Where can I download Zeta OS?

1

Hello! I’m looking for a place where I can download Zeta OS. Do you know where to download it?

2

Zeta OS was a commercial operating system based on BeOS code. Later in its life it was discovered that the creator didn’t have permission to use the BeOS source code and the company went defunct.

It’s best to pretend Zeta never existed and it was a step backward for the BeOS / Haiku ecosystem.

Haiku is way better then Zeta was anyway :slight_smile:

You can surf the torrent sites for it… however remember that downloading it without a valid licence would be piracy.

3

Piracy of… who? There isn’t any company with any intention of monetizing the original BeOS… so calling it piracy is a bit overboard even though if you want to get nit picky about it it is.

I mean Access owns the code but… I haven’t never heard anybody even mention they might have some intention to do anything with it.

If anything Magnusoft kept the BeOS ecosystem on life support for awhile which nobody else was doing… even if they weren’t legit.

4

Haiku is way better than Zeta is every respect except stability. I know from plenty of experience. It’s not worth bothering with.

5

I downloaded and installed Zeta a few years ago. I wanted to check it out and I hoped it would be good. I installed it on a IBM Thinkpad, very stable laptop. Zeta would not run more than 5 minutes without locking up.

This was before Alpha 1 of Haiku. Haiku A3 is much better than Zeta was, in many ways.

6

There were livecds of Zeta 1.1 and Zeta 1.21 which could be downloaded from an European freewhare/shareware site. The 1.21 one might still be around.

This should be sufficient to give you a flavor of Zeta.

Warnings:
i) the Zeta livecds are much slower than the older BeOS democds
ii) the default localization is German - this can be changed to a number of languages - either the country flag icon or local/sprache menu item - I can’t remember now.

Although Zeta was on the wrong side of the fine line of a legitimate redistribution of BeOS, it attracted some application developers and kept the BeOS concepts on life support.