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First Look at YellowTAB's Zeta 344

Posted by Hemos from the i'm-not-quite-dead-yet dept.
Gentu writes "Great news for the BeOS fans. After Be sold its IP to Palm, many said that the BeOS was no more, but a new startup company from Germany, YellowTAB, was able to get hold of Be's source code and form the future of the never-released BeOS 6 ('Dano'), under the name 'Zeta'. YellowTAB added a lot of new goodies to the OS and brought it up to speed. OSNews features the first ever preview of Zeta with a lot of good information, along with some screenshots."
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First Look at YellowTAB's Zeta More

First Look at YellowTAB's Zeta

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  • here we come... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:34AM (#6095206)
    YellowTab's site traffic has jumped to the phenomenal amount of 51 GigaBytes (GB) this month. We attribute this increase to the growing interest in the upcoming release of ZETA, the next generation of BeOS.

    ...and /.

  • Uh oh (Score:2, Funny)

    by ergonal ( 609484 )
    YellowTab's site traffic has jumped to the phenomenal amount of 51 GigaBytes (GB) this month. We attribute this increase to the growing interest in the upcoming release of ZETA, the next generation of BeOS.

    We have upgraded our webspace from 500MB to 1000MB and traffic allowance from 25GB to 50GB. This is the largest package that our host provides. In order to be able to add more features and functions to our site (especially for developers) we will soon have our very own server.

    I think you might need to

  • Looks interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Noryungi ( 70322 )

    But I have to ask the question:

    Who still cares about BeOS?

    This is not a troll or anything. I am just curious.

    I was never able to use BeOS on my 'puters, since none of my graphics were supported, and, once I started using Linux and *BSD, I never looked back.

    So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?

    • Re:Looks interesting... (Score:5, Informative)

      by mirko ( 198274 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:51AM (#6095319) Journal
      So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?
      I used to code for BeOS : the API was stunningly easy to learn.

      I only found such pleasure with the Zaurus Qt API... a long, long time later.
      (BTW, I've also heard that AtheOS was similarly "coder-friendly")
      • > I only found such pleasure with the Zaurus Qt API... a long, long time later.

        I can't agree. I too have coded for BeOS and am now working with Qtopia.
        Qt/E shares most of the codebase with Qt/X and is inapropriate for handhelds.

        I f.e. was a bit shocked when I saw that a simple QString has UTF16 coding
        and an overhead of > 34 bytes.

      • Re:Looks interesting... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Bish.dk ( 547663 ) <haasNO@SPAMitu.dk> on Monday June 02, 2003 @10:50AM (#6095823) Homepage
        I used to code for BeOS : the API was stunningly easy to learn.

        ... And not without humour. I remember a function named isProcessorOnFire(). There was a quite detailed description of when it would return true in the API-reference. Apparantly, smoke coming from the processor was not enough to warrant a return-value of true. :)

    • Re:Looks interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:57AM (#6095348)
      > Who still cares about BeOS?

      I for one, since I was lucky enough to have it run on a couple of computers.

      The problem with Linux and *BSD is that I just don't the time to config them. (Allthough it's cool that the Linux router "just works" -- has been for years.) Win2K is "OK" (would be good if it wasn't for the dam memory leaks), and I *hate* the Mac. GUI (pre OSX). BeOS is "sexy", blazingly fast, VERY well designed, and I really liked that it felt like a great blend of the Win32 and Mac. GUI, but designed by a person with REAL concern for users -- newbies and power uers alike. The only problem is that BeOS never gained "critical mass" like Linux. KDE 3 looks REAL sweet, but I have a dual 550 box just for Be. :)
      • I would say that BeOS had critical mass if it were an open source project. Linux would have died long ago if it was a commercial venture, luckily it started out as a hobby and had time to reach its maturity instead of getting its venture capital cut off in version 1.0 when it sort of wasn't too good.

