written for, let alone a pro graphics package that would justify the decision to come with so many fonts. I see no reason to bloat the default installation with 400 fonts when they won’t be used by most users, and especially the kind of users that will buy this product, who want BeOS for speed-speed-speed. The other reason is the startup sound, which is 1.3 MB (original Be startup sound is about 140 KB). I am sure there are other reasons for the slowdown but these were the only two that I was able to isolate (Update: YellowTAB is looking into the problem, might be Tracker’s new SVG capabilities that create the problem). Other than that, the first boot in this beta version of Zeta greets you with two dead replicants, but that’s easily fixable (as long you understand what a replicant is, which is a concept that new users have trouble with).
From startup on, the OS feels a lot like the legendary leaked version of Dano/EXP with most of the BeOS 5 apps able to work (about 8% of the BeBits‘ ~2900 BeOS apps won’t run on Dano/Zeta because they are too old and the API has changed a bit). YellowTAB has changed the Deskbar folders from ‘Applications’ and ‘Preferences’ to Demo, Bookmarks, Software and Preferences. Software now has a number of submenus with application launchers, like games, office etc. I like the order found on Software’s hierarchy, but now that YTAB decided to put subfolders there, maybe the “Demo” folder should go under Software too, in order to avoid clutter in the root window. As for the “Bookmarks” submenu, it would only have been useful if these were the same bookmark-set as the ones NetPositive (BeOS’ browser) creates instead of a completely different set of bookmarks files. I see no point having these 5-6 bookmarks there linking to YTAB’s sites and friends, while it doesn’t use your own Net+ bookmarks at all. It defeats the purpose of having a bookmarks menu, at least in the way KDE and Windows use this feature.
On the good side of things, you will find that YTAB has worked on their themes and they got it… more right than in their past attempts. They include a number of window manager themes, but most are just variations of the same theme, so overall there are about 8-9 different window manager themes to choose from. I got fond of the “Smoke Decor” to be honest. It has its problems but it seems to be the most carefully designed of all.
Another great thing that I love about the Dano/EXP codebase — now found at Zeta — is the “smooth window dragging”, which is explained here better (only visible on CRT monitors, LCDs won’t feel the difference). MacOSX is the only other OS that has this feature (and in fact it does it better than the BeOS, as the BeOS’ way is a bit of a hack since the Be engineers didn’t have the full specs of the graphics cards they were supporting in 2D mode back when they were implementing this feature. Under BeOS there is some tearing when moving windows, on OSX it is “clean”). Other new features include flicker-free updates of windows, more color sensitive UI, non-rectangular window support and more.
YellowTAB includes a number of applications with the OS. This version I tried, beta 5a, featured CD tools (e.g. Helios), a few demos, development applications (e.g. CodeLiege IDE), the Bochs emulator, three games, some internet applications (BeAIM, BeShare, Mozilla, NetPenguin, Beam, Phoenix), some third party multimedia apps in addition to the BeOS ones (e.g. SoundPlay, SampleStudio, DVDRip, VideoLAN), BePDF and more. There is still space on the CD to be filled up with apps, as the ISO was only ~500 MBs.
YellowTAB has developed a few applications from scratch, like the FFMpeg front-end which allows you to encode videos, the Fax-It application which allows you to send faxes and another one called BeEAR, which I have no idea what it does as the app would only load itself in German language, even though my localization was set to English (my guess is that it is an address book though). There is also a To-Do application, called ToDoIt, also coded by YellowTAB and, as the other YellowTAB applications, will only be available for Zeta.
Zeta uses a modified OpenTracker and Deskbar version which supports Internationalization and a few other goodies like cut/copy/paste directly when selecting some files/folders (a feature missing from the original Tracker). This Tracker also supports SVG, but I found no way to enable its settings globally (you can only control it on per-window basis, as far as I know, I could not for example set all windows to 128×128 or 16×16). Deskbar now supports “Team Expander” which will expand the running applications’ windows to be able to select them directly instead of having to navigate on a submenu to reach them. Nice add-on, I really like it, but there are bugs still. The “Move To”, “Copy To” and “Create Link To” context menus have been enriched with more options. So far, I had many instances where NetPositive and other apps won’t respond to my mouse’s double click to minimize, while the minimize button (found only on some themes) does work.
YellowTAB comes by default with a number of useful Tracker add-ons, including a brand new one named “Fax these files”, which loads a new FAX-It application created by YTAB+friends especially for Zeta. Overall, some good new additions and options and some bloatware/duplication ones, like the addition of DockBert, a MacOSX-like Dock application which, when it comes down to it, it does exactly what Deskbar does. It serves no purpose having two different taskbars on the same OS, and BeOS was never the OS of many choices (like OSX and Windows too), it was the OS with the best defaults. Zeta seems to fail in this regard, adding a lot of new but similar things instead of perfecting the solution at hand that is proven to work.
YellowTAB comes with… three GCC compilers. GCC 2.94, 2.95 and 3.2. YellowTAB claims that including the old BeOS compiler is necessary for easier adoption of the platform by the existing BeOS developers (applications compiled with GCC 3.2 won’t run on anything but Zeta you see, so the older compilers are needed). In my opinion, this is a bad situation. YellowTAB should bring the OS forward. When Be moved to R5, their forward compatibility issues wouldn’t allow creation of executables that could run on R4.5 either, but all older applications would run on R5. They made a choice to not allow legacy into the OS and without having an impact to the users, as all older binaries were still working. In my opinion, YellowTAB should take the same course and move the OS to GCC 3.3 and optimize it for all sorts of new cool stuff and forget the past. Allowing binary compatibility with R5 binaries is enough, developers will migrate with time.
Zeta comes with BONE, which was the new networking stack for Dano. It was modeled after BSD’s networking stack (it is not a port though, it is brand new code), and it offers much-superior performance to the old user-space based net_server which used to crash very often. Be left the BONE development in pretty much 90% of its completion and debugging but I don’t have any information about whether YellowTAB has completed the job or left it as-is.
Dano/EXP was also coming with some 3D support (Voodoo 3/4/5, ATi Radeon up to Radeon 8500, some Matrox G400/G450 3D support, Intel i810/i815/i820 and an SiS model I can’t remember now). Jason Sams, one of the brightest Be engineers that ever joined the Be team, created the GL stack and drivers with little help from others, and our benchmarks back in the day at BeNews showed that this was a very fast stack by year 2000 standards. However, no one really can get into Jason’s mind as there was no real documentation on how he put the whole thing together. Other Be engineers who looked at Jason’s accomplishment were left scratching their heads on how it worked (Jason had also created a brand new programming scripting language which looked like assembly to help him with the development). Jason works for nVidia these days (he left PalmSource recently). YellowTAB is left with no documentation about this particular GL stack, so there was no 3D support in the Zeta I tried. In fact, running a few *software* GL applications would result in crashes after a while (even the simple GL Teapot app). Please note that this PC has been running BeOS 4/5/betas for many years now, so it is definitely not my graphics card at fault here. YellowTAB is telling me that we will have to “wait and see” about 3D support; they do have something at work but it won’t be ready for quite a while.
Speaking of drivers, YellowTAB has brought to the table a number of new drivers, like better 2D support for ATi and nVidia, some more networking card support and Audigy, AC97 support. Zeta also features the new printing API and tools Be designed that look extremely nice, professional and simple! Check screenshot.
YellowTAB also works on the LocaleKit which will allow Zeta to support localization for most languages, something that BeOS lacked severely. They have contributed work on BeAIM, Jabber, wireless LAN drivers, video capture card support, support for latest CPUs (I think HyperThreading support is already there, Be added it a few years ago, when Xeons HT were not even available, with the help of Intel). YellowTAB also did some work on AbiWord, on a new word processing application (no details yet) and they now support all three kinds of USB (UHCI, OHCI, IHCI – BeOS 5 only supported Intel’s USB well, but VIA’s not very well or not at all depending on the chipset). There is also a new add-on to be added to Zeta, which will bring ODBC support to the OS! YTAB was telling me that this module will be available for testing soon.
Zeta uses the updated Media Kit, which doesn’t have broken support for codecs as the earlier versions of BeOS had… And hopefully, there is better support for the SB128 sound cards which was the main complaint in 2001. Also, a port of MPlayer is at works too. I just hope they will rewrite the GUI to be Zeta-like and simple.
