yellowTAB announced the immediate availability of the long awaited Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Zeta Neo. This service pack addresses bugs reported in previous versions of Zeta, and offers users the opportunity to enjoy the improvements done to the operating system as development keeps moving towards a Zeta 1.0 release.
Zeta Neo Service Pack released
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Eugenia Loli
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yelloTab has ways to sell unfinished product wrap into a nice name and they even put out Service Pack for it….
How many years will we have to wait for Zeta to reach final 1.0 status? What is taking them so long?
…for companies not wanting to sound like hacks, never to use the term “service pack.” it just has a negative connotation to it.
I vote Zeta 1.0.. how long have they been stringing us along now?
What the HELL is this? This is the most vague product page I have EVER seen.
If you don’t know the history its indeed vague.
But if you do know; its the eagerly awaited fixes for their latest Release Candidate, Neo. Its infact RC4 but they decided to bring over their Champion media player over from the Zintro but in a beta-state with many problems, and so they chose the name Neo.
Its a matter of choices to name products and/or fixes.
Many things still have to be improved though.
If this service pack delivers much more stability then its the right step to Zeta 1.0.
In about a week the (p)reviews will emerge on the Yellowtab forum site.
They announced and then pulled this earlier today. ICO picked up on it in the few minutes it was announced for…
What are the differences between it and the Zeta stuff? Also is there any haiku-OS iso, or binary installation (not through sources)?
BeOS is sweet!!!.. although I had to manually disable media_server as it was locking up the system. My P4 is 2.8Ghz, and I found on bebits.com something called cpu_fix – is that a fix for it?
I just downloaded the service pak from Yellow Tab’s site with Netpositive and installed it over Neo. It installed without incident and I was able to reboot ok. Install was quick and smooth – just minutes.
It now has an integrated method to reset the system clock as an option under preferences -> Time. This is needed because on faster systems the clock can run fast. My 3 Ghz system clock ran about 20% fast. I am presently using a different fix for this issue in the form of a program I got from BeBits that corrects for the clock and frequency readout.
Thanks for the SP yellowTAB!
differences between [BeOS Max 3.1 b1] and the Zeta stuff
BeOS Max is built upon a non-beta version of BeOS; R5.
Zeta is built upon a never-released(by Be Inc., or Palm for that matter) BETA version of BeOS; 5.1d0.
BeOS Max is packaged with software freely available from BeBits.com and Haiku’s cvs tree.
Zeta, in addition to some of the same software included in BeOS Max, has a few Zeta-only items.
BeOS Max is also distributed freely, where Zeta is priced somewhere around $75 EUR (estimated price)
Also is there any haiku-OS iso, or binary installation (not through sources)? As of now, there is no ISO or current-state binary installation. At http://www.haiku-os.org/factory you can find some pre-built binary packages, which can be installed on top of a R5 based system. (I don’t know how well they install on Zeta as I’ve never tried.)
My P4 is 2.8Ghz, and I found on bebits.com something called cpu_fix – is that a fix for it? Yes. Be sure to read the talkback comments for cpu_fix. cpu_fix is not a guaranteed fix for cpu’s >2.00Ghz, but ATM it’s the most viable patch.
rhetorical question: how can someone release a “final, stable” version of an OS that’s built upon a BETA quality OS?
It has been about 15 months since RC1 was released. Since there is now a service pack for Neo that means that hey are actually on RC5 with no end in sight. I remember there was talk or the final being released for christmas last year.
Really sad.
Thanx! Do the Zeta folks had access to BeOS source, or only the binary distribution was given to them (it doesn’t make much sense, but because you are saying BETA, does that mean that they never change a bit in the original source to make it more STABLE?)
Only the binaries, it seems.
If they had the source they’d have done something that showed it. They’ve done nothing that shows it.
Still no support for systems that have a total of more than one gigabyte of memory. How can we ever take them seriously? It’s obvious they don’t have the kernel source code, and so cannot fix the most glaring of limitations such as this.