    • Re:Looks interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:59AM (#6095372)
      Nice clean interface - in fact, it has the only Drag'nDrop GUI I've ever seen that I would be willing to call uncluttered. Amazing API (if you program). All sorts of tiny little details that you can't really put your finger on

      I like BeOS because, in my opinion, it is well-concieved. It has all sorts of problems with drivers and application support, but then again that's how every OS starts out. BeOS had something that can't be added later - generally well-thought-out design. You can't add that in as an afterthought.

      • Re:Looks interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by axxackall ( 579006 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @11:52AM (#6096275) Homepage Journal
        Nice clean interface

        What *specifically* makes it more cleaner than Gnome or KDE?

        in fact, it has the only Drag'nDrop GUI I've ever seen that I would be willing to call uncluttere

        What *specifically* makes DnD in GNOME/KDE cluttered?

        • How is BeOS cleaner than KDE or GNOME? That's an easy one.

          A) EVERYthing is multi-threaded, so the BeOS GUI remains responsive at ALL times. Xfree, on the other hand, runs in a single process, and all X apps running must share a timeslice with X, which is neither guaranteed nor, in my experience, acceptable - hence the nasty GUI latencies of X. [kerneltrap.org] This is one of the biggest things keeping me away from Linux right now. Of course, unless you've used BeOS, you're probably not even aware that you're being kil

    • Re:Looks interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bumby ( 589283 )
      Who still cares about BeOS?
      I do :)

      So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?
      Last time I tried it was some years ago on my 400MHz. It was goodlooking, felt very quick, and overall nice. It is easy to move from Windows to BeOS. As my dad now uses the old 400MHz:er, with Windows of course (he refuses to use anything new), I thought that he maybe was willing to use BeOS. Linux with GNOME or KDE is way too slow on his old comp.

      The lack of programs is the problem. What he needs is:

      A office-like collectio

      • The lack of programs is the problem. What he needs is:
        A office-like collection of programs (word, excell, etc)

        Like Gobe Productive?
        I'm not sure, but I think it's part of Zeta.

        Mozilla :)

        http://www.bezilla.org/ [bezilla.org] or http://www.bebits.com/app/2715 [bebits.com]. Shipped with Zeta.

        A image-editor like Gimp

        OMG, hopefully not. GIMP's UI sucks. BeOS/Zeta has Refraction [bebits.com] (closed source), ArtPaint [bebits.com] (open source) and a few others. At least shipped with Zeta Deluxe - not sure about ''plain'' Zeta.

    • Re:Looks interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MikeFM ( 12491 )
      I used BeOS (as I try to use all popular OS's) enough to be pretty familiar with it and I had a roommate that was a BeOS cult member.. I still never quite saw it as anything much. Sure it didn't suck as much as Windows but that isn't really saying much and it didn't have much in the way of drivers or applications. It booted fast but with proper tweaking I can make Linux boot just as fast. I never really cared because I reboot maybe once or twice a year so what difference does it make to me? It looks pretty

    • Re:Looks interesting... (Score:5, Informative)

      by dr_dank ( 472072 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @10:15AM (#6095472) Homepage Journal
      So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?

      BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper.

      He yanked the plug on the box.

      Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened.

      Damn.
      • heh, funny, i ran pretty much the same demo for a friend of mine a few years ago. 10 movies, 10 mp3's (at differing play-speeds), copying a few files around the harddrive, and *yank*, pulled the power cord. he nearly had a heart attack.

        the machine was a dual celeron 333 overclocked to 480, 128mb of ram, with scsi discs.

    • Who still cares about BeOS?

      Who still cares about, say, MacOS? I was never able to use MacOS on my 'puters, since none of my hardware was supported, and, once I started using Windows, I never looked back. So what makes MacOS so special?

      Well, you get the idea. This question seems to come up at every BeOS (and Amiga, come to that) article, but I never bother to ask the question on every Apple article, even though it applies just as much to me.

      As to graphics hardware not being supported, I guess this is

  • OpenBeos (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hutman ( 551773 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:40AM (#6095247)
    What does this mean for open beos people?? I would hope the YellowTAB people could keep their source somewhat in the open ala OSX at least.

    • Re:OpenBeos (Score:5, Funny)

      by bunyip ( 17018 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:53AM (#6095329)
      Yeah, we all love the idea of open Beos...