The group is also considering the development of a rootless X11 (similar to how it works on Mac OS X and QNX) so applications like OpenOffice.org and other applications would be much more easily ported rather than going through the major pain doing a direct port (BeOS is kind of a pain regarding ports because it is very different architecture-wise than any other OS out there). When on rootless X11, its applications would run side-by-side the native Zeta ones. Personally, can’t wait for a fully accelerated port of X11 on Zeta.
Bugs and problems
In this beta, I found a few problems, bugs and things that I personally wouldn’t agree with as a very old BeOS user. I don’t use BeOS much anymore, but I do have a good grasp of its excellence in some points and its suckiness in others, so please forgive me for being opinionated.
So, here are a few problems I found in this beta and I wholeheartedly hope they will be fixed for the final version:
1. The fonts are bad. Very bad. I don’t know what YTAB changed in the settings of the font rendering engine, but fonts are plain ugly. Dano/EXP also used this new font engine, but it wasn’t as bad as in this Zeta beta. Linux’s latest font config is worlds better in my opinion.
2. The preference panel “Fonts” is now broken. Changing the font size in the “Plain Font” only changes it to the context menus, but not in the menus of the applications, as it should have.
3. SoundPlay and its plugins and email client Beam crash like there’s no tomorrow. No DivX support I could see.
4. There is a problem with the font sensitivity of the UI, and it is especially visible with *some* themes. I don’t know if this is a bug of Zeta or a bug of the theme. But on some applications there are problems with widgets colliding with others widgets (they render on top of the other).
5. There is no security/protection for the user, even now with the introduction of BONE, like a personal firewall. Something more advanced like internet connection sharing, would be cool to have too. However YTAB has worked on better ISDN support and that’s a plus.
6. The logo of Zeta in the Deskbar is really amateurish and when you click on it you get an even uglier look. But hey, it’s a beta, right?
7. No scanner support as of now. Bernd tells me they are working on it though so this is promising.
YellowTAB is a small team and it doesn’t have all the resources to work full scale on every aspect of the OS. However, the realities of the marketplace won’t be kind to the company, so I feel I am forced to also not soft-pedal my criticism.
Granted, this is a beta. However, the direction the OS is taking is already clear: Add features and more new user-space applications and some more and some more. I will have to ring the bell of danger for YTAB and ask for more fixes rather than more new features. BeOS 5 was by no means perfect. But it worked well for most people. Replacing parts that are known to work well and have served well with new parts that only add unnecessary bloat (e.g. the new Installer) or duplication (e.g. Dockbert), is hardly a step forward for the BeOS paradigm. In fact, this could be considered a step backward. We certainly don’t need another Linux, with mind-boggling choice and variety at every turn. Zeta should continue where BeOS has stopped, not transform the OS into bloatware and illogicality like your average Linux distribution. Surely, I love the new drivers. Surely, I like the new Tracker (even if it is still buggy), but instead of filling up the preferences with unneeded panels I would have to ask for things like:
1.Samba. Where is a working samba? We need interoperability!
2. There is _stil_ no support for more than 90 Hz in the monitor panel. In fact, the current screen panel doesn’t expose all the abilities of the driver and app_server. Be was thinking of moving to GTF, but Palm bought them before that happens.
3. No spell checking or voice reading in the text views of any Zeta application. No real support for accessibility.
4. No multi-user yet! Yes, this can break a number of older applications (which was why Be didn’t go live with it, but Zeta/Dano already breaks apps, so let them breat in one go instead of having to break more apps again in a few years), but someone has to take the big decision and activate the Be implementation (it is just a build flag ;). Zeta is a desktop OS, but multi-user also grows in the minds of people as times goes by. It is not 1998 anymore. Even Microsoft now offers multiuser on all its OSes.
5. Why doesn’t Zeta use the _new_ preference panel that was written for Dano/EXP. Why do we still get the old panels that are now filling up the menus? (more than 12 items on any menu is considered bad by usability engineers).
6. No fix for the numlock bug which makes BeOS to not remember if the NumLock was set to ON in the previous booting. Sounds trivial and stupid but really annoys a lot of people.
7. No fix for the 1 GB RAM limit. This is maybe the biggest BeOS/Zeta limitation today. Read here for more explanation and make sure you read the comments too.
8. BeOS can’t load more than 32 MB of addons, which is needed for big applications (a problem that almost stalled the Mozilla port back in the day). No more than 192 threads per app. Say you open more than 192 child windows or threads of an application, BeOS goes ca-boom (e.g. ShowImage).
9. Still, no Java.
10. Sucky VM in the kernel. Needs fixing. Source of many problems for Zeta, including the 1 GB RAM limit.
11. I’d like to see support for Great Britain’s TV cards (some TV cards use a different sound standard). There was an addon for it but never got integrated to BeOS.
12. Second biggest problem: No usable browser. NetPositive just doesn’t cut it anymore — it is a Netscape 2 compliant browser. Useless, at least for me, despite its speed, as it doesn’t support SSL (I don’t care about javascript, but I need SSL). The Mozilla/Phoenix ports are just _BAD_. BeOS was created to run on computers like P90 and P100. I use BeOS and Zeta on this (fast machine by the BeOS standards) dual Celeron 2×533 (which is the machine most BeOS geeks preffered back in the day) and BeZilla/Phoenix is just _unusable_. I am *not* saying that it is Mozilla’s fault, because in this case it is not. I also have Windows XP and Linux on this machine and while Mozilla doesn’t fly, it is 100% usable under these OSes. But on BeOS/Zeta, it is not. It crawls like hell. Again, I will have to ask YellowTAB to help fix the port, as a good browser is imperative no matter the platform (and the rest of the Mozilla apps that come with the browser). THIS port should be fixed, regardless. It is a strategic step for YellowTAB, even if YTAB doesn’t plan on using it as default.
Conclusion
Even with Mozilla so slow when operating clogging up both my CPUs, mp3 playback did not skip (while it does on Red Hat Linux 9 on the much faster AthlonXP 1600+). The OS still has the BeOS’ great UI responsiveness, but overall the system is a bit slower: you will need something like 80-100 Mhz more than the previous low-end (P75-P90) and at least 48 MB (previous low was 32 MB). Still, the OS overall, BeZilla/Phoenix aside, is much faster and responsive on low-end hardware than _any_ of its competition (Linux, Windows XP).
So, what I do I think of this beta? I believe that it is two steps forward and one step backwards. YellowTAB does some hard work to ensure driver support and application support, but at the same time they lose focus and spend time working on things that don’t need replacement or fixing and leaving aside other things that do need fixing. The hard problems are still there. YellowTAB must play catch up with Linux and Windows now, as BeOS was paused and not developed for years now. For now, I say “good job,” but keep running.
YellowTAB has a great advantage inheriting all this source code from Be, Inc. but also it has the inevitable curse that they will have to live in the shadow of the “legendary days” of R4.5 and R5. To overcome Be’s own legacy will take a lot of work. But it is a great help that Zeta is the true and only direct BeOS descentant, so they are currently years ahead in development than the other teams who try to reproduce the BeOS, like OpenBeOS, B.E.O.S, BeFree and Cosmoe. I hope that ex and BeOS developers and users show the support YellowTAB needs in order to survive and continue the development of the authentic and original BeOS code.
However, I would like to see some real engineering from YellowTAB, not just “development”. Some real breakthroughs and innovations, like we became accustomed to from Be. Hiring a usability engineer with real BeOS experience would be a good thing in my opinion. I am not talking about a UI artist, I am talking about a usability engineer. YellowTAB needs one. More engineers to join the team would be good too. If they could “hire” Axel, Marcus and 2-3 more “big brains” from the BeOS dev community and OpenBeOS, they could definately get some great results with time.
For version 1.0, I can say that I understand that the product needs to play catch up with the competition because of the lost time Palm created, but from now on, I need to see some achievements in order to draw attention in the market. BeOS was always about impressions and “wows”. So, impress me.
Installation: 9/10
Hardware Support: 6.5/10
Ease of use: 10/10
Features: 6.5/10
Credibility: 8/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 8.5/10 (throughput, UI responsiveness, latency)
Overall: 8.08
“2. There is _stil_ no support for more than 90 Hz in the monitor panel. In fact, the current screen panel doesn’t expose all the abilities of the driver and app_server. Be was thinking of moving to GTF, but Palm bought them before that happens.”
What is GTF?
Generally it is great to see a new release of “BeOS” – and being ßeta, I am sure that most of the kinks will be ironed out before an actual release.
Are sliding tabs supported?
>What is GTF?
VESA autodetection method to get the right resolutions/refresh rates.
>Are sliding tabs supported?
No. The window manager is brand new code. It is not possible to support this now that theming is supported.