I for one am glad that Zeta is out there. I have yet to buy the product myself I am waiting on the final release and then I’ll buy it. I don’t understand why the whole BeOS community is against zeta they are trying to improve Beos they may go about it in a different way then BE would have but they at least believed enough to sign contracts with BE before they went under. I don’t know if they have the source or not but if they can add drivers for wireless cards and include some new updated applications it will be more than enough for me to use BeOS for several more years.
BeOS supports Intersil Prism and Intel wireless cards already. The driver were NOT developed by YellowTAB but by an independent developer, and are on BeBits. They could easily end up in Zeta at some stage.
As goes new applications, YT have provided 2 media players, and thats about it.
Nobody I know is against yT per-say, it’s just their handling of matters (ie: mostly Bernd. sorry, I call ’em as I see ’em) concerning source access and a few other matters concerning legality, usability, and commitment to their customers as opposed to their wallet.
While I agree that Bernd does not act as professional as I would like I am unfamiliar with how most German companies are run so this may be normal. My question is how does anyone know if they are allowed to say or not it may be in their contract that can’t give out certain information.
about how large is the Zeta user base? Who is their target audience?
Yesh. If I were running a company selling and supporting, a product that I don’t even have the source code too, I’d at least go in with a hex editor and change the build date on the kernel, so as not to look completely silly.
Without the source code, there is no future for Zeta. There is no fixing the VM or VFS (which do need fixing). There is no improving audio latency (which are now higher than OS X and even Linux). There is no gradually improving the APIs, or even switching to a late model compiler. Heck, how could you even deploy a Zeta machine doing anything remotely important, knowing that not only could you not fix a bug if you ran into one, but neither could the vendor!
Well, I for one haven’t had any probs with Zeta–I’m still running RC2, and it runs fine and smooth, to me it’s just as stable as R5.
And I don’t really care how long it will take them to get to 1.0. I’m already darn happy that a company is actually working on BeOS– whether they are taking leaps forward or only tiny steps.
i’d at least go in with a hex editor and change the build date on the kernel, so as not to look completely silly.
Not sure if you knew it, but that is exactly what they did do. They eventually had to admit that the edited the build date and some guy at the company took the fall. They lost a lot of credibility from that fraudulent behaviour.
I am sure they will wait 2 more years for Haiku to release a kernel, then use that kernel. Slowly they will replace all the old Dano stuff with Haiku stuff. Thats if they have money until then.
I take the bet!
how much ?
The kernel build date was altered to the birth date of (one of?) Bernds child(ren), and a line relating to SSE initialisation was changed to allow the use of the kernel on AMD Athlon XP/MP/64 machines. Both of these changes can be done with the hex editor provided with BeOS.
Assuming they have source, it would probably have been easier to do the changes in the source and recompile.
Their changes to the boot loader to use their logos were again done by hex editing – a documented procedure on ripping a gzip archive out of the bootloader and changing the images from within a hex editor. If they had the source, it again would have been much easier to recompile.
From the patches provided to limit the OS to 512MB RAM and to allow the usage of 2.1Ghz+ CPU’s, it seems that these could be easily implemented into the kernel if one had the source. To make the kernel read out CPU values properly would require changing an int32 to an int64, importing the new timer code used for more accurate timing on AMD’s would not have required much work either.
To date, no build of Zeta I have tried has integrated these fixes in any way.
I think the above shows that they don’t have kernel source. Or if they do, they don’t have it legally and hence are wary of using it.
Palm Source is a SW licensing company. They are doing ok but not exactly cleaning MSFT’s clock. The source for BeIA resides with Palm Source.
The interest in an instant-on Internet appliance like BeIA as part of a digital living room with wireless connectivity is much more likely to take hold with the more pervasive high speed backbone access and wireless connectivity available today.
It is hard to know what Palm Source might license over time and to whom they would license it. Whether yellowTAB becomes anything or whether Zeta becomes anything is hard to know. What is amazing is that there is ANY commercial company willing to put up good money to continue to work with the reminants of BeOS.
Hats off to yellowTAB as far as I am concerned. Everytime they releasse ANY code to further their product they have surpassed rational expectations in my book.
