Il Ritorno Di Beos. Si Chiamerà Zeta

[eagleman]

È Halloween, e quale miglior modo di fasteggiare che rianimare un sistema operativo defunto sul vostro? Lo spettro della scelta quest'anno è ZETA Live CD 1.1, il primo download gratuito a far risorgere il tanto rimpianto BeOS dalla tomba.

I fan di BeOS e ZETA dovrebbero essere un'eccezione per questo tipo di eventi, per questo fatemi spiegare meglio. Quando Be, Inc. vendette il suo pacchetto azionario a Palm nel 2001, la software house tedesca yellowTAB GmbH giocò la carta della ripresa dello sviluppo di BeOS Professional, che loro rinominarono ZETA. Questo fu ben accolto dagli utenti di BeOS ormai gettati nel panico, che temettero l'abbandono di entrambe le tecnologie e il tramonto del loro amato sistema operativo.

Rigor mortis

Tra tutti i vari cloni della Be, Inc.'s, molti progetti simil-Be si affaccaiarono alla ribalta -- il notevole OpenBeOS, un clone open-source dell'originale BeOS (in seguto rinominato Haiku), BlueEyedOS e Cosmoe, entrambe reimplementazioni delle API di BeOS eseguite sul kernel di Linux. Ma ZETA rimane l'unico vero discendente del vero BeOS.

yellowTAB vende ZETA R1 Deluxe Edition online per 100 dollari, e fino ad ora era quello l'unico modo per provare il sistema operativo. Di sicuro parecchia gente ha reclamato per il fatto di aver fatto un buco nelle loro tasche solo per avere un'occasione, ma non mi sono mai contato in quel numero.

Ma poi la ditta rilasciò ZETA Live CD 1.1 in download gratuito negli ultimi giorni di Ottobre, ed un aggiornamento alla versione 1.1 per i proprietari della versione Deluxe Edition. Il file da scaricare è di circa 175MB, un singolo file ZIP contenente due file .img ed un file .CUE che è possibile usare per masterizzare un cd autoavviante da boot. Sicuramente, almeno penso, è un segno che i tempi sono maturi, così ho scaricato il live CD ed impostato l'unità CD-RW per farlo risorgere e metterlo al lavoro.

Mad science

It was a dark and stormy night. At least, as far you know. The first obstacle was burning the CD itself. Apparently the layout of the CD image will not work as an ISO -- I think because of the BFS filesystem it is built on -- and none of the CD-burning applications on my system would burn it. Command-line clients like cdrdao failed with mysterious errors on the boot.img, and K3b reported the .CUE file as corrupted. Success came only with the time-limited trial of NeroLINUX, which burned the CD without complaint. Those of you with Windows or Mac systems may have nothing to worry about, as far more people with those systems have reported success on the yellowTAB forums.

CD newly minted, I prepared to reboot, pausing only momentarily as the wind picked up outside the window and slammed the gate shut with a clang. Somewhere, off in the distance, a dog howled. I threw the switch.

A minute later, the system sprang to life. Or near life, in this case -- the ZETA splash screen came up, the boot progress icons lit one by one ... then the system froze with a kernel panic message. Some research led to the helpful hint that hitting the space key as soon as the boot process begins allows you to enter "safe mode," which in my case worked more or less without incident.

It lives!

On the other hand, once ZETA was up and running, the system could not detect the built-in Ethernet on my otherwise uninteresting nForce motherboard. That alone is not a deal breaker, but the setup program allowed no way to manually configure it -- upon reporting "no compatible network cards found," it launched a modem configuration tool. Luckily I had a couple of older PCI Ethernet cards and managed to find one that worked through trial and error.

On the third hand, the default locale setting is German -- though not consistent -- and even when you find the "Sprache" control panel to change it to your language of choice, many of the secondary interface elements (and application programs) remain in German. I suppose that's the kind of lingering symptom brain-transplanting veterans are used to, but it may drive non-Germanic users quite delirious.

