I’ve been working off-and-on writing a review/overview of the Zeta LiveCD, but one topic in particular kept distracting me: the question of whether or not the demo CD can be installed and run from a hard drive partition. My experimentation ended up growing into an article of its own and the short answer is “no.” For all the gory details, read on.

As most of us remember, Be Inc. did little to prevent the Personal Edition of R5 from being installed to a hard drive partition. They didn’t even bother to remove the Installer application, so you could simply create an empty partition, boot into Personal Edition, and use the Installer to initialize it as BFS, copy the files and setup Bootman for you. I remember using this method to “upgrade” my R4.5.2 install while impatiently waiting for my R5 Pro CD to arrive.

The story is a bit different with the Zeta LiveCD. First of all, the installer is nowhere to be seen – not terribly surprising. It also appears that YellowTAB has limited the Zeta LiveCD’s ability to mount other BFS partitions. I tested by attempting to mount a partition on a local drive, and then attempting to mount a BeOS Max CD by putting it in my second CDROM drive. Neither mounted automatically, and every time I attempted to use Tracker’s “Mount” menu, Tracker froze and a trip to Kernel Debugging Land followed shortly afterward. No combination of “mountvolume” options in the Terminal worked either. In contrast, the hardrive partition mounted without a problem while booted from the BeOS Max CD, and the Zeta LiveCD had no problem mounting my NTFS volumes on the same machine.

Next, I looked for good ‘ol DriveSetup. It isn’t present in the LiveCD’s Preferences menu or application, but it’s still there in /boot/zeta/preferences. So I tried to use it to mount the BFS partition on my hard drive, but I received an interesting error telling me that the file “/boot/beos/system/add-ons/drive_setup/fs/bfs” was missing – it appears that file was removed from the LiveCD as well.

On a hunch, I mounted the LiveCD image on my R5 machine and queried both it and then my hard drive for Be Applications containing “bfs” in the name. Comparing the results, I noticed another file that isn’t present on the Zeta LiveCD – mkbfs.

So it appears that the LiveCD is unable to read existing BFS volumes or create new ones. Combined with the absence of the Installer application, this pretty effectively prevents users from installing the Zeta LiveCD to their hard drives from within the live CD.

Next, I tried a slightly more convoluted method – since the test machine has two optical drives, I booted from one drive with the BeOS Max CD and stuck the Zeta LiveCD in the second drive. I mounted the LiveCD and told the BeOS Max Installer to copy from it to my empty BFS partition. This appeared to work, but when I attempted to boot the partition (by boothing from the LiveCD, pressing space at the splash screen, and choosing the boot volume), I get kicked out to kernel debugging land with an error saying that the boot device could not be found.

One thing I could not figure out was how the Zeta LiveCD is able to mount the LiveCD partition itself, but not other BFS partitions. When browsing the filesystem while booted from the LiveCD, I noticed quite a few (what appeared to be) mounted BFS images. Perhaps the BFS driver is in an image which is unmounted once the Zeta LiveCD has booted.

From my hour or two of experimentation, it looks like yellowTab has been able to short-circuit at least the “easy” methods for installing the contents of their LiveCD to a hard drive. My reaction is mixed: I’m both pleased and disappointed. Pleased, because I can post about it without any fear of cease-and-desist letters. Disappointed, because it means I don’t get Zeta for free. Oh well.

While some might be tempted to take the limitations on the Zeta LiveCD as evidence of YellowTAB’s “evilness,” I can’t really find any rational basis on which to fault them for it. While the LiveCD has less utility than the R5 Personal Edition, it’s obviously intended to be more of a try-before-you-buy demo. And the limitations make sense for a company wishing to be profitable and remain in business (debates on Open Source aside). As a demo, the LiveCD is certainly enough to give the curious a chance to play with Zeta hands-on. As the image file is only 540MB or so, it’s fairly easy for enterprising BeOS users to mount it and add extra software and files. I’ve done this with a few applications I use frequently in R5, in order to see how well they run under Zeta.

And I say that not as a YellowTAB apologist (or customer, yet), but in an attempt to pre-empt tiresome, repetitive flamefests.

Now that I have that out of the way, I hope to post a more general review of the Zeta demo CD (and Zeta itself) in the next few weeks. Keep an eye out!

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