YellowTAB’s OpenOffice.org port status update
Stephen B. - January 13th, 2006
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Archive for the ‘News’ Category Judging from a recent newspost on YellowTAB’s site, their developers have been hard at work on their port of OpenOffice.org. They’re now up to 50 of the 200 packages comprising OO.o (10 more than the previous update), including a major component called the SAL (System Abstraction Layer). From the sounds of it, they needed to create bindings between its functions and native BeOS functions, which made it necessary to add missing functionality to Zeta’s kernel and libroot library. Sounds like fun. The post also mentions that they’ve converted the suite’s cShell make-scripts to Bash and have submitted the changes upstream to OO.o. The post ends by saying that they’re looking for any developers interested in helping to accelerate the porting process.
Italian site Il tuo Sistema has a story on a new Tetris game called BeNetTris written by French BeOS programmer Cedric Vincent (aka CKJ). As well as the standard falling coloured blocks we all know and love, BeNetTris also supports networked multiplayer using a system called TetrisNet (if I read the babelfish Italian-English translation correctly). And judging from the screenshots, it has more settings available than any other Tetris program I’ve ever seen. It’s already been released, you can grab it from here and begin fragging others’ coloured geometric shapes online – or whatever it is exactly that one does in multiplayer tetris. Thanks to Mr. X for this and all the other recent news suggestions
Thanks to Mr. X for spotting this – BeZilla.org has been miraculously resurrected from the dead (or at least a long coma), without any need for lightning, neck bolts, or hunchbacked assistants. The new incarnation primarily features a forum, but it’s expected to change (and possibly break) in the near future according to a post on the BeZilla blog. Great to see the site active again!
In his post-holiday roundup over at ZetaNews, the_leander has the scoop on a new site created by BeWorld’s bs0. The new site, called BeOS Experimental news and tests, examines the various experimental versions and variants of BeOS which Be had in the works. There are a handful of articles up already, including one on the neat Spy-O-Matic app included in Dano. The site is also looking for writers, so head over and use the contact form if you’re interested in submitting content.
submitted by Mr. X Not long after the announcement of Besides magazine, another new magazine called Techview has been released to BeBits (in PDF form). From the description, it appears to be a German-language magazine focusing on Linux, Zeta, and other alternative OSes. There currently aren’t any plans for an English version, but they’ve posted in the BeBits comments that editions in other languages are possible if someone is willing-and-able to translate it.
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. Note: Some readers appear to have misunderstood the purpose of this article. Without writing a book on the subject, I’ll just summarise by saying the intent was not to post a guide detailing how to “steal” Zeta. The intent was to discuss a subject that I hadn’t seen discussed elsewhere – either on other news sites or in statements from YellowTAB – and that I believed was relevant/of interest to the community for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the obvious and inevitable comparison of the Zeta demo CD with R5 Personal Edition.
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 “ 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 booting 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!
Thanks to Mr X for the submission BeOS/Zeta developer Troeglazov Gerasim (aka “3dEyes”) is working on a new ICQ client, according to ICO. The client is based on the ICQKID2 library and appears to be pretty far along in its development. I couldn’t track down much information in English, but the Russian site Qube.ru and the Italian site Il tuo Sistema have some screenshots and information for readers of those languages.
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