I am also an enthusiastic booster of Haiku and any developer that is willing to support BeOS. What I am not about is childish tearing down of anyones effort to further the life of BeOS. BeOS needs all the good faith and help it can get.
mabe if they were using BeIDE instead of hex editers they’d progess faster. I hope palm sues these people, this is just sad. They’re not just beating a dead horse, they’re gluing on new fur where the whip marks are.
Summing up past developers posts :
Beos had major problems in the base classes that were left unresolved. You time is better spent developing Linux. Move on. So where is Beos now? Some 8 years later. BeMax got pulled from the free list .
What the hell are you on?
Try to actually justify claims like that. There were some major problems in the OS, but not many in the actual API. Other than things not working very well, such as most of the media kit, particularly encoders. The API wasn’t missing much – on the widgets side a decent ColumnListView and ToolTip class would have been nice, but they’re both there in Dano/Zeta.
Who knows.
As proframmer and long-time BeOS observer i’m sure that YT hadn’t access to sources until quite recent times, and more, it is quite obious that they hadn’t even real BeOS 5.1 developers docs and real Be’s bug database.
Helpless occasion with YT’s article BMessage issues in Zeta and Dianne Hackborn reply to it is very impressive evidence.
But time might change. E.g. misterious US investor who has, as guess, good stackes in PalmSource was impressed by Bernd ability to sell Zeta via TV-Shops and by his impressive world-around mobility and got some part in YT with (promise) of source access.
And if we don’t see any evidence of that till now – it means nothing. Imagine, some first year IT student or even mmu_man got Linux kernel sources with goal to change it to fix lot of obstacles. How much time it will take only to get bit familiar with, to say, 500 000 lines of code?
Conspiracy theory is that YT changed name to Neo with reason in mind. It indicates their new status with access to sources:)
btw, for those who forgot or don’t know. YT first unreleased product had name BeOS NG – New generation. So they returned to roots, hehe
>>> AndrewG wrote <<<<
I am sure they will wait 2 more years for Haiku to release a kernel, then use that kernel. Slowly they will replace all the old Dano stuff with Haiku stuff. Thats if they have money until then.
<<<< snip >>>>>
I can see that happening, but I can’t see how it will benefit Zeta much. Haiku will be close to releasing at least an RC I’d assume once the kernel is fully functional. The only way Zeta could profit by using the Haiku kernel is if Haiku is still nowhere near a release candidate by the time they finish the kernel.
BUT assuming both Zeta and Haiku are both installable at that point it would seem rather foolish to go with Zeta. Haiku is open source, and I assume it will have a freely downloadable ISO. Zeta on the other hand would be a mishmash of open and closed source. Getting support in terms of bug fixes, custom applications, etc. will be a nightmare. AND on top of all that you’re going to pay to purchase Zeta.
Zeta is just a place-filler it is not the future of BeOS. The only advantage Zeta has right now is that Haiku hasn’t put out a complete OS. The first Haiku release will be the nail in the coffin for Zeta.
Haiku cannot and must not become a threat to Zeta.
The part of “it cannot be” stems from the fact that Zeta is a usable product as of now and you can barely boot Haiku in text mode. The latter will change only very slowly.
If they eventually co-exist next to eachother then the must provide different kind of functionality so they could complement eachother, like Zeta for desktops and Haiku for servers?
The real problem for both systems is drivers.
If you don’t like it don’t use it this is exactly what I was saying people just come in and bad mouth Zeta either because they don’t like the new direction it’s not just as Be would have done it or they don’t have the source how do we know this from our psychic abilities as these bugs which we know exist yet having no programming experience are just way to easy to fix so there is no way they have the source.
People I have news for you Be inc. went out of business you have four options support Zeta which shows companies there may be money in this OS, wait for Haiku which may or may not ever be released, stay with BeOS until you can’t find hardware to support it, or move on and stop bad mouthing a company that is trying to bring back an OS you claim to love.
I too would like to see a cooperation in the future, where Haiku and YellowTab could take places similar to Linux developers and distributors: Writing software is one thing, but promoting, distributing and supporting is a whole different thing. It would be beneficial for everyone to cooperate here.
The real problem for both systems is drivers.
Correct, that’s been a big problem for Be Inc too.
What CPU problem? I am running the latest version of Zeta on a Pentium 2.8 ghz computer. Runs fine.
