“This review will not try to cater to users new to the BeOS world, but will focus on what has changed since my review of ZETA RC1 and what remains to be done for future releases.”
“This review will not try to cater to users new to the BeOS world, but will focus on what has changed since my review of ZETA RC1 and what remains to be done for future releases.”
An interesting review. At least the reviewer was forthcoming and honest about his experiences and opinions. I guess I’ll wait for RC2. It looks very very interesting, but perhaps it needs some time to grow.
much better review than osviews!
i agree with most of it.
one question:
“Deskbar bug when trying to vulcan grip an application”
what is a vulcan grip?
Take your mom. Grab he should from behind and pinch it with your fingers (not your fingernails). If she falls over, you’ve performed a vulcan neck grip. If not, duck.
Hold down Ctrl + Shift + alt + windows* keys and click on a misbehaving program in the deskbar menu. It will quickly die (or you will kill Deskbar instead if you hit the bug.)
* control + option + apple + shift on a Mac, or I believe you can do something with right alt key if you’re missing a windows key.
That should read “grab her shoulder”. And it’s the “vulcan nerve pinch”.
I forgot I had this window open, and just switched to it and your post was the first one I saw. I read it, and I’m like “WTF?” then “Ewww!” then “Ohhh!”
“Do they have the source code? Do they have the right to use it? Do they have the right to sell Zeta? Zeta is Dano with BeBits stuff, isn’t it? Why don’t they answer? Are Bernd’s panties yellow?”
I’m getting really, really tired of these questions.
I’m getting really, really tired of these questions.
Right. So I guess that puts you about even with the people who are really, really tired of not having those questions answered satisfactorily?
Right. So I guess that puts you about even with the people who are really, really tired of not having those questions answered satisfactorily?
I’m also tired of replying.
Why in the fucking world do people care so much about the details of yellowTab’s license? Whether they have the source or not really isn’t the point, but rather this collective bunch of whiners aren’t having their question answered. They’re of some misplaced mindset that they actually have the right to know. Give it up and give it a rest! Buy it or don’t buy it! Just shut up about it already. These whiners are as bad as that psychotic Stallman freak.
{I}Why in the fucking world do people care so much about the details of yellowTab’s license? Whether they have the source or not really isn’t the point, but rather this collective bunch of whiners aren’t having their question answered. They’re of some misplaced mindset that they actually have the right to know. Give it up and give it a rest! Buy it or don’t buy it! Just shut up about it already.{/I}
Well, I believe that people continue to ask this question because they care about the future of BeOS and its progeny, and hope for a resurgence of this remarkably-good desktop computing platform.
The question whether yellowTab has the source code — and has it legitimately — is basically part of an effort to gauge the prospects for yT’s longevity.
Consider that an operating system has at least two important target markets: end-users and application developers. In the early days, the latter group is arguably the more important of the two; after all, their efforts in application development will eventually draw in more end-users over time.
Commercial developers are profit-making entities; developing an application for this or that platform is an *investment* in the platform, in a concrete dollars-and-cents sense. In order to choose between platforms, the commercial developer needs to evaluate the relative strengths of competing platforms, and one crucial strength is *longevity*.
So: If yT does not have the source — or has a legally-tenuous grip on the source — their longevity is in doubt. This doubt will keep developers away from the platform. Fewer applications will be created. This means that fewer users will be attracted to the platform. And this means that the platform as a whole is doomed to obscurity or wholesale extinction.
For anyone that finds this possibility horrifying — which many BeOS enthusiasts do — the question is important.
Cz
“For anyone that finds this possibility horrifying — which many BeOS enthusiasts do — the question is important.”
I wonder if and when the open source alternatives will be ready. Those might represent a better future for BeOS, and the reasons are obvious:
1)An open source project dies only because of lack of interest.
2)How many people are willing to pay 100EUR for a hobby OS?
“I wonder if and when the open source alternatives will be ready. Those might represent a better future for BeOS, and the reasons are obvious:
1) An open source project dies only because of lack of interest.
2) How many people are willing to pay 100EUR for a hobby OS?”
The open-source Haiku project (http://www.haiku-os.org) continues to make rapid progress, but there is, of course, no deadline. I personally feel that Haiku does represent the best hope for the future of BeOS, for many reasons, including the ones that you mention. Haiku will not “focus-shift” or go away on the community in the way that Be Inc. did, and that yellowTab could (especially if they have no legitimate source code).
