Magnussoft ZETA
Magnussoft ZETA (formerly yellowTAB ZETA ) is no longer available commercial operating system that came on the market in November 2003 and was sold until April 2007. It constitutes a development of the operating system BeOS, whose development was stopped due to insolvency. Thus came the rights to BeOS for the most part to the company Palm, some rights retained former developers of the company Be Incorporated.
The name ZETA refers to the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet, which also stands for the number 6; because de facto, in ZETA to the successor of the last BeOS version 5.0.3.
On 16 March 2007, the financing of the development of ZETA magnussoft has set according to own data.
Main developer and yellowTAB - founder Bernd Korz released on 2 April of the same year that he would stop the further development of ZETA. In addition, he expressed considerations, according to which parts of the software could be released under open source licenses, so they would benefit the Haiku project. David Schlesinger, director of open source technologies in ACCESS, the company that holds the rights to the source code of BeOS, expressed, such disclosure would constitute an unauthorized publication of a derivative work and also explained neither yellowTAB yet Bernd Korz had ever a license for the use of the BeOS source code obsessed. In response to these expressions of distribution of the software has been set.
System
ZETA inherited many features from its predecessor BeOS. So it is just as SMP, multitasking and multithreading. It also uses the working file system as a file system ( with the possibility of associative file management ) and is able to ext2 (read), ext3 (read), FAT16 ( full access), FAT32 ( full access), NTFS (read), ReiserFS (reading ) and HFS partitions (read) access. Also, it brings the boot manager already used in BeOS bootman with.
Business development
On 4 April 2006 an application for the bankruptcy petition process, the business accounts was against the manufacturer of the operating system ZETA, yellowTAB, set to bankruptcy, initiated disabled and a liquidator appointed.
YellowTAB denied in a press statement that this meant the end of the company. It was said that it definitely should be a next version of ZETA, and you also wanted to offer support services that should, however, be limited to four weeks. Furthermore, should the activation (introduced with ZETA 1.0) again removed in version 1.2 and the price will be reduced by nearly € 10. In addition, it was announced that there will be further developments on ZETA, even if yellowTAB " can not continue to exist ." Closer collaboration with the open source BeOS Haiku replica will be sought.
YellowTAB has business operations, however since stopped altogether. Due to lack of the proper conduct of the insolvency proceedings shall be questioned.
New distributor of ZETA was after the end of yellowTAB the company magnussoft. This stated on 26 March 2007 that it had stopped the funding of the development team, led by Bernd Korz the 16th of the same month. In support of the company referred to the sales figures of ZETA, which would have greatly exceeded the company's expectations. The distribution of ZETA magnussoft wanted but at least maintained until the end of 2007.
According to the official statement of magnussoft Germany GmbH, the sales of the products Zeta 1.5 was on 5 April 2007 magnussoft Zeta 1.21 magnussoft set. The adjustment is made to the clarification of the Access Co. Ltd.. submitted a declaration that neither the yellowTAB GmbH nor the magnussoft Germany GmbH are entitled to distribute the product Zeta or were.
Area of application
While previous BeOS was considered the " multimedia operating system," ZETA may have no such longer a unique feature as the appropriate skills competing operating systems have developed significantly since the end of the 90s heyday of BeOS. The manufacturer describes the operating system still to be particularly suitable for multimedia applications. However, most manufacturers of multimedia hardware and software have support for BeOS abandoned, so compared with other operating systems, the application range is small.
ZETA is a single-user system for the home. Thus, viewed with the VLC media player videos and DVDs, MP3s with Champion, the default media player in ZETA be played and surfed with Mozilla Firefox on the internet. E -mail Programs and Office are included in ZETA.
ZETA provides a standardized interface, which facilitates the porting of UNIX applications with POSIX.
Criticism and shortcomings
The properties of ZETA are discussed partly controversial. Critics see no real improvement over BeOS. Many of the advertised features and advantages of ZETA were of a trivial nature. The distribution of unfinished versions of the software on a home shopping TV channel has also cast doubt on whether the manufacturer is able to continue the project financially.
Another point of criticism is the lack of contemporary software. So the included office suite GoBe Productive is available in the published 1999 version 2.0. Since the manufacturer has discontinued the support BeOS, the product is no longer being developed. Also the Flash Player and RealPlayer are for the same reason, only in versions available from the end of the 90s. Many of the available programs offer insufficient properties from today's perspective, it can be, for example, do not print out the included BeOS port of Mozilla Firefox, while the BeOS own NetPositive browser does not support HTML - to-date.
The Java Runtime Environment from Sun is no more available such as OpenOffice.org. Ports of both packages have been repeatedly announced, but in any case lead to a publication pulled.
Is also criticized the low range of supported hardware. It is sometimes not possible to install ZETA without restrictions on a today's standard PC.
It is possible under ZETA, as with Linux, Windows and Mac OS, play multiple movies simultaneously, but since the manufacturer of the video card for ZETA offer their own drivers with hardware acceleration, other systems (eg Windows, GNU / Linux) with optimized video decoders even on older hardware better able to smoothly play more videos at the same time as ZETA.
The WLAN support is also incomplete. For example, the WPA encryption standard is not supported, ZETA users will have to make do with the older and insecure WEP.