I must say, I am glad I’m an OSNews regular. I expected that this site would be the first or one of the first to report on Zeta, and was not mistaken.
Excellent review. Do you know if the same font rendering engine that PhOS used is here? that one seemed much better than Dano. Overall, a lot of these issues PhOS FIXED! For example, I got a routing 120 fps with my i810. Maybe looncraz left after all.
That should be “routine”, and in GLTeapot.
>Do you know if the same font rendering engine that PhOS used is here?
I don’t know as I never used the PhOS BeOS distribution. But one thing is for sure: Zeta did something to the font engine code that decreased the font rendering quality when compared to any version of BeOS, even Dano. I hope they will find what’s wrong and fix it for the final version, because the fonts are really not good…
I love the WORLD EXCLUSIVE titles they really get my attention
I am really looking forward to Zeta, I would love to have it on my current machine, that is when I get my new machine
I actually liked Dockbert a lot. I could use my Deskbar to keep track of windows and such, but Dockbert looks much better and has a nifty “CPU-usage” feature. It was also something i could keep on the side and launch favorite apps with. Not quite as space-hogging as the Dock, too, and has a few nifty graphical effects.
Also, I must say I liked the BeOS Terminal better than any of the Linux ones. I could configure it to be green text on black with spiffy no-background selection, as I like the readability better that way.
The /dev directory, implemeneted for POSIX compliance I think, was brain-dead. A UNIX/Linux like naming scheme would be better. Come on, /dev/disk/ide/ata/0_0/? better /dev/hda.
Good job on the review Eugenia. I completely agree with your conclusions regarding the direction that needs to be taken with this. I was attracted by BeOS’s elegance and speed, and it sounds as if Yellow Tab is doing quite a bit of patchwork adding features etc. that aren’t needed or wanted.
If they can focus on using the power of BeOS to take advantage of the latest hardware, who knows what it could do. Your report that it boots slower is very disturbing… Boot time is not everything but it sounds like you get nothing from this extra time (besides more fonts!).
Lets hope YellowTab gets the bugs worked out and keeps the focus on BeOS’s founding principles.
Granted its just a beta, but from what I’ve read and heard Zeta is going in the opposite direction from the way I would like to see BeOS progress. I also thought this of the leaked Dano .. more features, fewer fixes. I wish they would dump the themeing engine, I wish they would adopt Freetype as the default font renderer, I wish they wouldn’t throw Dockbert in there by default.
I hope none of this is the case for Zeta R1 Final. YellowTab, take head, in the opinion of many BeOS enthusiasts Zeta should be an R5 with more drivers, an updated networking stack and tons of fixes … nothing more. I for one would be perfectly satisfied if that’s all Zeta was.
>I also thought this of the leaked Dano .. more features, fewer fixes.
Dano was never finished. This is why it didn’t have the fixes you wanted to see. As for more features, it was natural for Be to develop them, as Dano was supposed to be R6.
> I wish they would dump the themeing engine
No, that wouldn’t be wise. The theme engine is there, it works and it was one of the points users were asking during the R5 days.
I agree about adopting Freetype and Fontconfig though. Dockbert shouldn’t be there either, because duplication is a bad thing on any OS.
1. What the hell is up with the installer? I mean, not being able to pick source and target? Talk about dropping a really nice feature. Also, I take it Drive Setup is gone, or at least been made such a weak duck that it won’t let a sure resize or remove/create other types of partions?
2. Make an amazing Word .doc translator, and life will be a little easier for some of us.
3. I think offering Dockbert to the user is just fine, I’ve never used it but it doesn’t seem like a bad way to go about things.
4. Font rendering, for most of us, isn’t that impressive in Dano, I hope it gets some targetting, that it would become worse in Zeta is distressing. I assume you played with the Rendering options in the font previews? (if it works, I saw in the review how some things are broken in there, this might be one of those items).
5. Best of luck to YellowTab and the coders out there helping them try to make the best BeOS they can.
I don’t think looncraz left, I think he is just busy atm
From what I can see in those screenshots, it seems to be an application for finacial accounting purposes. But it seems very specific for Germany, because there are fields like “DATEV”, which is the software/network for this here in Germany….
> 1. What the hell is up with the installer? I mean, not being able to pick source and target? Talk about dropping a really nice feature.
Agreed. Bernd said that he would add it to his new Installer, but in my opinion, any new code is prone to bugs. Personally, I would just drop the YTAB installer and use the much simpler and less involved old one, and just add to the old one the ability to select the language and tweak a few things that might need tweaking.
(and I didn’t even mentioned to the article that the thumbnails of any application you have selected in the new Installer are just very badly resized, using “Smart Size” instead of Billinear or Bicubic resizing method, making them looking exceptionally ugly!)
> Also, I take it Drive Setup is gone, or at least been made such a weak duck that it won’t let a sure resize or remove/create other types of partions?
No, Drive Setup is there. As it was before. The same Drive Setup as Be’s. But Be’s Drive Setup doesn’t have the ability to edit flags/create partitions. And so doesn’t Zeta’s.
i just hope they don’t lure away the best devs from openbeos! a much more worthwhile project imo.
>a much more worthwhile project imo.
I don’t understand how you can say that when Zeta is there and it boots and it works, while OpenBeOS’ doesn’t. The only thing that Zeta doesn’t have is the OSS way of doing development and the excitement of creating new stuff and becoming a “hero”. But what Zeta does have is a codeline and a product that it is working with a great inheritance.
As an old BeOS user, I much prefer a company to offer me something that is inheritent from BeOS and it WORKS, instead of something that MIGHT work in 5-7 years from now. As a user, I need a computer now, not in a decade.
Eugenia, you complained about Zeta being slow. Did you feel that you were using BeOS, or did it feel like something new?
It did seem from the review that zeta tries to be another Linux distro.
Judging from the review, Zeta will NOT be on my to purchase list.
>you complained about Zeta being slow.
No. The *booting time* was slow. The usability is the same as Dano’s (which is *a bit* slower than BeOS 5 *naturally* because of all the theming stuff etc). As for the BeZilla stuff, it is slow on BeOS as well, not just on Zeta.
>Did you feel that you were using BeOS, or did it feel like something new?
Felt like BeOS Dano, with some additions, but these additions didn’t always worked well (e.g. Tracker would crash when changing settings of the SVG icon size)
>It did seem from the review that zeta tries to be another Linux distro.
It certainly has this feel here and there. However, if YTAB *learn* from this preview and fix some bugs, then this IS a product to be in your purchase list. Definately.
I’ve played with Dano, Phos and use BeOS as my main OS, simply because it delivers most of what I want without the hassles I always seem to encounter with Windows.
I must admit that I got quite used to the way Dano did things, and missed them alot when I went back to plain old R5 (needed some apps that simply didn’t behave under Dano). That the Font engine has gotten worse (It was way better under Phos) than the Dano original is shameful really, sorry and all of that, but it has to be one of the most used componants of an OS….
I truely hope Bone is fixed otherwise a whole lot of Dialup users of Zeta will likely be waiting until it is or be handing their copies back when they find out the worst…
All in all it’s good to see that they are doing something, as their website has been awaiting for about a month now. I agree that it would be a good idea to have a central core of lads and lasses working on this, but time is money as the saying goes and programmers eat a lot of capital per head. So I guess that’ll have to wait untill they start getting money back from Zeta R1.
RE the firewall issue, if its using Bone then you can install Snort (available at bebits) I don’t know how good it is in the firewall sweepstakes but its better than nothing at all. That it wasn’t included seems to me to be a very serious oversight on their part as Security on the internet are must haves and could be turned to a distinct marketing advantage.
And Finally Thanks for the review, I thought it a bit harsh re it’s critism but I think that that is a case of each to their own and as I’ve not used it yet I can’t really say more than that 😀
Good work Eugenia,
and well played the YT crew!
Im not trolling or anything, but I am woundering what the real advantages of BeOS are, I’ve never used it (though I have the install file) so I have no real opinion about it. What are the advantages over my Mac (OS X) or my PC (win2k, linux)? Is it unix-based / open source, etc? Fill me in
If they are going to add something new, why not try doing something similar to Safari.
eg. KHTML stuff with an interface that is a lot like Netpositive with tabs.
Also in the future as the Mozilla team make gecko more embeddable that too could be ported. Imagine being able to switch between rendering engines for website that don’t work well for konqueror derivatives(hopefully things in konqueror will be fixed).
>> [openbeos] a much more worthwhile project imo.