      But maybe there's at least 10 or 15 lines that look vaguely like some code SCO that probably took from BSD in the first place.

      I wonder how much SCO could extort from the Beos community? Gotta be at least $3.

      Alan.

    • Re:OpenBeos (Score:5, Informative)

      by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Monday June 02, 2003 @10:28AM (#6095618) Journal
      Zeta's not fully open because much of the code is licenced from Palm, especially network and backend gui code. What this means for OBeOS people is all good (as soon as it's released).

      There will be more interest, apps and support for BeOS. Right now the community consists of people who use it, and people who want to. Zeta will bring modern driver support, networking, and to BeOS, and that is something that has improved greatly in the last year. BeBits (in my sig) is somewhat like a sourceforge for BeOS, and the number of drivers written recently are all posted there.

      You can also try BeOS out on most modern hardware by grabbing BeOS max (link in my journal), a distribution with most necessary included.

  • wait a sec... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Alpha_Nerd ( 565637 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:49AM (#6095305)
    You're telling me I have to pay for my operating system??

  • BeOS was cute (Score:5, Informative)

    by GnuVince ( 623231 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:49AM (#6095306)
    It had a very nice GUI, it was fast and responsive, it was very light. I liked its design and feel, but I sticked to Debian due to the eternal problems that plague most new OSes:

    Lack of 3rd party apps

    Lack of drivers

    Lack of documentation

    Lack of some useful features (multi-user for example)

    This Zeta looks nice, but it won't be successful as long as it carries these problems.

  • First look? (Score:5, Informative)

    by DeathPenguin ( 449875 ) * on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:49AM (#6095308)
    Hardly. Below are two links that have video coverage of Zeta at CeBit2003:
    http://ddanneels.free.fr/Zeta-CeBIT200 3.avi
    http://gravity24hr.com/mirror/zeta/BeOS-Zet a-Prese ntation-CeBIT2003.avi

  • Zeta? (Score:4, Funny)

    by h00pla ( 532294 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:51AM (#6095316) Homepage
    Bad name. I can see Catherine Zeta-Jones sueing. But as long as they don't take her picture, they should be all right.

    • Re:Zeta? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Strike ( 220532 )
      No kidding, it's a good thing she hasn't decided to litigate the Greece school system!

      Say it with me kids: "alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta (trademark 2003 by Catherine Zeta-Jones), eta, theta ..."
    • What about zeta tau alpha [zetataualpha.org]? Or more commonly known as Zeta? My gf is zeta and wouldn't care (she loves AOL *sigh*) but it's interesting.
    • This "joke" isn't funny... it's begging for the Stupid mod category I saw on someone else's sig.

      Pedantic: Zeta is a greek letter, Ms. Jones has no claim to it.

  • And in SCO news. (Score:5, Funny)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:52AM (#6095323) Homepage
    SCO declares that YellowTABs OS "BeOS" is infringing on SCOs IP. According to SCOs CEO Darl McBride: "We ran the BeOS through a machine code debugger and found sections of 10-15 instructions that are the same as those used in our product." SCO says that people need to stop using the new BeOS or face lawsuits.

    Darl McBride also said that if YellowTAB were to buy a larger license, like the Entire-SCO-Company "license", the problem may disappear. When asked how a fledgling startup company like YellowTAB could buy SCO, McBride replied: "Right now even a few dollars is better than a counter lawsuit, besides I have my golden parchute. Hahah. Wait, is that tape still recodi...."

  • Germany? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Flabby Boohoo ( 606425 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @09:54AM (#6095335) Journal
    Why do the old systems go to Europe to die? Arn't the Germans responcible for keeping the Amiga alive?

    • Why do the old systems go to Europe to die? Arn't the Germans responcible for keeping the Amiga alive?

      The Amiga went back to the US awhile ago...
      Anyway, I guess thats why they called it "old europe" ;-)

    • France (Score:2, Informative)

      by aspargillus ( 640992 )
      IIRC, BeOS originally came from France. (Old Europe at work here...) So it rather returns.