Legal issues
Throughout the development time prevailed in the BeOS / ZETA - user community uncertainty about the legal status of ZETA. Neither yellowTAB still magnussoft expressed themselves decidedly to the license terms under which it sold the BeOS -based system. It has been speculated that the developers possess no access to the source code and the development would be alone in the modification or replacement of binary codes. Secondly, it was assumed that illegally published source code of a developer version of BeOS ( dano ) would be used. Another assumption was that yellowTAB have completed just before the dissolution of the BeOS manufacturer company Be, Inc. a license agreement with this.
YellowTAB expressed to the speculation only that you do not use any illegal program code published. Whether, and if so was used terms on which the original BeOS code that has not been explained. At the same time nothing was known of legal action against yellowTAB.
On April 4, 2007 David Schlesinger (Director of Access / PalmSource ) gave up bits of news known ( BitsofNews.com ) that YellowTab / Korz 've never had legal access to the BeOS source code and a license for the publication of BeOS software possessed. Furthermore, as Schlesinger, Korz do not own the right to publish the source code of BeOS / Zeta. The absence of legal action founded with the wastefulness of the German Schlesinger remedies as well as with the absence of any economic interest. ACCESS achieved even with the BeOS source code and no revenue due to the assumed low level of financial strength by Bernd Korz / yellowTAB legal action would not promise a profit. Nevertheless, you 've Bernd Korz repeatedly sent cease and desist orders, which had been ignored. Effective April 5, 2007, the Company magnussoft, under whose name the Zeta versions were expelled from 1.2.1, the distribution, to clarify the legal basis of a.
Versions
Pre-release RC1 - RC4
The operating system ZETA was issued before the publication of the final version 1.0 first as a Release Candidate ( RC). This started with RC1, RC2 where already the later showed significant progress in development since BeOS version 5. Among other new hardware is supported, including USB devices, but also many new programming languages and new applications from many categories were included. As of 9 June 2004, the third release candidate of the system was available.
On October 15, 2004, a fourth release candidate was published under the name Neo. This brought among other things, better hardware support more drivers ( and Others eliminating the 128 -gigabyte limit for hard drives), full USB 2.0 support, a new media player named champion and an Internet telephony program called Whisper. Since after the release of Neo occurred various errors yellowTAB has released a service pack for this version.
ZETA R1
ZETA 1.0 is the final version of the operating system and was presented by yellowTAB at CeBit ( 10 to 16 March 2005 in Hannover). The delivery was delayed by a few weeks, on 9 June 2005 started the CD production. ZETA 1.0, like Windows XP, the first time a product activation. You get a registration key by post must be sent and then type this CD and the serial number into a window ZETA, so you may use ZETA on.
From June 24 to ZETA 1.0 was in the delivery; on the company's website, the dissemination of version 1.0 was officially confirmed on 1 July 2005.
ZETA R1.1
On 17 October 2005 appeared to be approximately 50 MB ( installed about 150 MB) and large service pack that increases the version number to 1.1. With this new version, it should be possible to boot from a USB ZETA drive. Furthermore, supporting ZETA also dual-core processors.
ZETA R1.1 and R1.21 LiveCD
On 21 October 2005 was published in cooperation with freenet.de a 174.5 MB ( unpacked about 550 MB), free live CD, which makes it possible to test the operating system without having to install it. There were, however, omitted commercial programs in the Live CD, contained only in the paid full version. Other limitations are that ZETA can not be installed on the hard drive and also can not access drives with the FSO, the ZETA own file system write. Since September 2006, the new, also free ZETA Live CD 1:21 is available for download, with a size of 223 MB.
ZETA R1.2
Shortly after the announcement of the bankruptcy petition in April 2006, the manufacturer announced the version 1.2. On April 22, the RTL Shop began as a distributor selling this version. This version has brought some innovations, such as a full SATA support and a port of the Yahoo! Messenger for the first time.
ZETA R1.21
ZETA 1.2.1 was originally to be released in June 2006, but this was prevented by the insolvency of the manufacturer yellowTAB.
After the bankruptcy, the software company took over magnussoft, which was initially described by pages yellowTABs only as " exclusive worldwide distributor ," the responsibility for developing the operating system. For the actual development work, an independent ZETA programming team has been created, which also the founder and managing director of the insolvent yellowTAB, Bernd Korz belongs. Sales and marketing will be handled magnussoft, with the support of a former yellowTAB salesperson.
Actually should be loud announcements of magnussoft the Leipzig Games Convention in August 2006, version 1.3 of ZETA appear. Instead, a beta version ( Beta 2 ) as a version 1.21 ( without the second point of 1.2.1, which signals a " minor release " ) named version was presented there only. There, the first professional computer games were also first presented, which have been ported on behalf of magnussoft.
The release of the final version was then in the first half of October. However, a detectable media coverage did not exist. Neither H nor Golem.de, slashdot or osnews.com mentioned the release.
ZETA R1.5
On December 24, 2006 Revision 1.5 was issued to the media and other interested parties. Official launch for end-user should be the 15th January 2007. He was later postponed to the end of January 2007. According to data from magnussoft was started on 28 February 2007 in order to provide ZETA 1.5 to dealers. Delivery of Version 1.5 is done only as an upgrade to an existing Zeta version. The distribution has been adjusted due to the legal uncertainty ( rights to the source code / Access) on April 5, 2007. An advertised for April 2007 Update to the version number 1.5.1 was not released due to the discontinuation of sales and development.