> I don’t understand how you can say that when Zeta is there
> and it boots and it works, while OpenBeOS’ doesn’t. The only
> thing that Zeta doesn’t have is the OSS way of doing
> development and the excitement of creating new stuff and
> becoming a “hero”. But what Zeta does have is a codeline and
> a product that it is working with a great inheritance.
i was talking about a “project” not a “product”. having a free and opensource desktop OS in a few years (glad to see your prediction is down to 5-7 years instead of the usual 10…) is imo worth more than a feature bloated zeta this or the next year; always on the verge of bancrupting the company.
Well, BeOS’s main advantages (fully buzzword compliant) are mostly the technological innovations it brought (some still have no duplicate). BeOS will seem faster in day-to-day (ie not heavy compiling) use than anything on slower hardware. The user interface is quite beautiful and intuitive (IMNSHO). It has real-time video and audio (it was meant to be a MediaOS), so it is theoretically superior to anything else (other systems now lead due to raw speed). Programming for it is supposedly a wonder, and the API has things like BMessage (find the old BeBounce demo somewhere).
It isn’t UNIX-based, but it is partially POSIX-compliant. Definitely not open source, though such an effort is underway. Linux and W2K will kick its ass in networking–BeOS networking sucks, even in the leaked stuff.
Overall, it’s nice to boot into sometimes, and see what things could have been like. Nice to play 10 different videos at the same time–linux could never do that. Too bad it’s dead, and if anything will eventually change that it’s OpenBeOS, not Zeta.
Just read here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010603035418/www.benews.com/beos/ (slow site)
I should say it’s not as dead anymore with Zeta, but it is dead in terms of mindshare, just like the original. When you don’t have mindshare, open source is the best way to go.
I don’t understand how you can say that when Zeta is there and it boots and it works, while OpenBeOS’ doesn’t. The only thing that Zeta doesn’t have is the OSS way of doing development and the excitement of creating new stuff and becoming a “hero”. But what Zeta does have is a codeline and a product that it is working with a great inheritance.
As an old BeOS user, I much prefer a company to offer me something that is inheritent from BeOS and it WORKS, instead of something that MIGHT work in 5-7 years from now. As a user, I need a computer now, not in a decade.
Didn’t you learn anything from the Be experience? With closed-source applications you always have the risk of the company dying and taking your application with it, rendering all the time you invested in learning that application useless. If Be couldn’t make BeOS fly, what makes you think these guys will? It’s pretty clear they’re not half the company Be was.
And a fair bit of warmth.
so had they included that stegemann “multiuser” /patch/ yet?
it doesnt seem like it.
and an easy way to go if they want a so-so firewall solution is to use portsentry i.e not the best solution but a good userland “firewall”
good review.
>Didn’t you learn anything from the Be experience?
I have. But open source doesn’t guarantee ANYTHING either. Especially development. Especially good debugging. Especially professionalism with usability engineers with guts to kick the nuts of the engineers when they don’t listen. Closed source development has its high points and its low points. Open Source development has also high points and low points.
At this point in time I prefer YTAB over any other BeOS project, just because YTAB’s OS *works* and it is ready for consumption. This is their main advantage. As a consumer, I don’t want to wait years, I want something NOW. And YTAB is able to provide me with that today.
It is simple economics.
>With closed-source applications you always have the risk of the company dying
I can tell you my friend, I have seen a zillion OSS projects die because their developers just lost interest. It is the same danger. Always. You can never guarantee anything.
> If Be couldn’t make BeOS fly, what makes you think these guys will?
I don’t think it. I don’t believe that they have many chances of sell enough to sustain them. Still, I do prefer them over any other BeOS OSS project, just because their product is something I can use TODAY.
> It’s pretty clear they’re not half the company Be was.
What do you expect when they have 5-6 people overall, and Be had 105 in its high day with over 70 engineers? Kinda unfair comparison, don’t you think?
So they released a “Beta” with missing features? I thought Betas were supposed to be feature-complete.
Hey Eugenia, just a thought. If such a small company as Zeta can buy the source code of BeOS, it isn’t *that* expensive. Just like the open source community did with Blender, maybe that same community could buy the BeOS source code? Hell, I’d immediately pay 300$ for it to help this. It would give a huge boost to projects such as OpenBeOS… Anybody share this thought?
>Anybody share this thought?
No.
The BeOS source code costs about $2 million dollars (this is how much PalmSource asked the last time to the people attempted to buy it). Blender only costed $100,000 in order to open source it, and even then, it took months to gather thant sum. There is no chance in hell that the small community of BeOS can buy BeOS. As for YellowTAB, I think they got the source by other (yes, legal) means, that I won’t reveal here.
They didn’t buy it, they reached a licensing agreement with Be before Be was sold. I wish….
Nice review, Eugenia. Gave a pretty good overview for us old BeOS users what using Zeta is like. Personally, I’m saddened by it. It seems that practically everything that made the BeOS neat back in the day has been laid to waste.
I mean, look, for example, at http://img.osnews.com/img/3692/zeta4.png. What do we see? Some programs have menus, some use tabs instead, and some don’t deal with that kind of layout. Of those with menus, one has a help menu, and the others don’t. Every program using any kind of toolbar-ish buttons rolled their own. Or do you like how the ffmpeg GUI (great name, btw!) window has some options capitalized, others not, and lots of the options just thrown into random groupings? Etc. etc. etc. There’s just no consistency whatsoever.
Or look at, say, DVDRip. “Write to standard output”? Now, what the hell does that mean to anyone except a total geek? Why would you want to do it, anyway, if you weren’t using something else on the command line? Oh, and you just have to love how ffmpeg GUI shows you the command-line output it’ll use. WHY? So I can pat it on the head and say, “Good boy, you correctly translated the options I selected into the appropriate command-line string. Have a biscuit!” A good GUI is more than just a listing of all the command-line program’s flags with checkboxes and radio buttons; it’s about making choices. To me, Zeta looks like a mediocre Linux distro that doesn’t use X11 and uses a different threading model. Yay. It seems the days of, “yeah, the BeOS is technically awesome, but the interface kicks ass too!” are long gone.
But you know, I think the best thing said here was when Eugenia mentioned that Be used to have some 100 employees, while yellowTab has merely a handful. Back in the day, the BeOS was competing against an unstable and partially unadopted Windows, a Mac OS that had a pretty sad underlying structure, and a Linux without a decent desktop interface. Now we’ve got a rock-solid Windows and Mac OS, both of which do thousands of things the BeOS never dreamt of, and a Linux community that it hard at work to bring Linux to the desktop. Our expectations have grown far higher. Sad as it is, the BeOS’s capabilities simply haven’t caught up.
I have really been hoping to replace my current music creation setup with Zeta, the purpose I bought BeOS for in the first place. At one point MidiMan announced it would be writing drivers for the Delta 1010 for BeOS, but as far as I can tell, nothing came of it. I was never able to buy a midi sequencer/audio recorder aside from tracker or drum-machine type apps.
I hope Zeta can steer this where BeOS said they were going; a Media OS. I am sure that means different things to different people, but to me it means running my midi and audio studio.
Hmm, I assume BeOS uses something similar to AmigaOS’ catalog files for localisation, so that looks like a catalog file editor… quite why its part of an installation procedure though… who knows.
> Back in the day, the BeOS was competing against an unstable and partially unadopted Windows, a Mac OS that had a pretty sad underlying structure, and a Linux without a decent desktop interface. Now we’ve got a rock-solid Windows and Mac OS, both of which do thousands of things the BeOS never dreamt of, and a Linux community that it hard at work to bring Linux to the desktop. Our expectations have grown far higher. Sad as it is, the BeOS’s capabilities simply haven’t caught up.
Your whole comment was excellent Billy, as always, but the last paragraph really excels. It requires INNOVATION to be able to survive in today’s OS world and captivate a market. Things are always getting tightier with time, not easier for OS companies/projects. Sad as it is for small groups…
The same type of thing was happening 30-35 years ago. Reading Edsger Dijkstra gave me some insights into how this works. Back then, IBM and its OS/390 crap (according to Dijkstra) ruled the nascent computer world. UNIX was not nearly mature; E.D hardly mentions it. The point is, something will come along that shakes the world to its foundations (sad as it is, it won’t be BeOS or Linux). Back then it was UNIX. What’s it gonna be now? Plan9?
..first time as tragedy second time as farce….
“Something more advanced like internet connection sharing, would be cool to have too.”
There’s ipalias, though it’s not entirely user friendly
“There is _stil_ no support for more than 90 Hz in the monitor panel.”