      • Re:France (Score:5, Informative)

        by qubex ( 206736 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @12:21PM (#6096515) Homepage
        As a matter of fact BeOS' only connection with france was the nationality of Be Inc's founder, one Jean-Louis Gassé. However the OS (and the beautiful BeBox) was entirely developed in the USA. It is true that Be Inc later opened its european regional offices in Paris, but this is a far cry from "being born in europe".

        As for why old systems "go to europe to die", as a european, I guess it is down to a general appreciation of solid stuff that works as opposed to newfangled stuff driven by the corporate sphere... or maybe that's just me...

    • Why do the old systems go to Europe to die? Arn't the Germans responcible for keeping the Amiga alive?

      Europeans seem to make much better use of their machines than people in the U.S. This is not just a difference in how they treat hardware, but how they feel about software, too. Many people in the rest of the world don't have the budgets at work or home to have "current" tech, and they just have better sense in realising that learning to use your tools effectively makes you more productive in general.

      Fac

    • Yeah, those guys are still listening to heavy metal, too! I guess it's a nostalgic continent...

      But just maybe, they're wise enough to recognize a good thing when they see it, and don't just give it up when the market has moved on.

      But on the other hand, there's David Hasselhof...

  • ... 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).

    Oh "understanding what a replicant is" is easy once you administer the Voit Kamph test...

    And which dead replicants show up, anyhow? Zora and Priss?

    • BeOS has the unusual ability to embed one application inside another, these embedded applications are called "replicants". If you shut down the parent ("container") application, the replicants stay running, and even persist over reboot (think of it as "fork off and die" on steroids). In this case, I guess two replicant applications present themselves but are DOA for some reason.

  • BeOS advantages over Linux, Windows, BSD? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The GUI which was interesting 5 years ago no longer is unique - it's now a commodity in the days of KDE/GNOME. So what market is this OS appealing to? Businesses? No apps. Home users? They won't pay. Embedded Systems designers? Possibly, although Linux is free. I'm not trolling - any idea?
    • Anyone who requires/demands resposiveness. Linux and OS X, user input takes a back seat to what's going on 'behind the scenes'. (Windows is sligtly better)

      BeOS has always been about instant reaction to the user, no matter what else was going on. Although most programs (with the exception of Mozilla/Phoenix) load too quickly to be intercepted...

      If BeOS stays true to it's roots as a media OS - musicians, video artists, animators and their ilk would switch from the ever more bloated, less free(DRM) window

      • BeOS has always been about instant reaction to the user, no matter what else was going on. Although most programs (with the exception of Mozilla/Phoenix) load too quickly to be intercepted...

        If BeOS stays true to it's roots as a media OS - musicians, video artists, animators and their ilk would switch from the ever more bloated, less free(DRM) windows. BeOS needs media, like media needs BeOS.

        You know what, I like a lot of things about the BeOS, and I think that Linux could learn a lot from them. But I

  • Y Tu Gentu? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02, 2003 @10:07AM (#6095424)
    It's amazing how every [slashdot.org] single [slashdot.org] story [slashdot.org] about [slashdot.org] something [slashdot.org] on [slashdot.org] OSNews [slashdot.org] is [slashdot.org] submitted [slashdot.org] by [slashdot.org] Gentu [slashdot.org].

    I have no idea how Eugenia got a free pass with the /. people, but I am pretty sure it isn't the quality of her writing, or her tolerance for dissenting views.

    Seriously.. this is ridiculous [slashdot.org]. Save for one story submitted by "Worried" on April 19th, I had to scroll back to March 28th to find one not by "Gentu." And even back that far, the Gentu thing is still the name on almost all of the stories. Its just stupid. Anonymity in story submission only works if you don't choose the same handle each time, sweetie.

  • BeOS was great in its time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @10:09AM (#6095435)
    As you can tell from the nick, I was a BeOS user back in the day. Technically, it was way ahead of anything at the time:

    1) The kernel was extremely low latency, and the scheduler was superbly designed for user responsiveness. This was at a time when the low-latency and preempt kernels simply didn't exist, and we were putting up with the 100ms+ second latencies of kernel 2.2. While Linux today has caught up with and surpassed the latency targets, it (even in 2.5) still hasn't managed to reach the same quality in the scheduler.