The big dilemma facing Dr. Frankenstein was, of course, what to do with the monster once he got it up and running (or more accurately, staggering). He's no good with the beakers and sensitive equipment, and he isn't going to get the hang of the phone system, so in most incarnations of the story he is relegated to simple manual labor or the occasional dance number.

The same issue arose with ZETA. Okay, I reasoned, now that it is running, what can I do with it? Surf the Web? Firefox is included, so I could do that, though it is no bigger thrill than on any other operating system. The ZETA Live CD includes a number of standard applications -- music players, games, editors, sound and video tools -- many of which will be familiar to Linux (if not BeOS) users. But there is no access to the myriad of BeOS applications available through BeBits, so you are left with a pretty bare-bones system. Since the CD image is less than half full, there is no good reason for this.

I was unable to access any of the files on my hard drive while running ZETA. This might be due to problems with either SATA or ext3 support; I could not find an answer. Unfortunately, hardware support is still sketchy -- in the support forums most problems with the ZETA Live CD were met with pleas to add an entry to the hardware configuration database. In fact, the machine on which I was finally able to boot ZETA as described above was the only one of the three that I tried on which it worked. I could not get the live CD to run at any resolution other than 800x600, which is disappointing, and it only recognized PS/2 keyboards, which is both disappointing and dated.

While limited hardware support is understandable for a company the size of yellowTAB, it still leaves users in the lurch. But don't let my ill fortunes deter you; dust the cobwebs off of an older PC and put it on the lab table yourself. You may be in luck.

The interface takes some getting used to, but does an excellent job of making almost every task on the system accessible within three clicks of the mouse, something few environments can claim today. Reading through the control panels, ZETA is apparently capable of real-time audio and video transport, though I was not able to tax my system hard enough to tell the difference. Nor are the advantages of BFS or the allegedly faster-than-X graphics apparent -- because the system runs from CD-ROM. If these features are a selling point of the full version of ZETA, yellowTAB needs to find a better way to show them off to potential buyers.

Looking into the crystal ball

The BeOS obsession is still an unsolved mystery to me. I threw open the crypt and ventured inside, but I left without revelation. Once I got ZETA to boot, yes, it ran reasonably fast, but whatever bug infects people with love for this OS didn't bite.

Fearing that I had missed something important, I set off to wander the streets at night, knocking on strange doors in search of that yellow window manager's glow, to ask the denizens within if they could help me solve the riddle. Some spoke in whispers of BeOS's journaling filesystem. Others of its integrated, non-X11 graphics subsystem. Still others merely shook their heads, informed me that I would never get it, and shut the door.

Perhaps there is no answer. Or perhaps when Haiku makes a public release, I will learn more. Perhaps, if the fundamental advantages of BeOS (and ZETA) are indeed BFS and the direct graphics subsystem, these ideas will find their way into Linux or other mainstream operating systems.

I confess, after my ZETA Live CD experience, I find myself inexplicably more curious about these ideas; sometimes I catch myself thinking about them on my way to work, or else I glimpse a ZETA logo out of the corner of my eye. Lately I've been waking in the middle of the night, wondering if the ZETA Live CD has inched a little closer my direction. Maybe I should purchase the full Deluxe Edition, I think, maybe I should...

Fonte

[eagleman]

Stasera sono un po' stanco. Finirò di tradurla domani la notizia. Se non ci pensa qualche anima pia prima.

[Dr. Jekyll]

....far risorgere il tanto rimpianto BeOS dalla tomba!!!

Per chi non lo conosce, era il miglior sistema operativo del mondo! :up1:

[eagleman]

....far risorgere il tanto rimpianto BeOS dalla tomba!!! 

Per chi non lo conosce, era il miglior sistema operativo del mondo!  :up1:

115260[/snapback]

La traduzione è più o meno quella. Sto traducendo a pezzettini l'articolo originale. Se qualcuno vuole collaborare, così mi dà una mano e lo si legge completo in molto meno tempo.