You can download and compile the OpenBeOS Screen Preferences app from their CVS silly YellowTab.
YellowTab, get your act together and create something that will make us old timers proud, right now, I certainly won’t be buying your cheap BeOS hack.
YellowTab, get your act together and create something that will make us old timers proud, right now, I certainly won’t be buying your cheap BeOS hack.
————–
Thats what i am seeing too. The more i look at the screenshots, the less i want to buy Zeta. I am actually quite dissapointed.
Oh well, i am glad it is Zeta and not BeOS.
Why do i feel that BeOS was just raped and pillaged?
Maybe this is why they didn’t want to release it yet.
>The more i look at the screenshots, the less i want to buy Zeta.
Well, most of the screenshots just show Be’s own pref panels, and not YellowTAB’s creations. Some windows are of YTAB’s, but in the first shots it all Be’s.
The design of the UI widgets was also Be’s.
Check the printer windows on the first two shots for example. This is the new printer panel that Be created. Really nice I must say…
Does BeOS support TTF fonts? If not, why?
Thanks.
Of course it does.
hm,
seems that many points critisized are being adressed by the b.e.o.s-approach, which i personally for this reason(s) find the most interesting. some might say that it’s neither fish nor flesh, but properly done, it could combine the best of both worlds, means participating in the very good driver pools as well as the technical progress of the linuxkernel, as well as being source-compatible to beos.
sounds very promising…
as for dano, i don’t think they’ve chance. really…!
“as for zeta…”, of course!
I don’t like the BEOS approach. It combines Linux and Xfree bloat with something that needs to be responsive. Both of those have way more features than needed or wanted in a BeOS clone. Linux is good for Linux. there’s a reason Be used a microkernel.
dano: you mean YellowTAB….then again, that too
Eugenia, your comment :
“Zeta uses a modified OpenTracker and Deskbar version which supports […] a few other goodies like cut/copy/paste directly when selecting some files/folders ”
Misses the fact that Open Tracker has had this for ages. I rebuilt my ppc box in January (maybe earlier) with the latest Open Tracker CVS tarball and it had this feature.
Nope. There’s no telling what the status of it was, it was a leak. It wasn’t released be Be Inc. at all.
And looking at these screenshots and reading this review really made me feel a tad nostalgic and miss my old PC and BeOS. But I’m pretty happy running MacOS X, It’s not perfect but it does all I need now.
The last OTracker I used, about a year ago, didn’t have that. And there was no official version that had that either. Not everyone is using CVS you know… 😉
Your whole comment was excellent Billy, as always
Thanks!
I think one of the biggest problems with the “geek” community is growing up with stars in their eyes regarding Jobs & Woz (or Hewitt & Packard, or Gates & company, or whoever). The belief that two guys in their garage can create something cool and shake up the world with it. But what they often don’t seem to grasp is that Jobs & Woz (to use them as an example), created an industry. They made something new that hadn’t existed before. These days, companies like Be compete with huge, established companies who are in the same business. And that already have the investment of millions of customers.
The BeOS, as cool as it was, wasn’t that different from other operating systems. It wasn’t a completely new industry; it was a nicer operating system, which was an established industry. Yet a lot of its fans apparently expected the world to say, “Wow, that scheduler’s a little neater, the API is cleaner, and the icons are cuter. Ok, you’ve convinced us…we’ll throw away the trillions of dollars we’ve invested in this other platform and adopt yours!!” That’s like saying, “Ok, we don’t like this one thing about English, so we’re going to change it and translate every book ever written.” For people to be willing to throw away such investment, the advantages of the new platform have to be tremendous. Face it: the BeOS’ advantages weren’t tremendous back in the day, and they sure as hell aren’t by today’s standards.
Moreover, I doubt that too many people really care about the operating system, other than its not getting in your way (by crashing, not having drivers, not supporting applications, etc.) other than the capabilities it brings to its applications. Love or hate Apple, I think they realize this. They go, “Hmmm, a web browser is a crucial portion of a modern computer and the user experience with those existing on our platform isn’t good. Let’s deliver (what will hopefully be) a great experience to the user.” Or they do it with e-mail, or digital photography, or whatever. But I’ll bet that Apple has more people working on Safari than yellowTab has employees, period. There’s just no way that yellowTab can compete with that.
So what is yellowTab left with? An aging OS that can’t run most software in the world (including not being able to run a decent web browser at all decently), whose applications tend to lack even basic polish (and this is getting worse, not better, with time), and for which, in the few areas where it still is technically superior, the features aren’t particularly compelling. Who’s the market?
If it were me with BeOS source code, I’d attempt to do something radically different from what Apple and Microsoft are doing. What exactly, I don’t know–I haven’t thought that much about it. But the Apple I didn’t succeed because it tried to take on IBM’s mainframe business. To the extent that Be had a differentiating angle (personally, I’ve always thought the sole reason for Be’s creation was to be bought by Apple), it was that it did media well in the days when competing systems didn’t, and that it focused on bringing incredible power to the user in an easy package. Nowadays, as it stands, Zeta is worse than Windows or the Mac for media. And because of lack of polish and lack of talented engineers/UI designers working together, it’s worse in terms of “easy package.” By contrast, Apple and Microsoft are both strongly focused on it (Apple especially, in my opinion). Zeta simply cannot compete with that “differentiating angle”; if your army’s outnumbered and outsupplied, you don’t lead a forward charge.
Yet yellowTab hasn’t bothered to seek out a new angle, something that could leverage what little technological advantage they still have. Instead, they’re adding small applications to an OS that no sane person would use for such applications, anyway. It just doesn’t make sense. They’re obviously trying to appeal to the few BeOS diehards who say, “Man, I’d love to still use the BeOS [for reasons that are beyond me considering the awesome things competing systems can do], but I just won’t be able to without a few more abilities.” Great, so you string the small and ever-shrinking group of users who use BeOS “just because” along for a few years, and then what? The company folds and the game is over. They can’t seriously be crazy enough to think that they can be successful by making and selling a product that to most users is “the exact same thing as Windows or the Mac, except with way fewer features and worse applications”, can they? Rather than trying to fight Apple and Microsoft, they’d be better off trying something radically different, something that the other companies simply can’t do. If it doesn’t work, fine…they tried. But at least they’d have a chance. Where they’re at now is playing chicken in a Mini against a freight train and hoping that somehow they survive.
You are 100% correct.
I think yT’s target market is 1)Geeks and 2)BeOS fans. I bet they’ll make a couple thou net profit, and then quietly fade off into promises and obscurity as the world moves to 64 bit computing.
“I don’t like the BEOS approach. It combines Linux and Xfree bloat with something that needs to be responsive.”
if you haven’t, read the articles about and from b.e.o.s in osnews’ archive-it depends on _how_ you do things…
As an old time BeOS user and developer I am saddened to see this review of Zeta.
It seems to me that YellowTab has taken BeOS and destroyed the principial idea: Keep it simple and efficient.
I see the screenshots and the “themes”, and I feel sorry for what BeOS has become. I read what Euginia has to say and agree, what reason could YellowTab have to screw up a great/simple installer with more bloat-crap.
YellowTab should have sat down and done a bug-fix release first, then they should have turned to more features.
Frankly I don’t see how they plan on competing with Mac OS X, Windows XP, or even KDE 3.1.
I also think that providing themes is a very bad idea. At least they should have focused on 2 themes, not 8. 2 perfect ones are better than 8 screwed up ones.
Just my take on this.
Michael
PS. I am not buying this one, perhaps the next version
The 64bit computing is just a recompiling away and a bit of testing/debugging. There is nothing stoping YTAB porting to a 64bit CPU.
The problem is, as Billy said above, lack of innovation and features that will sustain the OS and bring NEW users to their market. YTAB won’t survive with only the current or ex-BeOS users as customers. It HAS to attract new ones, and to do that, it will have to prove itself against the big sharks. And you can’t do that with 5 employees scattered around the world…
But I wholeheartely wish them the best of luck! I really do!
Yes, I know all about the preemptive and lowlatency kernel patches. I have tried them; they have made zero difference in performance on two of my computers. You just can’t have the Be innovativeness with Linux and XFree. If I want Linux I will run Linux, and I do.
> I am not buying this one, perhaps the next version
Don’t forget, this is only a beta. The final, might be a better one.
And also, if you and the rest BeOS users won’t buy THIS version, there won’t be a next one. Count on it.
Well, remember that this is not a release, but a beta.
well, let’s wait for the final “product” (if there will ever be one, but i’m quite optimistic), and then judge, ok?!
looking forward to it!
