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
>Are you sure you launched a new app *after* changing the font ?
Yes, I did. I know.
>In other words, is this new OS based on old BeOS code?
Yes. It is based on Dano/EXP codeline, right out of Be’s latest source code.
Where can i buy it? 🙂 this is great
Okay,
There is a final system that brings the product together. The font problem was resolved long ago, but seems to re-appear on systems with R5 most prevalently. I architected the repair, so I know.
Your startup time is terrible. My Zeta installation starts before my monitor is warm enough to show anything. The startup sound I never liked (huge). I cannot think of much o anything to slow down your boot that much, except a driver exception being handled about fifty thousand times. Which makes me think the ATA133 support may be a culprit. Often you would think such delays are from Networking slowdowns (as you can see with Win9x), but our BONE is loaded side-by-side with everything else even before the app_server (with a delay), so that is no problem. However, it is possible you still have the debug level bootscripts in place, which could result in such slowdowns. But I thihk I am the only one with them…
The installation-time repartioning is a simple item to support…now… We just prevent any partition on that hardisk from mounting during the installation, instead of mounting whichever ones by default.
Also, the installation process should be including a wizard, but my suddenly bogged schedule has slowed my progress on the ZWizard API. I have been able to make a real working wizard now, finally, so this feature may still be able to make it for R1.
Anyway, I am not arguing for Zeta b5a, as it obviously has many known flaws (why else would it be a beta?). The decors have actually been repaired a great deal, though none of these updates have made it off my computer. The latest deco r was not by me, but I have asked Bernd to relay a message to the creator to have him polish off the other alpha / concept decors while I am finishing up my latest contract. When this is done (two weeks or so), I will polish everything I have done, and then dive in and do what I am most famous for… creating a BeOS distrobution. Then the yT team will see what I think Zeta should be when released.
The betas simply are containing the technologies we created (and not even all of those). yT should seriously think about merging together several of our relateed technologies and create a team for the purpose of patents. There are many awesomely innovative ideas that are not yet known to the world.
Anyway, I must be off…
–The loon
PS: Nice and fair BTW, Eugenia 🙂
I installed BeOS5 some time ago. I had to manualy install the ati driver (lappy has ati-rage-mobility) . As in .. boot up in low res and without colors .. browse to bebits .. grab the driver , install VESA stuff .. edit some file, reboot, worked.
It’s good to see all this fixed in ZETA.
Are they working on the BeOS Filesystem ? Coz when I tried BeOS5 and moved or copied big files BeOS just crashed and rebooted.
HW : acer travelmate 529ATXV
Oh, the fonts in our latest test tracker were accidently hard-coded.. should have been B_MENU_FONT (or whatever the contsnat is), heh.. oops
–The loon
The return of the vangeance of the loon ?
btw,
SOFTWARE PATENTS SUX.
Great scoop Euginia! I really enjoyed reading the article and the comments so far.
I’m waiting to inspect the final hardware support list before I decide to purchase or not.
YellowTab has preliminary product descriptions that do not include a complete list of applications, yet. But the Home Edition says will include an office suite. Did you see anything like that in the Beta? Just AbiWord?
Too bad about the Installer. That was one ~super~ idea in BeOS. Install BeOS from any partition to any other partition and carry over all installed apps and user files…
Anyway, I’m very glad to see they’ve released something.
Best Wishes,
Bob
…is a real problem. For me, the great advantage of BeOS 5.01 (the only flavor I have used) is the speed with which it comes up and runs. A slow BeOS looses much of it’s advantage over Linux.
The other feature(s) I was looking for was support of more hardware. Eugenia mentions WiFi; I assume that means I will be able to use my LinkSys WPC 11 under Linux. But what about the dreaded AMC bug, and support for Pentium 4?
Good review, Eugenia. Lots to think about. Thanks.
Terry B.
I know they can go up to 128×128 but as Eugenia pointed out, the user cannot make the changes applicable to the entire operating system which is something that is a bigger usability improvement than themeing is.
Hate to break it to you, but smooth window dragging has been around a long time. OS/2 has been able to do it since Warp 4 was released. I remember doing a demo at a store I worked at with 4 mpegs running, you could drag one of them around the screen and not only would the others continue playing smoothly, but the one being dragged never glitched either. This was on a P90 with an S3 video card back in 1996.
This time it’s not about video playback (which BeOS was doing flawlessly even before 96), but about reducing flicker caused by redraws being done while the video card sends the framebuffer to the CRT.
Sorry to break this to you, but OS/2 does NOT have Smooth window dragging. I don’t think you have understood what really this is.
We are not talking about video performance and latency, we are talking about something that’s similar to VSYNC. You haven’t understood what that is, you confuse it with video playback smoothness.
Hmm… This seems similar to another time when a group of germans had delusions of grandeur….
…of course,that ended with hitler blowing his brains out in a bunker.
What kind of changes or enhancements are there already? Will Zeta support ISDN plug-in cards? Does the new FAX application work with ISDN?