They may have integrated the CPU Fix patch, but BeOS and hence Zeta have a bug where the system timer malfunctions over 2.1Ghz, causing clock problems and media sync issues. Try watching a DVD. If its staying in sync, they’ve integrated Micheal Lotz’s fix; if not it still has the bug.
Don’t waste your money on Zeta. I did and I regret it. If you feel like liberating some cash from your wallet, give it to the Haiku project. If you feel like spending even more, buy a Mac with OS X. OS X is everything BeOS was supposed to be. Innovative GUI, Media OS, Posix Compliant, designed for multiprocessor systems. I can’t think of any software package of consequence that is available for BeOS which doesn’t have an equivalent on the Mac.
I wish Zeta was more than it is. I wish Be never focus shifted, but they did. Zeta doesn’t have access to the kernel source. They will never get hardware accelerated OpenGL for the newer GPUs. Zeta just doesn’t have the resources.
You say never but have you been to the YellowTab headquarters? Have you seen the secret documents that say YT has no source they will steal your money and hope nobody notices lets hope we can wait for Haiku to steal it’s drivers? I have heard of no such documents.
I like BeOS and would love to see it come back but this fruitless split in the community helps no one.The only hope BeOS/Haiku/Zeta has is if we the users pull together and help out.
Who didn’t see this coming?
My hope for Haiku is that Yellow Tab wouldn’t be the distributor. This company is only few years old and has already a much badder image as microsoft. YT sell over third class TV channels its alpha software with funky names. Congrats beside YT microsoft seem to be a cool company.
I actually know a bit about both MSFT and YellowTAB. To compare MSFT and YellowTAB is to display complete ignorance of MSFT. There is no company in the contemporary technology industry that compares even remotely to MSFT.
MSFT has many fine employees but the upper management is devoid of any moral integrity or honor.
YellowTAB on the other hand is trying (at their own expense) to make something positive for BeOS users. YellowTAB does have some problems but there can be no doubt that having an option (Zeta) to BeOS that loads on today’s hardware is a very important contribution to the BeOS community.
I’ll do a donation for the good heart people at YT. Nobody force YT to do a such great thing for the community without being selfish 😉
They sell the abandoned beta from Be with a horrible stability for 99€. YT acting in neither way as a professional company. If they sell a shareware product with a testing time for the end-user the price model would be ok for me. They doesn’t have a defined market because they sell this beta package to absolute home user with the direction toward windows user. They don’t tell in the TV shows about this beta status. and there ist no legal way to test this beta os before paying the money. There is no money back option. This is a real customer related product.
“MSFT has many fine employees but the upper management is devoid of any moral integrity or honor.”
just to point it out, many feel this is exactly the case w/yT.
Then those people should look at Yellowtab again, because their strategy has changed.
At first they wanted to stuff many new things into Zeta, among a very poorly designed application (at least the User Interface), way too many fonts etc. etc.
In the mean time they have learned to listen to the community resulting in more appreciation for what they are TRYING to do.
Do not forget that their ultimate goal is to make money just like any other company, which means they have to put much focus to “collecting” money.
And they probably have some contracts which prehibits Yellowtab for speaking openly.
Sure they have still problems but they are doing the right thing now – in my opinion – like giving away Zeta for some of the developers, outsourcing development of the AC97 coding to the community and reward them for it.
“just to point it out, many feel this is exactly the case w/yT.”
Fine, that may be the case.
My point is that when last I checked this SP is free and widely distributed. This is the right way to do things. If someone has had a bad experience with yTAB in the past they should be encouraged by this action. It is the right thing to do and such actions should be applauded!!
We need to recognize and applaud good behavior because it helps the BeOS community. Many people are working very hard to improve our little community with noble intentions. There are some who are not able to see the good that comes from all the various efforts surrounding BeOS. For them they can only muster an immature emotional response that harms the whole community. They raise their voice loudly with repeated criticisms of all the wrongs they perceive all the while the very boat on which they ride is carried by the good intentions of others.
“MSFT has many fine employees but the upper management is devoid of any moral integrity or honor.”
just to point it out, many feel this is exactly the case w/yT.
Yeah, I’ll second that.