Allright. That’s what choice is about, after all.
I have problems with their licensing. What are they trying to do, build a semi-proprietary OS on top of Linux? Legal and feasible, but still. Pah. I believe their site says you have to be a developer to look at the code.
I agree with Eugenia about Dockbert.
I still have no idea why they’ve included it in Tracker.
It duplicates functionality of Deskbar, and it’s fugly, IMHO.
Also, I can’t speak for Zeta, but when I installed OT that has Dockbert included, you can’t turn it off if you don’t like it. Only option is to make it autohide.
I have SVG Tracker, and it is OK, but prone to crashes. Restoring Tracker helps, but hope YT will make it more stable. Also, I hope they automated making of thumbnails, not thru Thumbnailer add-on like it is in SVG Tracker (leaked one).
Also one more thing. People use high resolutions. I’m on 1152×864. I need bigger Deskbar. For example, build in option to dispay bigger icons in Deskbar. Why have options to have bigger icons in Tracker when Deskbar remains tiny?
BTW, look at this realy nice mock-ups. Now, that is Deskbar that it would be great to have. Much better then Dock-look-a-like Dockbert.
http://www.webhost-free.com/beadingo/guis/OBOS_UI_v2_3_1_a.gif
And Eugenia is right about Mozilla/Phenix. I’m too on dual Celereon 550Mhz, and Mozilla is slow. Usable, but slow. I made Net+ theme for it to look like BeOS app, but it surely doesn’t feel like one. And it’s memory hog.58 megs of ram are eaten by this beast.
And finaly, Eugenia didn’t tell much about compatibility list. A lot of time passed since R5. Huge loads of new hardware apeared. I’m talking about loads of integrated audio/video chipsets and “softer then softomodem” modems (like AMR ones). I’m sure hardware compatibility problems will be much, much bigger now with Zeta then I had with r4, for example.
Euginia you are perfectly right when you say that there will be no “version 2” if we don’t buy version 1.
Well, so be it. A long time ago I invested a lot of time and trouble (plus some cash) in writing programs for a commercial operating system. Suddenly the company switched focus, threw the developers out in the cold and eventually was sold to another company.
Well, guess what if YellowTab goes under its the same old situation all over again.
I am not betting my time on a closed source operating system, I’d rather wait for OpenBeOS, even if it means running the risk that the OpenBeOS people might never deliver anything.
But if it turns out to be a really good product I might consider investing in a copy of it, just to play with.
Michael
This is what happens when a company don’t listen to the market but rather what they wanna do themselves. This is exactly what I feared all along. yT is sort of vapor… I’m not even sure they have access to sources but rather just remove and append new software. That could be the reason to why they decide not to fix things like they should have.
I will most likely buy it anyway assuming they support GeForce 4, but my heart and hope goes to OBOS.
If only some more kernelhaxxors could join the group…
” think yT’s target market is 1)Geeks and 2)BeOS fans. I bet they’ll make a couple thou net profit, and then quietly fade off into promises and obscurity as the world moves to 64 bit computing”
I think you are leaving out Beos’ real target market….multi-media, audio/visual.
XP is definitely better than win 95/98 but i’ve found that its peformance become sub-par once you push into the 24 to 36 track range if you start adding real time effects. reponsiveness fades pretty quickly.
I’ve heard good things about OS X behavior when loaded but pricing becomes a problem there. The premimum of a OS X machine compared to a PC is about the cost of a good studio condenser mic, a mic preamp, a decent compressor or a couple of universal audio UAD-1s (an audio effects accelerator). The opportunity cost of buying that apple is quite high though i might do it anyway.
Beos on the other hand does the job (well it would if the software were there) and does it with cheap PC hardware. Openbeos is the future as far as i am concerned but i’ll definitely purchase zeta when its available.
Hi Greg!
Do you tried see BlueEyedOS Demo? No? Look at http://www.blueeyedos.com/downloads.html! Give a try. See and comment here again about Linux and XFree performances.
I’m wanting your positives words
Michael Vinícius de Oliveira
~ BlueEyedOS.com Webmaster ~
I don’t like the BEOS approach. It combines Linux and Xfree bloat with something that needs to be responsive.
If I write a slow and non responsive app under BeOS will you conclude that BeOS is bloated? No, of course.
So, don’t do the same with the linux kernel and XFree86, they are working very well, even without patchs (preemptive, etc..). You see XFree through KDE or Gnome, and the linux kernel through its boot time, I suppose. It’s the mistake you do IMHO.
Take a look at the demo CD of B.E.OS, and be conscious that it’s compiled in debug mode with a lot of ‘printf’, and with an app_server which is built (for debug) to redraw _everything_ at every needed redraw.
Regards,
Guillaume
Slashdot just linked to this story.
I must admit I was never a BeOS user, but I loved it none the less, and when I heard of Zeta I was hopeful to see BeOS back.
But this review brought me to reality, has Billy stated, and what does Zeta bring to the market that other OS don’t?
Linux is already pretty usable has a desktop (even if long way from perfect) and has community and commercial support Zeta can only dream about so who would by Zeta besides BeOS die hard fans?
So my conclusions are that BeOS has an OS is dead it’s just too old to compete with the rest of the boys, but BeOS has the collection of innovating ideas should live on!
Things like the database like file system, the translators, just to name a few are still with out mach on other system.
In the end I think what projects like OBOS could be doing is bringing these ideas and concepts to the next level and building what BeOS would of became and not what it was.
DragonSoull
I was hoping beyond hope that Zeta would be an improvement. I wanted updated drivers, Media kit fixes (multichannel for example), OpenGl (as Bernd has repeatedly promised), and some of the Dano/Exp features. Sadly only the drivers issue will be updated. Some Dano/EXP features will be added but excessive bloat is also added. Eugenia reported that Soundplay was now broken. That is one of the ESSENTIAL apps for BeOS. Really sad news.
OBOS will need years to be a viable OS, but sadly they do not have the manpower to keep up.
I think this review is the death knell for BeOS.
Eugenia also hit on my major peeve with most Linux distros. I do not want zillions of options or apps to install. I wanted a decent desktop OS. I want basic functions that work. BeOS R5 and Corel Linux were examples of OS’es that did exactly that. Granted there were a lot of cool apps you could install later that independent developers made, but the OS itself was perfectly functional with the default install. Obviously as the years have passed the basic requirements for an OS has radically changed and these OS’es are now frightfully outdated. I am now resigned to use Windows XP as it does most of what I want, nowhere as elegantly as BeOS did, but it is being updated and has actually improved.
It galls me to think that BeOS is dying a most inelegant death. I would have liked to see one final blaze of glory with the release of Zeta.
Wow, looks nice. I haven’t used BeOS in years, and the other projects and BeOS editions don’t support the wireless card for my laptop, so I haven’t even thought about using it in a while. Nice to see they’ve got a decent amount of drivers and are putting some good work into Be again.
Looks like it’s time to buy BeOS again
That’s just what we used to call the tip of tree (‘exp’ for experimental) as opposed to the release branch (‘rel’ for release). It looks even weirder in all-caps. I guess BeOS just won’t die 🙂 Where’s JLG to make some bizarre necorphilia crack?
– Brian
Well, I look at the kernel through its enormous size and features that are unnecessary, plus some that are missing. Is anyone really going to be running BEOS on a SPARC? Also, on your site you mention that all the hardware drivers are compiled in…do you mean as modules? because if they are *actually* compiled in, that increases the kernel’s footprint significantly. XFree (I read your piece on this site earlier; enlightening) I look upon as something designed for UNIX, not Linux. Its features–network transparency etc.–are lost for single desktop machines. Even within the Linux community there are many voices shouting for an alternate solution, like DirectFB. And last time I checked app_server didn’t use 7.5% of my CPU like XFree does….
I wish I could try out your demo, but unfortunately the CD-ROM drive in this computer is b0rked. Will definitely when I get my main PC back.
>I think you are leaving out Beos’ real target market….multi-media, audio/visual.
Nowadays, that crowd’s hardware is less and less supported. If you look at the website. you see that there is little information about anything media, just BeOS geek stuff like “History.”
A lot of the questions are already answered on the yellowtab forum btw…
Here are some quickies:
> > Are sliding tabs supported?
> No. The window manager is brand new code. It is not possible to support this now that theming is supported.
Let’s say “for now”. Really the decor system doesn’t make it easy. It seems that would need some hacking.
> Maybe looncraz left after all.