    2) The GUI was very fast and responsive. The theme I use today (dotNET on KDE) is probably similarly complex to Be's native look, but BeOS was still faster, even though I ran it on a lowly 300MHz PII, and I run KDE on my 2GHz P4. It was heavily multithreaded, which made a world of difference for a machine under heavy load. In BeOS, an app's GUI would never freeze up while the app did some background task. This was at a time when GTK 1.2.x and Qt 2.x weren't even thread-safe! Even today, KDE and GNOME have yet to make use of multitheading as effectively as BeOS did half a decade ago.

    3) It had a very fast journaled filesystem, with attributes and live queries and everything. This was at a time when ext2 would nuke your installation after a bad crash.

    4) It was pretty. It was simple, without being austere, and had a colorful asthetic. It had fully-antialiased fonts back when we had Win9x's "font smoothing" and Linux user's were just happy to be finally able to use TrueType fonts.

    5) Long before OS X came around, BeOS had the power of Unix with the simplicity of a Mac. The shell was extremely well integrated with the GUI, and you could even script GUI events from the command line.

    6) The API was awesome. It was simple, well designed, and well documented. This was back when GTK+' s documentation consisted of source code.

    Of course, these days, Linux has come a long long way from what it was then. It's got a kernel much better than BeOS ever did, KDE and GNOME are catching up in the GUI department, XFree86 has fully accelerated OpenGL, and is getting nifty features like XRender and Xr, FreeType/Xft has some of the nicest looking antialiased fonts out there, etc. But BeOS has stagnated for years, and is much the same now as it was then. It's still quite impressive, but not as shiny as it was in its heyday.
    • I think the coolest thing that wowed me about BeOS was when I loaded the GL-Teapot demo, watched it spin, then kept adding more and more and watched as they each *gradually* spun slower and slower. There was no locking up, none of them stopped, and the gui still responded just as fast. I didn't know a whole lot about programming back then, but I was impressed with how the whole system *scaled* usage.
    • Just wanna clear some stuff up. I liked Be a lot; a friend of mine had a BeBox and it kicked (and I was waiting for them to port it to a PowerPC that I actually had... they managed to port it to everything that I did not have...)

      1) The kernel was extremely low latency, and the scheduler was superbly designed for user responsiveness. This was at a time when the low-latency and preempt kernels simply didn't exist, and we were putting up with the 100ms+ second latencies of kernel 2.2. While Linux today has c

    • Just imagine where BeOS would be if they had released it under a GNU license.

  • What about the PPC version? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kommakazi ( 610098 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @10:10AM (#6095440)
    I looked all over their site and cannot find anything about a PPC version, this is rather disappointing. Anyone know if they plan on continuing it as well?
  • All of the ex-Be-Developers and management? Just a few?
    Did "Be" basically buy it's OS back?

    What is going on here?

    • Re:Who *EXACTLY* are "yellowTAB"? (Score:5, Informative)

      by no reason to be here ( 218628 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @11:26AM (#6096087) Homepage
      YellowTAB are a German group, completely separate from the original Be, Inc. Before Be went belly up, but after it had become obvious that they had put all their eggs in the Internet Appliance basket, yellowTAB approached them about licensing BeOS so they (YT) could distribute it. The nature of the contract between the two apparently made it still valid, even after Be, Inc.'s sale to Palm.

  • links (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02, 2003 @10:19AM (#6095521)
    • BeOS5-PersonalEdition.exe [filesearching.com] (45 MB) - BeOS which installs its filesystem virtual into one file on your Windows partition. No partitioning required, no risk involved! Ideal for trying it out.
    • BeOS4Linux.tar.gz [filesearching.com] (41 MB) - same thing, but installs into a Linux ext2 partition. Needs a bootdisk here, though.
    • dano_51d0.zip [ed2k] (68,4 MB) - Never released "next generation" BeOS. If link is buggered, paste this without spaces into emule/lmule/xmule: ed2k://|file|dano_51d0.zip|71802854|30CA778C7F8E1B 5A94557E5CD8923B93|/
    • DeveloperEdition-1-1-boot-and-main.zip [bezip.de] (188 MB) - Needs own partition. Great distro [beosonline.com], about as much fun as a Linux desktop of two years ago.
    • BeOS-Zeta-Presentation-CeBIT2003.avi [beos.spb.ru] (67 MB)
    • OpenBeOS [openbeos.org] recreates the OS in open source
  • Good to see that Sinclair Research has made another comeback with the Zeta [nvg.ntnu.no]. I wonder if they will port it to the QL or to tricycles?