I don’t have ISDN here so I couldn’t test, but I know that YTAB was working towards much better ISDN support, so there is hope.
The real market for Zeta and other alternate OS’s is the geek community. People who are willing and have the desire to try new things. We are on the fringe of the normal user community.
Windows, MacOS, and Linux really have their markets well defined and pretty much locked up. Linux started off as a hobbyist OS that reached a critical mass and is now starting to take on some of Windows and MacOS market, but it is still more useful in the places that traditional UNIX has been. It gained enough users and developers from the fringe to start breaking into other markets.
It was mentioned that Jobs and Woz and Gates et al. created an industry. That is true, but their original customers were people like us — people who used stuff because it was cool. It was several years before their first products started making inroads into the business and non-technical user markets.
I think that the same situation applies to Zeta and other alternate OS’s. Companies and OSS projects need to know who their customers are — early adopters and people who use their products because they are ‘neat’ or cool. These projects then will either stay in their niche or they will spill over into more mainstream markets. But the projects will not succeed by making a frontal assualt directly at those markets. I think the experiences of Be Inc., Amiga Inc., and others bear that out.
Zeta will only succeed if they listen to and go after their target market. I wish them the best of luck, and if they fix some of the bad points that Eugenia pointed out I may just buy their product.
Good review.
I couldn’t agree more with you. Listening to your (target) audience is the best thing anyone can do (regardless of what you develop). I think however the Zeta people will be doing this. Their replies to this preview have been interesting, they immediately offered to look into the slower boot times etc, so it’s good!
I wish they’d restore the old menu/button style … I hate that dano look. Does anyone else agree? It just doesn’t look BeOS!
> It just doesn’t look BeOS!
I was work in progress by the Be usability engineers (was not created by YellowTAB but from Be themselves).
Well…
If you don’t like the idea of patents, we could at least get the software organized in such a manner as it would be patentable. Patents are good, IMO, you can always do your own open licensing and such.
–The loon
First and foremost, good review Eugenia. Very direct, not at all candied-up, and the best review/article from you yet. Hope the rest of your articles continue down this path.
As for Zeta, I have been eagerly awaiting the release since I first heard of them. This review gives me a glimpse of what I have to expect with the release. My major concern is not the technical side, but rather the interface layout. BeOS was an elegant system with something for the average and geek users alike. I hope Zeta did not lose sight of this.
Even though I am not as excited for the Zeta release as I once was (bought a new Mac), I am still running r5.0.3 natively on my only x86 machine, and it is awaiting Zeta’s release.
Good luck to the Zeta contributors, and you have my money when Zeta is released.
Icon:
128×128 max? why letting it hardcoded to size smaller than a hi res screen? I always liked those big icon on amiga demo coverdisk
blue eye OS:
it’s not my number one choice either, but look at it this way. One have a driver in it because of it’s linux root, one do an app in BeOS api using that driver …. after one see the app already done and say to itself, would not be too much work to port that driver to beos. If blue eyed OS would not have been there that app and that driver would not have existed
. See it as symbiosis cooperation.
Hyper treading:
even if i find this quite BS from intel marketing pr dept, i also want more info on this an zeta. Also test on some multi CPU board would be nice (because it’s not the same code base as R5 i want re-confirmation it can run on 8 CPU).
Copy/Paste:
copy paste was in OT yes, but a tracker add-on was on bebits even long before that (i think it was called XCV)
Theme:
I’m the most anti theme in the world, when i see this remove the sliding tab i’m even more pissed. It’s one of the 1000 thing that add-up to make BeOS so great overall. Anyway, the only theme that would matter (and Jess would agree here) is to be able to remove the supid white paper paradox that came with wysiwyg era and that is no longuer needed in an all digital age, Of course this cause problem as all app need to have is color balanced accordignly but at least it serve a purpose (energy economy on laptop LCD).
In fact the slidy tab concept was not even 100% evolved, what would have been nice it to have the window start glue itself to other window once the tab is no longuer at position “0”, so that we could move the entire rolodex of windows. would not be really hard to do to sent mouse moved message so other window follow. All the window that fit a certain tab patern would follow. Once a window tab is slided back at is original position the glue behavior disapear, not even a need for a widget of a pref panel!
OGL:
YT better release a video of it playing with fps enabled
i don’t care if it don’ support MY card, as long as it support one that we will not have to be 1000 to fight over on ebay 
. I don’t care if actual GL stuff dont work anymore. Only stuff i liked was Behavior and i planned to code something better anyway for my simulator. If no Hardware OGL present i am not sure i will get it (i will even but don’t tell YT).
BeOS apple and Windows:
Look at all those car model on the market, BeOS will find is place. Just do a killer amateur rocket launcher monitoring app or a telemetry thing for RC car … anything. Just kid wanting to have it done once and for all with fubar PC of their parent could see it welcome. YT is 6? this mean they need to sell lot less than M$ or apple to make money.
