[Sarlug] WORLD EXCLUSIVE: First Look at YellowTAB's Zeta

[Paul Galashin]

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WORLD EXCLUSIVE: First Look at YellowTAB's Zeta

http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3692&page=1

  By Eugenia Loli-Queru - Posted on 2003-06-02 06:10:45

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, Impressions
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).