Zeta vs Paypal

Should I buy a copy of Zeta, or donate money to Haiku and patch my R5 distro of BeOS?

My impression of Zeta is that it is a repackaging of R5 with some updated USB drivers and so forth. Am I wrong?

In short, I’m curious to know what the best way to get BeOS back on one of my machines is right now.

Zeta is based on newer code than R5, pretty much the code at the state it was when Be died. In the state Be had it, it had some improvements but also some bugs, with it not being an official release. YellowTab have been fixing some of these bugs in Zeta. Their success rate has been debatable but the recent announcement of their R1 release suggests big improvements are on the way. Also Zeta bundles a lot of the commercial apps available on BeOS, the most important being the Gobe productive office suite.

Primary differences between R5 and Zeta are the BONE network stack (much better than R5 net_server, although the latter is fine for my purposes), updated USB support, better internal messaging, and an updated look for the controls (and an SVG tracker but you can get one of them for R5 too).

So is it worth it? I have been sent a free copy of Zeta Neo for my work on the BeOS ports of mozilla and firefox, and it still sits in the drawer uninstalled. I’m happy with R5, and I’ve heard enough bad reports on Neo to put me off it. I’m personally waiting for the R1 release and will see how that goes down with people, then I may well buy it.

R5 works on pretty much all hardware Zeta will work on, although it may need various 3rd party patches. I would say that Hardware support alone are not enough reason to buy Zeta.

Personally I see Haiku with a more secure future (thanks to open source) - any commercial alternative OS will always face a tough time. However the first stable release of Haiku is probably still some time away - over a year I would guess.

If all you want to do is get BeOS back on your machines I’d recommend sticking with R5. If Zeta R1 gets good reviews and you feel you need the increased USB, printer and networking support you can always buy it later.

yeh I’m a little dubious of how Zeta would run on new hardware.

I’ve tried to get BeOS installed on new hardware with no success, even some older boxes with dual processors and scsi drives.

Sikosis wrote:
yeh I'm a little dubious of how Zeta would run on new hardware.

I’ve tried to get BeOS installed on new hardware with no success, even some older boxes with dual processors and scsi drives.

With the right patches, bios settings and safe mode options R5 and Zeta should work on most things I think. My advice was don’t just assume with new systems that R5 won’t run and therefore be forced into buying Zeta.

quite true … I was just trying to point out that running Haiku on machines is what we’re trying to achieve :lol:

some machines even with tweaks won’t boot, but in saying that I’ve installed BeOS on a number of machines (at least 20 I’d say) and some of those machines wouldn’t load other OSes such as Linux (Mandrake, Red Hat and Knoppix) and were too low spec-ed for WinXP boxes unless used as dumb terminals with 10 minute load times :wink:

Thank you both very much for the reply.
I will stick with R5 for now.

You made me think of another question, actually.

Is there a post somewhere on these forums where people are posting their working configurations? Would it be useful to post if there is currently not a topic on this? I’m sure that people post their problems so those are known.

well there is and there isnt :wink:

basically the old Hardware Matrix over at BeDrivers allows ppl to say what works and what doesn’t work.

but it’s old and the code wasn’t great, I’ll be making a new one in a few weeks when I’m on holidays.

Yeh BeDrivers.com has the hardware matrix. It’s usually safe to assume that most systems will boot at least (with some patches possibly), but things like network and sound support are a little more hit and miss.

decorbett182 wrote:
Should I buy a copy of Zeta, or donate money to Haiku and patch my R5 distro of BeOS?

My impression of Zeta is that it is a repackaging of R5 with some updated USB drivers and so forth. Am I wrong?

In short, I’m curious to know what the best way to get BeOS back on one of my machines is right now.

I wouldn’t advise paying any money to zeta until they prove that they are legally entitled to be redistributing beos, which they’ve failed to do to this point.

tb100 wrote:
So is it worth it? I have been sent a free copy of Zeta Neo for my work on the BeOS ports of mozilla and firefox, and it still sits in the drawer uninstalled. I'm happy with R5, and I've heard enough bad reports on Neo to put me off it. I'm personally waiting for the R1 release and will see how that goes down with people, then I may well buy it.

If you don’t want it, I know somebody who does…

:slight_smile:

Sorry. I guess it’s bad form to make a first post trying to mooch freebie software. I kid, regardless. Seriously, though, I’ve been wanting to try Zeta but it’s tough to justify spending what, 100 Euros on an OS I may not even be able to install, and may not have much use for. I know I could get R5 PE for free, but isn’t that just a live CD? I’ve also been wary of installing some of the other “free” versions out there simply because I’m not sure what’s been done to them or how well the patches and addons have been coded.

decorbett182 wrote:
Should I buy a copy of Zeta, or donate money to Haiku and patch my R5 distro of BeOS?

My impression of Zeta is that it is a repackaging of R5 with some updated USB drivers and so forth. Am I wrong?

In short, I’m curious to know what the best way to get BeOS back on one of my machines is right now.

If you want to know the best way to get BeOS back on one of your machines, then Haiku is not for you, as there is no self-contained installable Haiku yet.

You can try some of the BeOS PE-based iterations, which are free, and basically consists of R5 + patches/drivers/apps, and works well.

Or you can use Zeta, which is developed on a more up to date codebase, and has certain enhancements/apps that the free versions do not have; for example: USB2 stack, BONE network stack (it is faster and more stable), localization support (most of the OS and many bundled apps are localized to several languages), scanner support, and the Gobe Productive office suite. According to a recent announcement, Zeta 1.0 will soon have an NDIS wrapper for expanded wireless support, support for HDDs larger than 128GB, CUPS to support many printers, and an updated kernel that allows to use it on PCs with more than 1GB of RAM.

Which one is best for you, only you can decide. :slight_smile:

Koki

Ravnos wrote:
I know I could get R5 PE for free, but isn't that just a live CD? I've also been wary of installing some of the other "free" versions out there simply because I'm not sure what's been done to them or how well the patches and addons have been coded.

PE just lives in a single file on a windows/linux drive. Doesn’t work on Windows XP’s NTFS drives though unfortunately. It’s also possible to burn it to a CD and use it as a live CD. Once you have it booted, there is a program called “Installer” to transfer it to a partition all of it’s own.

The other free distros take the route of burn to CD->boot->install to partition.

If you want to give it a go, tell us what your system specs are and then we can advise you on the best distro for you. If you have windows and it isn’t XP, PE will probably be the easiest.

Unfortunately, I’m dual booting XP Pro and FreeBSD (I say unfortunately because I’m sure BeOS has no support for UFS2 either. I’m quite happy with BSD). Also, the machine’s a P4 1.7 w/ 256MB RAM and an older ATI Radeon, and I guess some machines faster than 1GHz need a patch to install or something (though I’m quite probably wrong about that). I doubt BeOS will become my primary OS at the moment, but I do like to play around with other OSes so any suggestions regarding which distro will be appreciated.

Well pretty much any distro will work for you without patches. Personally I find Max and Developer’s editions too packed with stuff, but they are the easiest to burn to a live CD.

Make a seperate parition first if you want to keep it around (I used the shareware bootitng to resize my XP NTFS partition without losing data - www.bootitng.com (say no when it asks to install to the MBR and then go to “partition work”)).

BeOS can read from NTFS fine, but for some reason PE doesn’t like booting from an image file there.