Another source of acrimony surrounding yellowTab and Zeta is simply that the BeOS community is small — if devoted — and so the question of dividing its energies becomes important. Although it may be a false dichotomy, for some the question is: Zeta or Haiku? Which should receive one’s support, financial, moral, intellectual? Which is more likely to be of greater benefit to the cause of the rebirth of BeOS? So, naturally people begin to look closely and critically at everything, and the dubious legal position of Zeta begins to seem like a big liability to the community as a whole, not just to yellowTab.
Cz
What the hell? Zeta is by all means a quite mediocre product at this point. When people spend $100 bucks on a copy, they’re buying the promise of the future of Zeta. A product without source code has no future, period. Of course the customer has the right to know that before plunking down their money!
Bullshit. Do you think the average Windows consumer either knows or cares to know where the source for Windows came from? It’s not a question of plunking down money with piece of mind for the future.. it’s still a bunch of whiners not getting information they wrongly feel they are entitled to. It’s closed source, live with it. Again, buy it or don’t buy it.
It has nothing to do with closed-source versus open-source you nutball. It has to do with any source versus no source. If Microsoft said “we don’t have the source code to Windows”, or worse, “we have the source code, but not legally” you can bet that the average Windows consumer would care. Maybe not your clueless home user, but your average Windows consumer is an IT guy managing hundreds or thousands of consumers, or a high-up at Dell or HP responsible for getting millions of licenses for their PCs. You think Dell is going to risk billions of dollars shipping a product that could be illegal?
“You think Dell is going to risk billions of dollars shipping a product that could be illegal?”
On the other hand, given the sheer amount of folks that claimed to have contacted Palm to report Yellowtab for this supposed lack of licence, its interesting to note that there has been absolutely no action taken by Palm or its subsiduaries against Yellowtab, and you can bet your backside that if Yellowtab, a private company known to be making a profit with Zeta was doing so illegally, Palm would have swatted them like flies by now, the EU has many very hardline laws against that sort of thing and being based in Germany, Yellowtab would be well placed to suffer very badly.
Oh, I don’t think the source is illegal, actually. But I do believe, unlike the guy I was responding to, that people have a right to know this sort of thing.
While I agree with Chris in theory about bloat in an OS installation,I do think its a good thing to have all these bundled apps with Zeta,the reason being is :When’s the last time you tried to get some older BeOS software from BeBits?it’s a virtual graveyard of dead links!While the seasoned BeOS user can find many of them on beshare,the newbe is left out in the dark,with a lean distro like R5,but I must qualify this stament with the footnote that I believe none of these 3rd party apps should be installed by default,they should be available as a menu choice in the insallation process and also be able to be installed off the cd at a later date if desired.Perhaps Zeta should ship as a 2 volume set one CD the core OS ,the other the 3rd party apps.
peace
sasquatch666
He’s focusing or changing focus or something…
Isn’t that how we got in this situation in the first place.
Doomed! We’re all doooommed!!!!!
Ps.
The games link at bebits seems to be broken…
I have to say that I agree with a great deal of his review. I have been a BeOS user for a years and have tried every RC up to R1 of Zeta. While I persoanlly think that I would give them more credit. I think they have done a great job considering their limited resources. However, Zeta R1 is by no means ready for a desktop replacement. Too many issues. Firefox has some rendering issues, no flash, no java makes web surfing boreing. I find that I had to continually boot into XP becasause what I wanted to do in Zeta was not possiable or the app too buggy to use. On the other had. It has great potential. If they can get the apps things straighted out. Get better support for moden codecs. The media OS has a surprisingly hard time with media. A native browser with the plugins neessary to make web surfing pratical. There is hope. It is all up to them to deliver. As an R1 owner it is my understanding that I will get all the updates till R2. I give them till then to give me an OS worth switching to. It is obvious that they have put a huge effort into this. They are to be comended for that. But, if it isn’t really usefull then it isn’t usefull.
DFerguson
Someone knows a working torrent for Zeta 1.0 ?
I want totest it before buy.
The activation in Zeta is not an activation like in Windows XP, it is a placebo. If you compare the Zeta installation before and after the activation, you’ll see that nothing has changed and nothing has been activated. Therefore, you do not need to activate, you just need to remove this little program that provides you with that funny activation window. And there is a second program that controls whether the first program is still “alive” or not. After the second program has been deleted, the activation window is gone forever, your bought zeta is free.