The install to another partition:
This need to stay, remove this and i fly to germany to spank your butt
OSS:
Sure zeta is not, but OBOS is and many part of the OS are , mail daemon, file system, tracker, deskbar, ide replacement and many more… Also i think yellow tab will turn into a beos red hat in the future. Another point is that BeOS is enough add-on based to survive for a long time by getting feature that way.
>copy paste was in OT yes, but a tracker add-on was on bebits even long before that (i think it was called XCV)
Which *I* published it there, so yes, I know about it.. 😉
But it is a buggy addon. Not really recommended.
I hear ppl saying, I wont buying that.. and that sucks.. remember this is a BETA. I remember when I got my Disks from M$ for Advanced Server and Profesional. It was so buggy. It looked like crap, had alot of different problems. Then I got RC 1 and the final version. I would say that it was 3 different versions of Windows. I think it took 3 months or something between the different betas.. maybe they had 500+ developer? Any ideas?
Common give the guys a break at YT. They are working hard to get you the best.
And I just couldn’t get excited.
I’ve used Windows, MacOS, and various Linux distributions over the years. Each of them has their relative strengths and weaknesses.
When I read this review, I couldn’t help but wonder “where are Zeta’s strengths?” Honestly, it didn’t seem to have _any_ areas where it really excelled over the competition. No decent browser, no reliable email client, spotty hardware support, bad fonts, no useful 3D support, and no new commercial apps for it. In fact, the only useful feature it seems to have is backwards support for more “recent” BeOS releases.
One other thing: how the hell did a buggy beta release get a 8.08 rating, when RedHat and SuSE got 7.5s? I mean, c’mon Eugenia, that does not make any sense. Either the ratings are “relative” (and thus useless numbers) or you’re just not telling us something amazing about Zeta.
Why should I (a non-BeOS user) buy Zeta when I can download RedHat/Gentoo/Debian for free? The review doesn’t do a good job of explaining that. _IS_ there a reason to do it?
-Erwos
> 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 ?
Ok, first of all, if you want to “reuse it later in the Terminal”, then why would you using the GUI in the first place? But fine, if you’re hell-bent that people might actually want to do this, there are ways to hide it, rather than having this big honkin’ text box at the bottom of your interface that is 100% guaranteed to scare some users, let alone being worthless to most.
Secondly, if you want to use “other options”, why are those options not exposed in the GUI in the first place? Are you making an actual interface? It sounds to me like you feel a text file listing the command-line flags might be a fine interface for a program–a window with checkboxes for flags really isn’t much different than that.
I’m sorry, but it’s this level of amateurism that has led to this monstrosity of a “BeOS” distribution.
BeOS apple and Windows:
Look at all those car model on the market, BeOS will find is place.
My god, will we never hear the end of this insane argument? An OS is a platform, not a stand-alone product. Tell me, if I buy car X, are you affected? Are there places you can’t drive because I bought car X and you bought car Y? No. There’s really no reason for you to care what I buy (“safety” is a tangential point here, so don’t even bother mentioning it). However, you should care what OS I buy. The larger the userbase, the more applications and driver support. Pretty basic concept, no? A car is simply a horrible analogy. By your logic, Beta and the Atari Jaguar still have a chance in the market. (sigh)
>Why should I (a non-BeOS user) buy Zeta when I can download RedHat/Gentoo/Debian for free?
Because Zeta is *much* faster in UI responsiveness than _any_ linux. Because it has much better latency and better multimedia performance.
Because Zeta is *simple* and EASY to use, much simpler than Windows or Mac even. There are no secret kung-fu you have to learn. Zeta just works and takes less than 1-2 days to learn all its secrets as well, while this procedure takes years with Unix.
BeOS/Zeta is SIMPLE. It is FAST. It is an appliance OS in a sort. These are its qualities over the competition.
It’s a shame that BeOS doesn’t have any good video editing and capture software/hardware.
It would be awesome, to have something (even just Premire quality) running on Zeta on a dual xeon HT system. Performance wise, it would be amazing.
>I was work in progress by the Be usability engineers (was not created by YellowTAB but from Be themselves).
I realize this, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck 😉 At least give a theme option. This is my main reason for never updating to Dano, it’s oooooooogly!
Another great feature of the wonderful Be UI that I’ll miss … I don’t know if I like where this is going.
I’d like a little more info, please. As I posted earlier the review was excellent. But now that I’ve been thinking, a couple of questions have popped into my mind.
First, any sign of an office suite, as advertised in the Zeta Home Edition description? Abi hardly cuts it as an entire office suite.
Second, the review mentions three games. I was under the impression that Zeta was working on something original. Any comments?
Third, I use a small freeware app called wxMount to individually select which partitions to mount at boot. With wxMount there’s no GUI, but you do get to see all of the available partitions and simply select from the list. The BeOS PE preference tool has an all-or-nothing type choice. Somewhere I read this would be addressed in Zeta. From looking at the screenshots, it still seems to be mostly all-or-nothing – I certainly don’t see a list of available partitions and check-boxes. Am I missing something?
