BeZilla.org: it’s alive, it’s ALIVE!
Stephen B. - January 12th, 2006
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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.
BeGroovy has an interesting bit of news that I missed in the pre-holiday scramble: Vasper from BeOSMax.org has announced his intention to start a new BeOS/Zeta magazine. It already has a logo and the clever name “Besides,” currently Vasper is soliciting ideas and looking for people interested in contributing content. Great news, especially now that Technoids is defunct.
Catching up on BeOS-related sites after my week-long visit to rural Cape Breton (aka the land of no broadband and frequent winter phone outages), I see that there’s been no shortage of interesting news over the holidays. So in an attempt to get the site up-to-date again I’ve written a short summary of recent happenings. Read more for a roundup of the last week of BeOS-related news, presented as a delicious feast of nourishing bulletpoints. DaaT over at ICO recently got the scoop on a new shareware RSS / Podcast client for Zeta called, appropriately enough, BePodder. The screenshots posted look quite slick and polished and the developers have also made the generous pledge to donate 20% of their sales revenue to the Haiku Project. No word yet on when it will be released, but it looks largely finished judging by the screenshots. On December 27th, Zenebona – a new audio player/ripper/organizer for Zeta – was posted to BeBits. Written by a Hungarian developer going by the nick RoGer, Zenebona appears similar to applications like iTunes and WinAMP 5 in that it provides a unified interface for organizing and importing audio files, as well as playing them back. The commercial version also sports the ability to burn audio CDs and read-only iPod support. Currently it only supports ID3 tags and not BFS attributes, but it’s a very impressive-looking first release nonetheless. Christian Biesinger (aka “biesi”) has made some significant progress in porting the Cairo vector graphics library which is seeing increasing use in projects like the Gecko (Firefox) rendering engine. IsComputerOn reports that work has already begun to support Cairo in BeZilla and Kian Duffy over at HaikuNews pointed out that Cario will be useful to anyone developing a BeOS port of GTK+. Dane Scott recently made an interesting post on LeBuzz describing the current state of Zeta’s sound card support and pointing out areas that need improvement. He’s also collecting suggestions to pass along to yellowTAB – so if there’s a sound card you’d like to be able to use in Zeta, head over and post a comment. HaikuNews has some interesting information on the progress of wireless and PCMCIA support under Haiku/BeOS. In addition to some headway on Haiku’s PCMCIA subsystem, there has also been development work done by Patrick Lafarguette to support PCMCIA Echo Audio cards. Patrick, who is apparently busier over the holidays than I am all year, also released updated drivers for the Intel 2200 and Ralink wireless chipsets which include monitor mode support. And to top it all off, he also released BeNetworkCapture, an application that makes use of the updated driver features to capture wireless packets and perform basic analysis of them.
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