He has become quite invisible currently… I think he has some personal problems to deal with.
> Come on, /dev/disk/ide/ata/0_0/? better /dev/hda.
Certainly not. And btw, even Linux is heading towards a tree-like devfs, years after BeOS did that.
The flat organisation wouldn’t handle growing numbers of drivers. Do you know what namespace polution means ?
> Good job on the review Eugenia. I completely agree with your conclusions regarding the direction that needs to be taken with this.
After some moaning, I admit I agree too. It’s always good to have external view of what you do
I’ll address issues in another comment.
> Also, I take it Drive Setup is gone, …
It’s not, however it never supported partition resizing. Besides it’s true it has lots of limitations (like creating only primary partitions).
> Is it unix-based
<troll>NO, it’s BETTER
</troll>
> eg. KHTML stuff with an interface that is a lot like Netpositive with tabs
I know there is development going on the browser side, but can’t tell more atm.
>> [openbeos] a much more worthwhile project imo.
Why do people always try to oppose those ?
IMO both are useful, and both need more developers.
> BeOS networking sucks, even in the leaked stuff.
BONE works here. I even got a working netstat
> Too bad it’s dead, and if anything will eventually change that it’s OpenBeOS, not Zeta.
Time will tell.
> Why not buy the BeOS source code?
For something to get bought, 2 parties must agree, one to buy, and one to sell. I’m not sure Palm even wants to think about it.
Besides buying the BeOS source code doesn’t mean we would be able to setup an sf.net/projects/beos and put it on. There are parts that are *licenced* from other sources, that you simply cannot opensource if you don’t want to face trials and such.
> The BeOS source code costs about $2 million dollars
For what they currently use IMO it costs much less than that… They should even pay me for cleaning up their cupboard from the box.
> Oh, and you just have to love how ffmpeg GUI shows you the command-line output it’ll use.
What about you want to reuse it later in a Terminal ? Or add other options yourself that aren’t in the GUI ? that’s what I like in BeOS, simplicity is there (GUI), but complexity (the CLI prog) isn’t hidden. Reminds me of what I read about an old Apple program (Commando).
> Hmm, I assume BeOS uses something similar to AmigaOS’ catalog files for localisation, so that looks like a catalog file editor…
Yes it is.
> quite why its part of an installation procedure though…
Simply because currently the Installer just launched the PresonnalSettings Preferences, which has more than language settings. I agree it might seem odd now.
> “as for zeta…”, of course!
Zeta is NOT Dano
I check out OSNews’ headlines everyday through its RDF backend, because it is a good source of news, even though there are way too much editorials entitled “Why I hate / love Linux” or “Why Linux isn’t ready for the desktop”. Hell, I just don’t read them.
I do have a few rants about your writing though, Eugenia:
– the title of this review (“WORLD EXCLUSIVE”) is really unjustified, it’s not like YellowTAB is revealing a revolutionary OS that everyone was waiting for. You make OSNews look like a tabloid!
– I wrote you an email some time ago, complaining about the use of acronyms without giving their meaning: I suggested the use of [abbr] and [acronym] HTML tags. You didn’t seem to understand the suggestion, perhaps you just didn’t find it interesting enough. Anyway, it seems like I’m not the only one who’s bothered by acronyms I don’t understand.
– You write “[…] the user […] can’t create, edit/resize partitions. This is a huge limitation for most new users and plagued BeOS back in the day, and it will continue to do so, unless the user already has a free partition waiting for Zeta.“. To my knowledge (I could very well be mistaking), neither do Windows OSes, MacOS X or Linux distributions offer such a feature. You always need to have a free partition to install an operating system! The bundling of Partition Magic with BeOS has nothing to do with the OS itself. I find the remark rather irrelevant.
– “The other reason is the startup sound, which is 1.3 MB“: do you mean that the sound takes a long time playing, thus making the boot time longer, or that it takes a long time loading? In the latter case, I wonder how 1.3 MB can be long to load…
– “Samba. Where is a working samba? We need interoperability!“: what about NFS? AppleTalk?
– “NetPositive […] doesn’t support SSL“: I could swear that NetPositive in BeOS R5 had SSL support; could someone confirm?
– “mp3 playback did not skip (while it does on Red Hat Linux 9 on the much faster AthlonXP 1600+)“: you make it sound like it is a real feature of BeOS. I play Flac, Ogg Vorbis and MP3 files (all three formats have very different impacts on CPU and bandwith consumption) from my NFS server, with a Pentium III-M 866MHz, 256 MB of RAM, running Linux From Scratch and using XMMS: playback never skips, even when I’m compiling a software or uncompressing a bzipped tarball. Consider your own experiences carefully, your comparisons are sometimes very subjective.
That’s all for today. Please take all these as remarks, suggestions, not as personal attacks.
If Zeta cannot exchange data with Windows via ethernet, I will not be buying it. Some networking equivalent of Samba is a MINIMUM requirement.
I was a BeOS user from R45 thru R52/3 and, while I loved it, it would not do what I needed. So, when Be Inc folded I knew it was NEVER going to be what I needed and I removed it.
I have been watching and waiting for a suitable replacement that will allow me to keep Windows XP just for games and let me do everything else in a BeOS-like environment. That includes my accounts and correspondance so I’ll need something like Open Office too.
Mozilla also absolutely MUST work properly. I will NOT put up with slow responses and a lack of utility. Java must also be implemented. That is also a minimum requirement for a browser.
My current machine is a high-end Athlon with a Radeon 9600 graphics card. I shall require that this resource will not be ignored by Zeta.
BeOS was always handicapped by the fact that there were no drivers for current hardware. Linux is now catered for by some sound and graphics card makers. BeOS never was. Zeta never will be. Zeta must therefore find a way to make use of the drivers provided for Linux by the likes of ATI and nVidea.
Will Yellow Tab make an effort in this direction? They should. After all, no drivers = no future. What do you say, Yellow Tab?
Eugenia,
in your review, you said: “(I think HyperThreading support is already there, Be added it a few years ago, when Xeons HT were not even available, with the help of Intel)”
Can you tell me where it is
Where did you hear or read about Be and HTT?
BeOS R5, nor Dano detect a HyperThreading enabled cpu, either Pentium 4 “C” or Xeon with HTT. R5 & Dano do detect an SMP capable system, but I assume thats due to MPS support in the bios.
Actually, that should have read, “neither” R5 or Dano detect & utilise a HTT (HyperThreading Technology) enabled cpu
To my knowledge (I could very well be mistaking), neither do Windows OSes, MacOS X or Linux distributions offer such a feature. You always need to have a free partition to install an operating system! The bundling of Partition Magic with BeOS has nothing to do with the OS itself. I find the remark rather irrelevant.
You are mistaken. Windows and Linux definately allow for the creation of a new partition to install on during installation.
what about NFS? AppleTalk?
When i bring a machine on my network that supports samba/smb – it can instantly talk to/mount shares/etc… every other machine on my network. None of my machines at home use NFS, and while the Macs have AppleTalk, it’s unused. I don’t want to have to go running around and get YetAnotherFilesharingProtocol up and running on my boxes at home.
The pathetically small icons have always been an annoyance in BeOS. Why can’t they add vector icons or at least support 64×64 icons?
Although I find the UI tweaks of Yellowtab to be ugly. I much prefer the old look to this.
I also don’t agree that the lack a multiuser support is a problem, as I think that there is a place for single user OSes.
> The pathetically small icons have always been an annoyance in BeOS. Why can’t they add vector icons or at least support
64×64 icons?
icons in the Zeta Tracker are in SVG format, and can grow up to 128×128.
Deskbar’s team expander (showing the windows) is definately cool. Even if I’m not a bit biased.
The patches for this were sent to both YT and OpenTracker at the same time. OpenTracker has had this option for a while in the deskbar.
As for this option being unstable, I submitted a fix for all the instability last week. I have yet to see it commited. If I had commit access to the OpenTracker CVS, it’d be in there by now.
Eugenia, it’s obvious you haven’t used a recent OT in a _long_ time, or you’d have known about cut/copy/paste of files, and the “SuperExpando” deskbar.
As for me (obviously a BeOS dev) buying Zeta. They won’t see a penny of my money. This looks like a bloated, vapor POS. No thanks, if I want crap, I’ll use Linux.
Besides that, on a matter of principle (and the fact that I use it extensively) If the window title-tabs don’t slide, I’m not wasting my money. YT, give me back the R5 look with slidy tabs, then I’ll -consider- forking over some $$.