Forth, can someone explain more about the updates YellowTab made to AbiWord?
-Bob
if several usability and marketing “engineers” and other “artists” weren’t just those persons who emptied Be’s pocket and brought Inc down
>Second, the review mentions three games.
These games was a minesweeper, a cards game and the Flight Demo.
>Am I missing something?
No. The partition mounting is the same as on BeOS 5, and it SHOULD NOT change, for simplicity reasons. All or nothing, as you said.
> if several usability and marketing “engineers” and other “artists” weren’t just those persons who emptied Be’s pocket and brought Inc down
No. Be gone down because it didn’t sell enough. End of story.
Why? Did you actually USED this feature, or you just want it there just for show-off?
Ok, some people here said that they didn’t particularly like the Dano/Zeta widget interface.
I say that it is actually pretty good, but it can be better. It just needs some polishing (and font fixing).
Here, I just quickly created a mockup cleaning up the interface. I believe that the new widget set is nice, it just needs attention to detail, as everything else does:
http://www.osnews.com/img/3692/printer.png
Thanks for replying to my post.
Too bad about the mounting choices though. I use a single FAT32 partition for swapping files between operating systems and want BeOS to mount this at every boot. But I ~don’t~ want any of the installed operating systems to have access to each others’ partitions.
As long as I can still install wxMount, I’ll be fine.
Best Wishes,
Bob
By the way, at the YT website they advertise the Home Edition at 700MB, but the beta was only 500MB. I’m thinking they saved some suprises for R1.
Is there any way I can replicate that disk space bar in windows? I LOVE that thing!
>Why? Did you actually USED this feature, or you just want it there just for show-off?
Actually, I did, it’s very useful being that apps like netpositive or gobe productive do not have builtin tabbing.
As for your mockup, it looks better, but i still like the old button/checkbox/radio box/combo box style FAR better than the new one … it’s just simple, nice to look at, gets the job done. That’s why I love be. I never themed it anyway, it was great the way it is. I think 50% of what I love about it is the brilliance of the UI.
And another variation:
http://www.osnews.com/img/3692/printer1.png
Nice looking, but I don’t know about the bold font on the tabs … perhaps on the active tab only or none of them at all.
Seems like a good report.
I’ll purchase it even with a few bugs. I bought winxp/linux and it has bugs.
> No sliding tabs? 🙁
I use them too, with Opera windows…
About UI look, well without touching the control drawing code you can already have nice effects…
Those shots don’t show much of controls themselves, but you see how themable Zeta can be:
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/shot_Gonx_Zeta.png
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/shot_XP_sux.png
(including Deskbar position :p)
I did a tech demo about theming, that I think was shown at webbit.
Then if you really want real R5 controls… nothing is impossible you know
But that’s really not what I have on top of the list.
Here is what the printer prefs gives with my current settings (Gonx colors):
http://clapcrest.free.fr/revol/beos/shot_printer_prefs_gonx_theme.p…
“>Why? Did you actually USED this feature, or you just want it there just for show-off? “
I used them constantly. Not having them really cuts down on the easy of use of BeOS/Zeta’s gui, IMOP.
The server OSNews is on seems very reliable, it got /.ed and it’s still there
better ditch windoze and use BeOS, you’ll find many other things you will love
Whoa not to shabby for an os that they say died awhile ago. I loved my beos and linux when i first discovered both back in 1999. I purchased beos 4.5 and 5 pro. Then soon after it was over.
After reading this great review of zeta. I am a bit worried that this version of beos maybe in some aspects not a step forward but a step back. Now this could change if they fix those things that were found problematic in the review. I hope i am wrong about judiging zeta. But I really hope someone in the beos community comes out with an updated version of beos5 without trying out to many new things. Beos was a great os I use linux now but wish I could still have the beos option as well especially for those older computers i got laying around. Beos was sure zippy on those.
I was hoping Yellowbox would end up saving me a bit of money…being the old school BeOS fan that I am (Beosiman at Arstechnica), but with 1) Apple bringing impressive hardware to the table 2) Panther reportedly running faster than any previous version of OS X and with WinXP not being that bad a PC OS to run games on…I’ll probably purchase my first Mac in 5 years.
I was hoping for the best with Yellowtab, but if I’m going to support one platform financially it’ll have to be the one that I think will provide me the greatest return on my investment.
I wish the employees at Yellowtab the best of luck.
This BeOS nut is moving back to the Mac.
>About UI look, well without touching the control drawing code you can already have nice effects…
Those shots don’t show much of controls themselves, but you see how themable Zeta can be:
Do the themes change the buttons/checkboxes/etc or just the window titlebars … I think the original Be titlebars are great so i don’t think I would even touch themes unless I could restore the original widget look.
Shame on you … I take pity on your poor soul.
Thats a great mockup, hope they implement that. Overal I a agree with you on the interface, I think its great. Why was the font rendering engine changed in Dano and then in Zeta?