As far as I am concerned, this procedure is not illegal, because there is nothing criminal about deleting a few files.
The other option it to write a small app that has the same MIME Type and name as the activation app. You can litterally just have the code:
#include <Application.h>
int main()
{
BApplication app(“[MIMESTRING]”);
}
and that is it. Delete the former app, replace with this one and no more activation woes.
Huuuhh???
sucks
Zeta now has NDIS, which allows you to use your windows networking drivers (posting this using Zeta and wireless network). Zeta has CUPS, SANE which actually work (easy to configure). Zeta can sync with iPod, and has USB2 thumb drive support. Firefox (although still buggy), is very fast (compared to Ubuntu on same box) and when it works, it works well. Acccessing Windows shared drives actually works. Memory larger than >1gb works (is actually used). Athlons use SSE and SSE2.
All these things were not possible (or never worked well) with stock R5. So Zeta has a number of good things compared to the drawbacks Technix mentioned. It’s a decent first release. Look back at the competition, do you think they made perfect first releases. Things can only get better.
And Haiku is coming. Watch out.
Makes me wonder why they’re bothering to continue development? What’s in the OS that can be of interest to anyone?
Who beat Zeta with an ugly stick? None of the elements match! The buttons don’t match the scrollbars, which don’t match the list headers, which don’t match the list cursors. I guess the scrollbars match the titlebars, but those are perhaps the ugliest parts of the theme…
Also, to add-on to my previous response. At this point, I do believe that Yellowtab has the source code to BeOS. The kernel updates and the promise of a 64-bit version are proof enough for me.
Can you use Firewire or USB2 dvd burners with Zeta?
Is there a good tutorial availabe for setting up wifi with NDIS?
If so could someone post links explaining these setups please.
I am left wondering about a few things, at least from my own experience the issues Technix describes with regard Firefox simply aren’t present in my own installs, his soundcard issues however are a known quantity from reading both Zetanew’s and Yellowtabs forums, it would appear that the settings file that comes with the driver package, wasn’t included – the driver basically has to be reinstalled from a fresh package on bebits, now whilst this oversight is pretty bad, its not exactly irreperable or time consuming to fix.
Now whilst there may be some justification in asking the question of “Do Yellowtab have the legal right to do what they have with Zeta and the R5.1 codebase” I have often seen it being used as a bludgeon as much as a reasoned polite question to Yellowtab. To be perfectly honest, I think that even a high definition video of the signing of the licence along with copies of all the documents involved would not put these questions to rest for some people.
With regard the “ugly stick” comment, the review used two different Decors, which is surprising for me given Technix’s usual methodical approach.
Chris Simmons, based on previous posts, seems to be a well known BeOS advocate and a reasonable and very polite person while we're at it. That's why I think that the review was honest and he does mean well to the platform.
However, I still think that some of his complaints were a little bit unfair. I don't think that the default software selection is so much of a trouble, since that, as already pointed out by a previous poster, only seasoned BeOS users would be able to find the software that they need right away after the installation. Having a lot of good software will give newcomers a taste of what the BeOS platform can offer. But I'll concede that the amount of software installed on the default installation should be reduced a little bit. The software should still be on the install media, but as optional packages nonetheless.
Another unfair complaint was regarding the outdated version of the applications used. While I'll agree that the most up to date the revision of a software is the merrier, in the end what really matters is how good the said software performs. Have you seen the last revision of most GNU tools lately? For Christ's sake, the zlib maintainers admitted that the library haven't been receiving too much attention for quite some time prior to the latest flaw found on it and you'd be hard pressed to find a piece of software as ubiquitous as zlib. Update to address security/functionality concerns, yes. But for the sake of keeping it up to date? Why?
There is also that thing with the USB pendrive. While he acknowledged that the Windows software provided lock/unlock feature probably would complicate the things a little bit for Zeta (or any other OS for that matter), he still felt that Zeta should be able to bypass the locking feature and let him access the content of the drive. How good would be such device if anyone could bypass its locking feature just plugging it on a, say, Mac? Not a big deal, but come on!