Now onto the review itself:
(once again many questions are answered in the yellowtab forums)
The Strings tab in the PersonalSettings is a string editor for the locale kit. It is there at install time, simply because the Language button in Installer loads the pref panel.
Boot time:
Yeah, 400 seems a bit too much, really.
The startup sound size is easily fixed by converting it to IMA ADMCP, cutting it down to 300K.
Let’s say also that more drivers means more binaries to load and check at boot…
> 1. The fonts are bad.
I think looncraz fixed it already, but maybe the fix got lost. As I remembered it has to do with the font file format or something.
> 2. The preference panel “Fonts” is now broken.
I think the Menu font is specified in the Menu preferences… Or I didn’t understand the sentence.
> No DivX support I could see
I thought there was Hybrid Divx included. I have an updated FFDecoders anyway…
> personal firewall
<troll>That should be a 3rd party opportunity ?</troll>
> internet connection sharing
that shouldn’t be too hard to add to Boneyard.
> 6. The logo of Zeta in the Deskbar is really amateurish
A matter of taste I believe… Does “BeOs” look that much sexier ?
> 1.Samba. Where is a working samba? We need interoperability!
Porting the current Samba needs fcntl() advisory locking, which BeOS defines in its headers, but doesn’t implement. Not undoable for a faithful mind though.
> 4. No multi-user yet!
It is planned, but not for R1.
> (it is just a build flag
No it’s not. There is much more to correctly working multiuser than rebuilding the thing.
Things as simple as umask() aren’t implemented correctly. (i.e. not inherited on exec()).
Also Tracker itself behaves quite strangely when run setuid.
But it’s to be tested yet.
> Sucky VM in the kernel.
I believe that will only be addressed correctly by OpenBeOS itself.
s,Linux,GNU/Linux,
This review s one of the best ever on OS News and by Eugenia. It’s good to see Eugenia get some credit for once. I do not think her review was harsh. She has simply always called them as she sees them. I thought it was fair and very balanced. As for tabloid headlines, every BeOS junkie on earth has been waitng for that headline 🙂
I though Billy and Eugenia’s (and some others) remarks are on the nose and lay out the problems for Zeta. Even if they end up being true, I dismiss, for now, the more negative remarks of some. I want to see the final release. It is hard for me to imagine former BeOS users not getting Zeta…how can we possibly resist?
The end game is the problem though, as many pointed out. It is very hard seeing Zeta catching the world on fire due to lack of innovation. I do not blame YellowTab for that – it appears they’re doing what they can do. If they get some things cleaned up and support some modern hardware, I will not complain.
I have never quite known what to think of OpenBeOS, although I fervently hope they succeed. It will be awhile though. I would not mind at all having something like Zeta to play with in the meantime, assuming it’s useable – and it sounds like it will be. At any rate, I’m going to give it a whirl.
In the way that it expresses my feelings towards what should and should not be worked on. I’d love to see more drivers, BONE and the new app-server but not bloat and inconsistancies and so.
Still, this is just the first baby steps of Zeta…
how can we possibly resist?
Very very eaisly if the damn window tabs don’t slide.
Sometimes I use BeOS 5.0. It is quite good: fast and well designed. For everyday use you do not need much: good and fast internet browser (where is Opera?), mail and user group client, Java and multimedia. And spreadsheet with editor compatible with MS Office (something like OpenOffice is welcome however it would require XFree API for BeOS).
But where is a place for BeOS? I see only one: if BeOS would be small enough to be kept in Flash Memory, you would create super fast GUI for notebooks and bigger palmtops. Without power consumption, noise and warm of HDDs. Dream Mashine – something that is not reachable for Windows, Linux and MacOS X now and probably in the future.
“Keep It Simple, Stupid!”
You are mistaken. Windows and Linux definately allow for the creation of a new partition to install on during installation.
I do not believe to be mistaken: BeOS R5’s installation program does allow the creation of partitions too, even non-BFS ones. I don’t know about Zeta, though. Yet none of these operating systems allows dynamic resizing of partitions without data loss, not even BeOS / Zeta (Partition Magic does it).
I don’t want to have to go running around and get YetAnotherFilesharingProtocol up and running on my boxes at home.
That’s not the point; nobody expects you to run several redundant servers at home. The point of interoperability is to enable most people to use file sharing (in this case), whichever protocol they use. You’re using Samba, I’m using NFS; if Zeta supported both protocols, both of us would be happy with it.
That is accurate, is it inaccurate, and wrong to say that “Linux” has font configuration. It DOES NOT. Linux is a kernel, not an operating system, and not a distribution.
Ok, let’s kill this complete nonsense once and for all. Saying Linux to a Linux distribution is correct. Saying Linux instead of GNU/Linux is correct. Ever heard of a pars-pro-toto? It makes articles and day-to-day speech alot easier, manageable and expressive. If you are confused by metaphores, you really should go back to school and learn to read.
Windows isn’t just windows. It also has buttons, a kernel, internet browser, firewall, command line tools, … But you don’t see long-haired windows zealots yelling “It’s buttons/windows!! Respect the work and philosophy of buttons!”
> “It’s buttons/windows!! Respect the work and philosophy of buttons!”
Actually in MSWindows, a button _is_ a window, technically speaking
> To my knowledge (I could very well be mistaking),
>neither do Windows OSes, MacOS X or Linux
>distributions offer such a feature.
>You always need to have a free partition
>to install an operating system!
Mandrake has it since r7. DiskDrake is the name.
It is part of install. You can resize Win partitions with it.
Realy great app. Every “alternative” should have something like this. And even BeOS r4 had special edition of Partition Magic.
And even BeOS r4 had special edition of Partition Magic.
So did R5.
This version of Partition magic is old now and it doesn’t support the new big drives. And Zeta doesn’t come with it anyway.
In other words, they do need a *well-designed* partitioning tool to accompany Disk Probe. What needed changing was Disk Probe, not the Installer.
Thanks for the information. As I read resize fat partitions – resize partitions (when not caring loosing its data) ( http://www.mandrakelinux.com/diskdrake/ ), tough, I assume partition resizing without data loss is only supported for FAT partitions. So if I run BeOS or another Linux distribution, I’m screwed
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression DiskProbe was for looking at raw hex dumps of files. I really really hope they don’t require you to do that
You did mean DriveSetup, right?
>You did mean DriveSetup, right?
Yes, sorry.
>I think this review is the death knell for BeOS.
i think you are overreacting.
>what about NFS? AppleTalk?
Samba is more important for the kind of users Zeta will have.
>Where did you hear or read about Be and HTT?
At Be.
>BeOS R5, nor Dano detect a HyperThreading enabled cpu, either Pentium 4 “C” or Xeon with HTT. R5 & Dano do detect an SMP capable system, but I assume thats due to MPS support in the bios.
Yes, and this plus a small change in the kernel is all it is needed. Adding HT support is easy. The only thing that BeOS didn’t support is the thing aboug bogomips, which they wouldn’t add it anyway.
>The pathetically small icons have always been an annoyance in BeOS. Why can’t they add vector icons or at least support 64×64 icons?
Zeta DOES have vector icons! Did you read the article and saw all shots?
>> 2. The preference panel “Fonts” is now broken.
>I think the Menu font is specified in the Menu preferences…
Yes. But it doesn’t work!
>> 6. The logo of Zeta in the Deskbar is really amateurish
>A matter of taste I believe… Does “BeOs” look that much sexier ?
Much better, yes. Especially when selected with the mouse, it was still looking clean.
> Sucky VM in the kernel.
>I believe that will only be addressed correctly by OpenBeOS itself.
I believe this is the kind of things any OS company should be doing: engineering. If YTAB can’t do that all, not even for R2, then they should not be working on an OS. No one said that it would be easy.
> >I think the Menu font is specified in the Menu preferences…
> Yes. But it doesn’t work!
Are you sure you launched a new app *after* changing the font ? the settings only work for newly launched apps (the BMenuBar isn’t suppose to resize itself, as it would need if it had to support changing on the fly, lots of applications would break).
I visited Yellow Tab’s site, and read through their “History” and “Products” section. I did find information on the history of the product – how they had begun negotiations with Be to develop BeOS before Palm bought Be. But Yellow Tab does not specify whether they actually succeeded in buying the source code from Palm after it had acquired Be.
In other words, is this new OS based on old BeOS code? And if so, did Palm approve its development?
(100th comment ? *g*)
Palm has nothing to say about an agreement that was made before they bought anything.
However There are some changes that need to be addressed about that agreement, that has to be discussed with Palm. Obviously we can’t say anything about it.