February 10, 2004
Zeta RC2 Delux Edition Review
Zeta RC2 Deluxe Edition
This review is a brief field report of my experience with Zeta RC2, an operating system based on BeOS. Zeta was delivered in four working days after I had transfered the money to yellowTAB's account. I did so in order to keep a great OS alive and because I simply could not wait until the incarnation of OpenBeOS which is making good progress but will presumably take years still to be ready for use.
I felt frustrated last year when all these bashings in the BeOS community started and thought about leaving this great platform forever. But after my already quite long experience with OS alternatives, including several Linux distributions, Mac OS X and others I felt unhappy because none of them had the simplicity and ease of use which I enjoyed so much using BeOS. It's mostly the same like what type of car driver you are with an Operating System. Either you feel comfortable with it or not. And for me Linux still isn't my way of driving yet.
System
PIV 2,4 Ghz Intel 845 / 768 MB RAM
Saphire Radeon 9000 Pro 128 MB
Soundblaster Live! 5.1
Hauppauge TV Card
Toshiba DVD/CDRW Combo drive
HP Deskjet 959c printer
19' Philips Brilliance CRT
Installation
Zeta was installed on my second 40 GB drive in just a few minutes. It was quick and easy so I expect also BeOS/Zeta newbies to cope with an installation. If you decide to choose what software should be installed you will find a brief description of each application and eventually a screenshot. As most descriptions do not include a screenshot I would leave this feature out or do the work and add them. My Radeon graphic card worked from the start without any problems but I had to fiddle quite a bit to get some sound out of my Soundblaster. But finally even my TV card was working just fine.
Impressions
The boot time is fast as on any BeOS so you don't have time enough to go on toilette while your system is booting like on other operating systems. Strangely it appears that Zeta boots even faster when you leave a CD in your drive. Zeta also feels fast and responsive and all the SVG icons look smart. FastLauch which is the equivalent to Quicklaunch on Windows is a new and useful Tracker feature. Adding my printer was easy so USB support seems to be fine for common devices. Ripping DVD's was fast and easy and 'Helios' burned CD's without any problems. I let some screenshots speak now as I am not going to discuss all programs in detail.
Unfortunately the overall stability and interface glitches eat up most of the positive general impressions so far. If you choose English as system language but use a different keymap Zeta does not keep it even if you tell it to do so. That is somehow annoying bacause I am used to this setting. It's also a great pity that Zeta is not able to write on NTFS partitions as it will coexist with Windows a lot. But for this it's not yellowTAB to blame and in the meantime you can transfer your media via a FAT partition to Windows. So keeping in mind that this is a release candidate and Service Pack 3 is on the way, I am confident that future releases will further improve Zeta.
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