Oh and the 400 fonts is stupid, no reason for em.
What i find interesting is the path of palm in the future.
They already said they want to make larger devices like notebooks or at least compact ones.
At what point does a palm-based desktop, perhaps one that runs on an ARM become a viable alternative to beos, openbeos, yellowtab, linux on x86. By that point, if that point, it would have lots of software and there is no way it could tolerate any kind of bloat since it would also have to run on cell phones and pdas. Multimedia is already a focus on Palm OS 6 and they have the be team.
of course such a scenario is many many years away if ever, and i still consider what yellow tab has done and what OBOS is doing very cool. I will support both.
> Do the themes change the buttons/checkboxes/etc or just the window titlebars …
(once again)
Currently theming includes:
– all ui colors
– fonts
– desktop backgrounds
– window decor, that is, the border and the scrollbars.
– other things such as Terminal settings, deskbar position, …
As I explained already I do have a system that changes the controls look (OSX menus hmm), but it’s nowhere near even alpha quality, so it doesn’t have its place in a commercial OS. (yet)
I don’t care if it’s buggy, it’s important to support all that’s left from BeOS. This was and could be again a great OS to work with. The first time I used BeOS I learned the interface in a short time, learning macOS or windows took me longer and learning Linux took me even longer. I loved the “keep it simpel” statement and Zeta looks like it’s leaving this statement a little bit.
I just wont comment about Zeta untill I have the oppertunity to play with the OS. I would like to see a downloadeble demo of Zeta. But I must say that this review brought me back to earth. I have read every argument and some of them where waved away using the argument; “it’s just a beta”, then is my question, why add so many programms and unussefull add-ons in a beta. Are they planning to add more in the final :S
I hope Zeta is just teasing us and the are keeping some huge surprises for themselves for now, because when I read this review it’s not the BeOS/ Zeta I was hoping for.
I dare zeta to let me play
[offtopic] @mmu_man: You said you did a tech demo about theming, I’m writing a paper about customizing and I’m in search for information, do you have some suggestions, about books, webpages or any other source off information. [/offtopic]
> I’m writing a paper about customizing and I’m in search for information
You have my mail here ^ btw, that would change me from spams
It seems to me their is a lot of wondering when openbeos
will ever have a working os.
Instead of buying zeta why dont you who are supporting
open beos trying like send them a contribution………
My self i will wait an see what happens with open beos.
It open beos can be done look at atheos it will take time
but hopefully they can in two to five years get a working
os. I still think beos should have sold to apple when it
had chance just my $.02 cents
What a freaking troll you are! Or you don’t have a freaking CLUe of what you are talking about.
>Instead of buying zeta why dont you who are supporting
>open beos trying like send them a contribution.
Because OBOS won’t be ready for many years to come. Why would I want to support OBOS instead of YellowTAB who NEED the money to survive the one and only AUTHENTIC BeOS SOURCE CODE?? WHY??
And what makes you think that the OpenBeOS can do it better than YellowTAB can? They all are a bunch of geek developers (YTAB and OBOS), with no project management or usability engineers. In other words, even if OBOS was usable today, it would have been worse than YTAB. It would have been “a semi-working Linux”.
Get over it and support the people who have SPEND all their personal life savings in order to acquire the BeOS source code. Yes, this is the deal we are talking about here. Some of the people in YellowTAB has put THEIR LIVES to secure that source code that you once loved but now you are ditching like freaking idiots.
F**CK
I am so freaking pissed off right now with you supposed ex-BeOS users.
You don’t want to use BeOS or Zeta? FINE. This is perfectly viable point and *understandable*.
But PROMPTING other users to NOT buy Zeta and put their hopes in the COMPLETE vaporware of OBOS, instead of the ALREADY USABLE solution of YTAB, it is distasteful and WRONG. Morally it is, for ex-BeOS users.
You don’t know the PERSONAL SACRIFICES Bernd has done in order to secure for you this source code. You fucking don’t.
Thanks for this review. As usual, I agree with basically everything you have to say. I also must add my voice to the cries in this forum:
“Hey, YellowTab! Don’t just add features. Fix problems! Don’t bloat the OS! AND MOST IMPORTANT: get a user interface and usability expert and then LISTEN TO THEM!”
I am concerned about the final state of Zeta, but I still want to upgrade. The updated USB and other drivers make it a desirable update, regardless of the future of the OS. I use BeOS very often so I want whatever updates I can get. What I don’t want is useless duplication (Dockbert) and new features that are hacks (do the new SVG icon features show up everywhere else in the OS or only in the Tracker???).
I like sliding tabs, too, BTW.
Its seems to me eugenia u must hate beos why would any one buy zeta?????????????????????????
The idiots who run be inc screwed up when they turned down apple’s offer to buy beos.
Since apple an microsoft aint buddies apple could have developed beos?
Zeta is only giving updates to beos which can found on the internet.
This version they realease now is overbloated………..