And lastly… Games. I'm not a hardcore gamer, but I do feel that the Windows selection is quite poor. I'd prefer the amount of games that are shipped on most Linux distros these days. Come on… 179 Mb isn't really a issue nowadays. It can hold no more than maybe a dozen of my .cbr files. I'd get rid of those weaker games in order to improve the overall impression of the product, though. But some of those are “must-haves”: Frozen Bubble, Rollemup, LBreakout2 and XGalaga!
Other than that, I agree with pretty much everything else. And by the way, I'm a Linux user not a BeOS user, just a long time fan fond of the memories of the time spent playing with BeOS 5 PE.
What really matters is security so that most software has to be kept up to date:
One main problem for Zeta is that all the Zeta/BeOS users and Yellowtab think, that Zeta is secure because there are no exploits for it. But Zeta or BeOS is only “secure” as long as only a very few people use it. Now this is changing as Yellowtab sold about one hundred thousand Zeta copies and is still growing. But Yellowtab seems to be unaware of important security issues.
What about Firefox 1.03 that ships with Zeta? Why is there no update to version 1.06? Should Zeta users explore the internet with a Firefox full of known security flaws?
What about libraries like the libpng (the Zeta version is from 2002, a real security risk)?
An OS cannot be secure if there is no one doing anything for this security.
So it seems that we have to wait for the first exploits for BeOS and Zeta in order to get really secure and updated BeOS distros.
Like I said in my previous posts, I have nothing against efforts to keep software up to date. Specially security-wise speaking. I’m not stupid. However, the review lacked some objectivity when the author stated that some software that was updated circa 1999-2000 is a problem, as if this was the problem per se.
What if yellowTab picked, say, a HEX editor and changed all the authors disclaimers of these softwares to (C) 2005? Would it affect the functionality of this software?
There are people out there running their lives on top of Amiga software, OS/2 software, DOS/Windows 3.X software and such. Even Linux people sometimes use quite old software just fine, like in my case:
$ bash –version
GNU bash, version 2.05b.0(1)-release (i386-redhat-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
A profiler made in 2000 is still a profiler in 2005. If it was complete already feature-wise at the time and haven’t faced a single exploit all this time, is it really a problem?
I agree that pursuing this approach leaves a huge risk that the Zeta/BeOS platform will have to deal sooner or later but right now they have a more immediate concern that is even bigger that is gather users back to the platform. The BeOS developer community is rather small compared to the Linux one and that’s why they have to plan wisely how to spend their energies.
I just think that these criteria was a bit unfair when evaluating the experience that the environment provided. But I mostly agree with other flaws that the author pointed out. These are serious issues that should be addressed by yT as soon as possible so that they can offer an even better product to their customers.
If the installer offers them as an option, why not have that option? OK, so someone doesn’t want them. Does he/she have the right for spoiling it for those who do?
I say, have all BeOS apps and games available, and have the option at install time, nicely democratically.
What I find amusing is that he is bitching so much about those games as if 200MB was a big deal nowadays..
That plus BeOS not being able to mount encrypted USB stick, well it’s obvious what would be the point of encryption otherwise?
and since you can easily make the install custom it’s not as if its that difficult to not have the games selected.
I must say, very good review.. however, as with every review, I will have to wait and see it for myself.
Most of FF,Opera etc vulnerabilities do exists only if those browser run under MS Windows. To say – 95 percent.
Point.
95%?
No, that is definitely not true.
If you read e.g the Secunia advisories, you’ll discover that a lot of mozilla and firefox vulnerabilities do not affect only Windows, but also Linux and MacOS (for companies like Secunia, BeOS and Zeta is of no interest at the moment, but this might change in the future).
If you want to test a few of these vulnerabilities yourself (e.g. with Linux), here is one way to do it (this website is in German, but I did not find an English one up to now):
http://www.heise.de/security/dienste/browsercheck/demos/nc/
(“Mozilla Demos”)
To people who concerns about yellowTab’s silence about source code license: did you ever signed an NDA? Obviously not.
What kind of NDA prevents you from stating whether or not you’ve signed an NDA???
“What kind of NDA prevents you from stating whether or not you’ve signed an NDA???”
Most.
To make Audigy and Live cards work, you just have to install the multi_audio media addon from BeBits.
It’s on the CD also, but it is not installed by default.
Try Zeta 1.0 De Luxe for free (and forever if you want)
http://bt.eastgame.net/torrents/10f3735e68083736ca80c8fcad0c1dab862…