- The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is yellowTAB Zeta.
yellowTAB Zeta is an operating system developed by yellowTAB of Germany based on the BeOS operating system developed by Be Incorporated. Currently at the public Release Candidate phase, the only available version is Zeta Neo.
The Zeta operating system is an effort to bring BeOS up to date, adding modern features like USB support, that have been introduced in competing operating systems in the years since Be Incorporated ceased development in 1999.
However, some commentators point to a list of goals for the first non-beta release that do not appear to have been met (including Java 1.4.2 and ODBC support). Other reviewers point to the bugs that still exist from the original BeOS operating system and question whether yellowTAB have the complete access to the source code they would need to make significant updates.
Additional controversy has come from their bundling of Gobe Productive in a licencing deal which Gobe has disputed. Neither side will conceed that the other is wrong, yellowTAB continues to bundle Productive 2.01 with Zeta without ill affect.
However, despite the criticism, Zeta has contributed to revitalising the BeOS commercial software market, with a number of new products for both Zeta and pure BeOS being released, including a CAD clone called AtomoCAD.
In October 2004, yellowTAB announced Zeta Neo. The reason for the name change is down to the largely increased feature set. New features include VOIP support, and a new media player, as well as enhanced localization of system components and a re-engineering of some important preference interfaces. This version is still not the official release, and the name change is suspected to be heavily influnced by marketing decisions. In December 2004 yellowTAB release a service pack for Neo which addresses a number of quibbles users have this latest release.
The product has come under ridicule from some sources after a series of "Schoolboy Errors" were made, including RC1 having a broken loopback adapter, one of their updaters containing a shell script that could not complete sucessfully, and gzip being missing in Neo despite it being present in every BeOS release.
The system has also come under heavy criticism from BeOS developers for the massive, undocumentated changes in the system messaging system. The lack of documentation indicates that YellowTAB do not understand these changes, which break compilation of code, and in some cases, most notably Mozilla, break the actual application if any code optimisations are applied, producing much slower builds [1] (http://www.livejournal.com/community/bezilla/64711.html). In addition, a number of graphics applications are having problems receiving input events under Zeta [2] (http://bebits.com/app/3569).
External links
- yellowTab Zeta (http://www.yellowtab.com/products/deluxe_edition.php) - official product page
- ZetaNews (http://www.zetanews.com) reports news revolving around Zeta
- YellowTAB Zeta 1.0-RC-1pre Review (http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4770) - reviewed by Eugenia Loli-Queru for OSNews.com
- Zeta RC2 Delux Edition Review (http://www.operajournal.com/articles/zeta.html) - reviewed by Operajournal.com
- Zeta RC2 Impressions (http://www.zetajournal.org/cgi-bin/topics.cgi?op=view_topic;id=62) - reviewed by ZetaJournal.org
- Zeta RC3 Preview (http://www.iscomputeron.com/index/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=389) - reviewed by IsComputerOn.com
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