Thats one reason i still use windows cause it works
Be Inc screwed up when they would not sell to apple since
Be Inc had idiots running the company apple would have developed beos an would not have cared about it being on
ibm compatable platform.
Just goes to show how stupid Be Inc was.
>Its seems to me eugenia u must hate beos why would any one buy zeta
Why are you saying that I hate BeOS? Just 20 minutes ago I was reading on Slashdot people saying that I am a BeOS fangirl (not true either). You obviously don’t understand what you are reding and you try to CATEGORIZE me as this or the other OS fangirl, while it is not the case for any OS. I just write what I see.
>Zeta is only giving updates to beos which can found on the internet.
WRONG. Did you not read the article? Most of the new drivers and some of the applications found on Zeta ARE NOT TO BE FOUND ANYWHERE ELSE.
>Just goes to show how stupid Be Inc was.
that’s your opinion. But I know things that none of you know, and I can tell you that Be had no other choices than the ones it made. So I suggest you shut up your stupid big mouth who doesn’t udnerstand anything.
This is totally cool! Way to go!
Does it run on PowerPC?
>Does it run on PowerPC?
No. Be stopped maintaining their PPC port after the release of R5. It will need a bit of work to make it work on PPCs.
Hey Eugenia (or anyone else having an answer to my question), do you know if Zeta is planning to release a PE like BeOS did with R5? I heard a lot of good thing of BeOS, but I never tried it and I doubt R5 will work on my computer. Oh, and I tend to be the kind of person that tries everything before buying.
I don’t think they will. These days most people don’t run on FAT32 and ext2 which Personal Edition required in order to load (ext3 and NTFS has numerous problems when loading PE under them) and they would not possibly spend the engineering time required to fix these issues (and with NTFS is not always fixable).
What I would suggest would be YellowTAB to release a “live CD” which doesn’t have the ability to get installed in a hard drive, I believe this would be a nice test for users to make sure their hardware works. Be did that back in the R4.5 and R4 days.
You need to remember that this is still ONE community. It’s not like there’s some sort of war between them. yT in fact said on their website that they are considering open-sourcing some parts. The OBOS devs are counting on Zeta to drive up interest in the OS. If Zeta fails, the community will die. Do you think someone’s gonna look at yT’s experience then and say “Wow, this Be community is really appreciative, maybe I should do something for it”? No. BeOS fans will have got their second chance and squandered it because they were too picky. By the time OBOS reaches any releasable stage, the hope will be dead. Like it or not, the whole community was SO much kept alive and interested by all the Zeta rumors. This is a great thing you’re destroying, people. It doesn’t matter whether there is anything new produced; as long as the community exists, there will be some drivers written and the compatibility extended for another short time. So, choose: Living OS or “blah blah blah company can’t use good english doesn’t care about users this sux0r”?
Strange as this sounds, if they do release a live CD I hope they cripple it somehow. If people just make a new partition with it and install like many did with PE, that will not add to sales at all. I hope they sell many boxes (I plan to buy it in the fall).
I am a faithful, although NEW (as of April) BeOS user. I tried BeOS 5 last year, to no avail, but I finally mustered the time, and got it correct on my K6/400 here. I love it! I love the 99% stability, the speed, the simplicity, and the flexibility of the OS in general. It, simply, gives me a great user experience without the useless junk I don’t want or need. If the horror stories continue as I’ve read them here tonight, I (like other BeOS users) will simply stay with their PE 5.0.3, or their Pro Versions…and just keep hoping that SOMEONE will get it right.
I’m no Linux basher (by in large), but if I wanted another flavor of Linux, I’d buy LINUX. Let’s hope that ANY future BeOS “Clone” stays true to the original Be model, and stays within the old adage of “Keep It Simple, Stupid”!
THEN, they’d sell tons of them.
John
What has amazed me the most in this thread–which I have not had time to read all of, I admit–is its shear size. I’ve looked at it twice today while taking a break from work, and I’m quite amazed at how many people are this crazed over an OS that never really got anywhere (as far as market share is concerned). This is pretty cool. I knew the BeOS fans were pretty ardent, but I didn’t know there were this many out there.
I brought the idea of a hardware testing CD that had just a basic launch routine that ID’d the hardware and gave a supported status (per item, and listed the driver used), but the idea was considered too big of a task for our already over-burdened team. Maybe after R1 I may decide to do this on my own.
Anyway, I have decided to bring my development machine back online and actually plan out time to develop, starting tomorrow. My first order of business will be to construct a completely new base Zeta, implementing all items I repaired in SD-a-1/-2/PhOS. Once I have completed this base, I will submit it to Bernd for use as a possible final build base.
In other words, a clean OS for the RC1 + builds, instead of the changes manually thrown in like is done for the betas (even though we have a nice build system in place, heh…life).
–The loon
(All my fans / friends know what I am up to, and are happier than a dog when the rubber band finally gets that tail off..heh)
>By the time OBOS reaches any releasable stage, the hope will >be dead.
This is the oldest fight in software, “speed, price, quality . . . pick any two”.