  • It might be the greatest desktop OS ever... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by skryche ( 26871 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @10:35AM (#6095677) Homepage
    ...but nobody's going to use it when there are alternatives that are cheaper, more free, with more apps, and are better supported.

    Without the GPL or, say, a Win32 emulation thingy, it doesn't seem viable.

    • I recall some people saying that about Linux a few years ago.

      Zeta doesn't need the GPL, OpenBeOS is taking care of that. Zeta will have the advantage of being done and increasing the user/developer base while OBeOS is working on covering the re-writing bases.

      Just keep in mind that there are a lot of niches not covered by the 'big' OSes and distributions that OBeOS can fill. (If there wasn't, why would we need YALD - Yet Another Linux Distribution?)

  • I'd like to see a BeOS GUI (desktop environment) that can run on Linux.

    It would have lots of advantages: use the drivers, packages for Linux, the best GUI for users and programs, no X.

    Disadvantages: not open source, doesn't really belong in either world.

    • Blue Eyed OS (Score:2, Informative)

      by Jack Comics ( 631233 ) *
      Your wish was already granted. Take a look at Blue Eyed OS [blueeyedos.com], a relatively new take on BeOS. It uses the Linux kernel with BeOS APIs. BeOS apps will run on it, so long as they are re-compiled. It combines the best of both worlds... Linux's stability, network capabilities, and far better device driver support, and BeOS's user interface, among other things. A bootable CD was recently released a month or two ago. You can get it from the web site if you want to try it out.

    • Why steal from that corpse, too? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RatBastard ( 949 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @12:55PM (#6096812) Homepage
      Don't you guys steal enough from others already? Every damned GUI I see for Linux always wants to look like something else with Windows XP and OS/X being the top two cloned interfaces.

      I remember when Be Inc. went under. The largest reaction in the OSS/Linux arena was "so what?", the second was "Will they release the OS under GPL so we can rape and pillage their IP?"

      This isn't a troll, this is a serious concern of mine. Don't copy BeOS, don't copy Windows XP, don't copy Mac OS/X! Do something ORIGINAL! Do something new that is Linix/OSS from the ground up. Stop playing catch up and take the lead for once!

      • Re:Why steal from that corpse, too? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by sultanoslack ( 320583 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @02:03PM (#6097505)
        Don't copy BeOS, don't copy Windows XP, don't copy Mac OS/X! Do something ORIGINAL! Do something new that is Linix/OSS from the ground up. Stop playing catch up and take the lead for once!

        This is just pointless hubris. To quote Igor Stranvinsky, Good composers borrow, great composers steal.

        This is to say that doing something original is pointless; building upon what has already been learned is the direction of progress.

        All of these desktops have common elements for a reason -- it's a pretty decent way of navigating through a computer. Yes, of course innovation is nice and sometimes you want to temporarily ignore some of what you've learned to try a new angle on things, but the most certain way to fall out of any meaningful cometition is to start ignoring everything that your competitors have done right.

        If you don't think that original ideas are coming out of the Linux desktop (and subsequently being copied on other platforms), then you aren't watching very carefully.

      • What, is EvilWM not original enough for something?
        1-pixel window borders, no icons, keyboard navigation for all features, I haven't seen that in any other graphical windowing system.

        Wait, but there has to be a reason why most people don't use EvilWM hasn't it?

        Repeat after me:
        Original is not always Usable.
        Original is not always Good.
        • keyboard navigation for all features, I haven't seen that in any other graphical windowing system.

