Techview: another new magazine
Stephen B. - January 11th, 2006
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Archive for the ‘News’ Category 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.
Mike Popovic – the creator of BeDope and Be Inc’s former webmaster – sat down with Jason and I to talk about BeDope, his time at Be, and what he’s currently working on. “Sat down” in the virtual, courrier electronique sense, that is… Jason has posted his half of the interview over at BeDoper, read more to see the BeOSNews interview with the man behind the original BeOS humour site. Update: Mike has generously offered to sporadically answer follow-up questions in the comments area. So if you’d like to ask him something, get thee to the comments!
Mike Popovic: Be Dope ran from January 1998 to January 2001. Although some people assumed there was a staff or group of people, it was really just myself (with a handful of contributed stories over the years). What inspired you to create a humour site focused on BeOS? Mostly, just using/learning about BeOS. The first stories just sort of spilled out. They got a good reaction, so I kept it going. When did you start using BeOS? Were you an instant convert? I started using BeOS in the PR1 timeframe. I sort of set it aside for a bit, but then got a hold of a PR2 CD and started digging in a bit deeper. Do you still get a chance to use it today? I haven’t used it in quite some time. I still have a hard drive, somewhere, with BeOS on it. I might someday boot it up for fun, but don’t think I’d find it useful on a daily basis. You also worked at Be Inc. for close to three years as their webmaster, how did you get hired there? You started BeDope before you began working at Be, right? Did BeDope help with getting a job at Be? I started working at Be in August of 1998. Through Be Dope, I had been exchanging a few emails with some Be employees. They were coming to NY for PC Expo; I was thinking it might be nice to move to California. So, I suggested that if there were thinking I might be useful, it would be a convenient time to talk to me. I interviewed with a few folks, and we all felt like it would be a good fit. Did anyone ever get offended by something you wrote on BeDope, or take a satirical piece seriously? Sometimes when the topics of the story included something far from the world of BeOS/computers, I’d get email from someone confused or outraged – most times they had been sent a link only to that story and not looked around the rest of the site. I believe there was an email about Be engineers hunting okapi, and often when I mentioned Macs I’d get a barrage of mail. Once, someone came in person to the office and bypassed the receptionist to find me. They were offended by the “BeOS Bible Causes Heavenly Rift”. I think it was the picture that did it. They asked if I would stop with the blasphemous content, I countered that God probably has sense of humor and that was the end of it. Another time some tech writer took issue with me mocking some content in his article. He wanted me to take out references to his article. I was sorely tempted to have the next day’s story be: “Stop Quoting Me,” Author Demands. But that would have been funny to me and just about nobody else. Probably there were more people who were offended, but they never contacted me. Did BeDope ever get you in trouble at work? From the start, everyone at Be was very supportive of Be Dope continuing after I was hired, to the point that said encouragement was written into my employment agreement. I had to restrict myself a lot more, naturally, once I was “on the inside”. But all agreed that I walked the fine line very well. True, I was the first one to get a phone call from the Be lawyer department when the rumor about Red Hat buying Be came out and sent the stock price soaring, but I think that was to be expected. From the outside, it always looked like humour was pretty prevalent at Be, from the haiku error messages to the “we own paper stocks” comment in BootScript next to the line for starting the print_server. Was it as fun a place to work as it seemed from the outside? An article once referred to the folks at Be as “Burning Man pranksters,” I and always thought that it was an apt description. They were incredibly creative, they wanted to try creative things and they had all come together to this company that was willing to let them try. It’s only natural that this fun energy would spill out beyond actual coding. If anything, I’d say it was more fun than it looked from the outside. How did the BeDope easter egg end up in NetPositive? I don’t remember exactly – either Scott Barta decided to put it in, or I suggested it. What have you been up to since you left Be? On the technology side of things, I now play around with devices powered by Danger technology (a company where many ex-Be went to). I started a moblogging site for users of these devices a few years back. It’s a well-designed device, so users get to focus on having fun. On the writing side of things, I’ve been publishing some short stories for kids online at Media Are Alive (http://mediaarealive.com). It’s sort of an experiment – I’m just putting these stories out there and seeing where they go. It has led so far to a project I am working on with an illustrator from southern California. There’s also a blog there for grown-up readers. I’d be happy to hear from any publishers who like the stories :) Are you still in touch with any of the other former Be, Inc. employees? I’m on the other side of the country from many of them now, so not so much in person. But I still do trade email and IM with some and follow some blogs. Since this is an interview with a former Be Inc. employee, we’re obligated to try to get some juicy, scandalous comments from you on the current state of things. So here goes. One thing that hasn’t been discussed in relation to yellowTab and Zeta is humour. Do you think yellowTab has a sufficient sense of humour? Is Zeta funny enough to succeed? I’m going to have to disappoint you here and say I don’t really follow any of these projects, so I can’t judge them on humor. But I do hope that the folks involved are having fun, having a good sense of humor about things. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions!
BeOSNews wishes everyone in the BeOS / Zeta community a Happy New Year, Bon Annee, ceid mille failte, and Felix sit annus novus (as a Canuck of Scottish descent who hangs around with Philologists, I think that covers it). Jason and I are planning a special surprise for tomorrow or shortly after. A late Christmas present, but I promise it will be worth the wait – an event of such import that it was probably prophecy’d* in the BeOS Bible or something. *Forgive the anachronism, I can’t remember the proper spelling, so I just stole Neal Stephenson’s as I’m finishing up reading The Baroque Cycle. Which is excellent by the way, and should be read by anyone who enjoys reading.
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