Eugenia, thank you for this review. Ironically I learned Zeta is of no interest to me at this time . . . well, that’s a valuable thing to know.
I use BeOS Pro 5.0.3 currently and with lots of help from others have it running on modern hardware. As OBOS becomes available that is my most likely migration path.
Eugenia I’m like 3 times your age . . . so a few years is nothing to me. It takes me that long to go to the washroom.
Also, I respect the hard work by Bernd and the other Yellow Tabbers; however I really disagree with the “suffering” lecture you gave because we are all blind to the suffering of others to a remarkable degree and buying software is not the solution to this dilemma IMHO. Bob Dylan said it better it IDIOT WIND:
You’ll never know the hurt I’ve suffered,
Or the pain I feel inside.
And I’ll never know the same about you,
Your holiness, or your kind of love.
And it makes me feel so sorry.
I D I O T W I N D. und so weiter.
What’s even more ridiculous is to label some guy as a “OBOS not Zeta” people. I’m mean what’s with that? Where do labels get us? I could tell from the review I won’t be downloading Zeta but that just says it doesn’t fit my situation at this time.
>>Why? Did you actually USED this feature, or you just want it there just for show-off?
Hey, I actually used that feature…
>Eugenia I’m like 3 times your age
You can’t be 90.
i havent read everyone’s comments yet, but i enjoyed your review. Concise and to the point.
Have to disagree about Mozilla being slow on BeOS though, but of course the review was about Zeta so it might be an issue there.
I have a 1GHz PIII and 512MB RAM and frankly BeOS R5 (BONE) flies on that, Mozilla included.
cheers
peter
> Have to disagree about Mozilla being slow on BeOS though, but of course the review was about Zeta so it might be an issue there.
No, *it is not* a Zeta issue. Mozilla is unbearably slow on BeOS 5 as well. You have a much faster machine to say that BeZilla is faster. But I also have another faster machine, and I can tell you, BeZilla is _nowhere_ near the performance of Mozilla under windows/linux on the same machines.
Whilst there is no Samba, couldnt you use CIFSMounter (GUI app from BeBits) that uses cifsmount to connect to Windows Shares.
I use it on BeOS to connect to our Win2K and NT4 servers.
>couldnt you use CIFSMounter (GUI app from BeBits) that uses cifsmount to connect to Windows Shares.
Very buggy and featureless app. Try playing some mp3s via the network and then come back to us and tell us the results…
The new firebird (mozilla) port is really looking good on a newer fast machine.
Here’s the link (66.4 meg DivX):
http://ddanneels.free.fr/Zeta-CeBIT2003.avi
But without slidy tabs, I’d have a hard time justifing buying it (even if the slidy tabs are only on the default BeOS theme).
Pfft. I’ll see you next revision, if ever, Zeta…
OpenBeOS, B E OS, let’s talk, baby. Cosmoe, what’s up?
Isn’t it pretty odd? I mean everyone seem to agree that OBOS team is the coolest people on earth… how is it possible then to say that they will not succeed?
The only guys I’ve actually heard say different is Linux zeals, but on the other hand, they’d say that about pretty much anything.
What this sort of brings to my attention, shouldn’t there be a huge interest from devs to work an a project that is sooo popular?
I’m finding Mozilla Firebird 0.6 is great and definately not slow for all my web needs – my system is a 433 Celeron with 256mb of RAM (a PC that would struggle running Win2K/WinXP)
Eugenia, is BeServed included with Zeta? Was that the app that gave the connectivity to Windows and Linux via CIFS ?
re: Mozilla slow, yeah it’s hard to compare my PC to yours….my friend “repaired” my Abit BP6 mobo (dual 466 celerons) but i’m too scared to connect it (soldering doesnt look too good)…..then i’d be able to compare!!!
Just for the anti-zeta comments, this review was based on a beta version. It was/is a good review but it’s still a beta of Zeta.
Don’t decide to not buy it based on the comments in here.
Wait for Eugenias review of the official R1. Then try and see a demo of it and then make up your mind .
cheers
peter
I expected Zeta to be much, much more.. this is a very disappointing review (well, not the review, the object under review).. I hope for the real R1 Zeta will be more than this unfinished Dano clone.
I’m finding Mozilla Firebird 0.6 is great and definately not slow for all my web needs – my system is a 433 Celeron with 256mb of RAM (a PC that would struggle running Win2K/WinXP)
Have you tried running WinXP ? You will be surprised
it isn’t too bad when it’s running on such a machine.
one at work is a 266Mhz and it works. a coworker was
enthousiast about his 166Mhz machine with 256MB and XP…
it needs the ram, and a more modern harddisk doesn’t hurt either… but graphicaly XP is quicker then a Xfree/KDE
combo…
BeServed uses its own protocol, so it has nothing to do with CIFS support.