          Windows?

          And I'm not talking about the extra 'windows keys' on the keyboard. Any program that follows the win32 usability guidelines can be completely controlled without ever touching the mouse.

      • "Do something ORIGINAL! Do something new that is Linix/OSS from the ground up. Stop playing catch up and take the lead for once!"

        Why?

        Seriously, very few people have original ideas. And even fewer have original ideas that might benefit others. What is wrong in taking the works of others and building upon them? Everyday I use tools created by others, these tools lend themselves to solve problems certain ways, I doubt that many of my solutions are unique. In fact I can accept that some solutions are prob

  • Wasted efforts? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by teslatug ( 543527 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @10:54AM (#6095848)
    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.
    Damn! Just how many BeOS clones are there out there in development??? Also, what's up with adding Zeta all over the place. Most people who will buy this are familiar with the name BeOS. Does Palm own the trademark?

  • num-lock??? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mydigitalself ( 472203 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @10:58AM (#6095883)
    i found this a bit of an odd request...


    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.

    now i don't know about you, but i generally don't know the state of Num/Caps/Scroll lock every time i reboot my computer. the behaviour i DO care about is that they are consistant every time. numlock status is a CMOS-level (its been there for YEARS!) consistant feature.

    so i read the whole review with a pinch of salt if somebody wants their numlock status to persist after reboot, really...
    • i remember having a tiny app in my startup script that turned the numlock on at bootup. here [bebits.com] is an app that does the same.

      listening to eugenia (the reviewer) is always a mistake. this is the same reviewer that complained that be (back when they were alive) was not planning on supporting machines with more than 8 cpu's and 4 gigs of ram (back when they had silly things like 'video card support' to work on)! she really is a blight on the beos community.
  • In the review, he mentions that he has a dual Celeron 533 system. From the article conclusions: "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+). " All I have to say is....WTF???

    I've got an AthlonXP 1800+, and I've never ever ever ever had an mp3 skip (both windows and linux) unless the mp3 file was actually corrupted itself. Hell, even when I was using my old pentium 233 I only rarely had

  • From the review.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by PS-SCUD ( 601089 ) <peternormanscott&yahoo,com> on Monday June 02, 2003 @11:17AM (#6096018) Journal
    "Non rectangular window support."

    Now that would be interesting, round windows. Would be difficult to read text in lol.
    • Now that would be interesting, round windows. Would be difficult to read text in lol.

      Actually, this is no different than XFree86's SHAPE extension which is used by a LOT of applications (mplayer, xine, xmms, many window managers, etc) to create oddly shaped windows.
  • I know!
    AmigaOS! That OS is the poster-child for zombie OS'es! And now BeOS will join it. A few people will attempt to drag it's lifeless corpse around in hopes of reviving it but not have the drive, skill or money to make it happen. It'll keep going on and on in limbo.

    Too bad. This was a clever OS (Amiga and Be).

    • Dude, if I had some mod points right now you'd be getting a plus 1, Funny. "the poster child for zombie OS'es" is priceless and soooo true.

    • AmigaOS is tied to expensive PPC hard(vapor)ware, whereas BeOS works with what you've got - crappy old x86 pentium 120 machines. ;) Anyone can try it, or use it.

      So don't count it out yet - there are a lot of tireless crazies out there who are working hard to make BeOS into the next Linux (only better)...

  • It might have been an interesting review, but it was so cluttered with opinions that it was hard to actually find the content.
    • 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.

      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.

      YellowTAB should have concentrated on f

  • Other than that, the first boot in this beta version of Zeta greets you with two dead replicants Good to see Decker is still taking out the trash.
  • Be tried to sell BeOS, it failed miserably, then gave it away for free in a last ditch effort to increase interest in the platform, and while extremely neat, the commercial interest remained weak.

    Now, it is in the hands of another company trying to sell it again. At the same time, so many groups have extended in very good ways the free edition of BeOS5, and thus this somewhat improved commercial BeOS faces very similar, yet free competition.

    I really don't see much hope in this, but it would be interestin

  • I love any company that manages things like this [mit.edu].

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