It is good to see such a huge amount of reactions. ZETA/OBOS/BeOS seems to be a hot topic. Everytime Osnews has a report on ZETA lots of people who call themselves (ex-)BeOS users feel the need to explain why ZETA sucks (?). I’m sure ZETA won’t be perfect (a perfect OS does not exist), but they keep the BeOS source alive. That should be reason enough for every BeOS-user on the planet to buy a copy.
So Opera, Gobe (and others) wake up! It’s time to start coding for ZETA (the sun shines and I’m an optimist!).
Bernd, I wish you and YT lots of success!
eugenia do you know?
> (the sun shines and I’m an optimist!)
Wow, that makes one so far !
> how did they get be’s ip since palm wasn’t licsining it?
that had been said 10 times, they got it _before_ Palm bought it.
Hey I bet most of you don’t know that mandrake 9 has sliding tab. Not only does it have tabs but will slide automatically so some portion of the tab is shown.
Please don’t make up your mind until after the review of R1.
They do ? Let’s sue them ! *g*
Kudos to Jenny!
Also….. I think I’ll stick to BeOS r. 5, for now, thanks.
I want to express my thanks to the hardworking members of YellowTab for contributing to the BeOS community with Zeta. This initial peek at Zeta shows promise – I’ll certainly be buying a copy. I also appreciate Eugenia’s thorough and unflinching evaluation of the Zeta Beta.
Like others here, I find the Zeta vs OBOS vs BEOS conflicts confusing and disturbing. I believe all of these efforts are vitally important to the future of what was once BeOS. Everyone who enjoyed BeOS and would like to see it endure in some fashion should do their best to support Zeta, OBOS, BEOS, and whatever other BeOS projects and products appear. I believe that these projects are complementary and that their components can be combined and shared. It is vital that these projects try to work together and strive for common standards such as those championed by BeUnited so that they can collectively be targeted by software developers. The relevance of all these BeOS projects will ultimately be determined by the appearance of quality third-party applications that let normal users get their work done.
Thanks,
Tony
(OpenBeOS Contributor – InputServer Team)
this is really sad people. all you beos fans out there have been waiting for this moment for such a long time and when it comes around you snub your nose at it. bah to you i say.i find myself agreeing with eugenia alot. if you do not support this then it can not take off. give them the support they need so they can better support you. Zeta is now. myself personally, although not a real big be guy myself, will be getting myself a copy because there is so much potential here.
I don’t really care about BeOS but if I would I would surely buy Zeta. People who think they can migrate to OBOS in one or two years are just blind. Really you geeks seem to lack the most basic common sense in the case of your pet projects. OBOS won’t be ready in 2 or 5 or 10 years. Please look at ReactOS to see what happens if a few geeks try to clone a full-fledged Desktop OS.
Just as you will never see an OSS clone of WinNT, you’ll never see an OSS clone of BeOS.
Any real future for BeOS will die together with YTAB. Buy Zeta even if it doesn’t meet your demands. See it as in investment in the future / charity.
“if you do not support this then it can not take off. give them the support they need so they can better support you.”
Uhm, maybe because I’ll never put my money (AGAIN) on a company just because they have been “nice” and they put their lives in that work?
I did once, with Be, Inc. They failed. They left a (good) product in a bad state. So, why should I bet on another company which could share the same fate ?
At least, if the code was available, no one could shut the OS off. And Eugenia, while you are right that OpenSource doesn’t guarantee ANYTHING, at least it doesn’t promise ANYTHING.
I don’t know if it’s slow compared to Mozilla on other platforms, but I can tell you it flies compared to IE on my machine and launches in 4-5 secs (slow for BeOS though). I’m pretty sure you will be satisfied with the current builds. There are still issues in usability, but that’s because there are to few devs working on those issues so it’s hard to keep up.
Other than that I can just say that I intend to buy Zeta but I think Yellowtab should fix the things mentioned in the article. I’m confident that the ppl working on Zeta will do their best.
i’ll be buying Zeta as the BeOS experience is still a good one even after Be Inc ceased.
The rootless X support alone will be worth it. Very much looking forward to it.
cheers
peter
Since I use BEOS every day, ( except when I have to use doze 🙁 ), I guess I will spring for Zeta.
I am curious to see codeliege.
Oh, and did I mention I NEED sliding tabs.
Screw the theming, I just want sliding tabs and/or automatic cascading windows.
Moooo:
Eugenia is dead right. Mozilla is SLOOOOW on old Celerons. It crawls on my dual Cel. 550’s.
However, even on my 1Ghz PIII 768MB, it doesn’t exactly fly but more or less ambles along. On the same hardware, IE 5 is much more zippy.
Every now and again in R5, Mozilla will do something which pegs the cpu and I have to wait several seconds for Mozilla to respond. <Grrr>
Eugenia:
You are missing the point to say OBOS (or whatever daft internal name they have for it now) will be ready in 5-7 years. For the purpose of OBOS is not only to be a component in its own right, but to provide components for others to use.
Right now, I am using small components of OBOS in BeOS R5. And more will follow.
And even if OBOS never eventuates as a complete product, we can use Zeta.