ZETA 1.21 Coming Soon, LiveCD Available
Stephen B. - October 2nd, 2006
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Over at IsComputerOn, DaaT was the first to spot an announcement from MagnusSoft regarding the release of ZETA 1.21. The post on ZETA-OS.com states that 1.21 has been sent to a CD manufacturing company for duplication (as of Sept. 19th); no official release date is mentioned, but they say that the the CDs should begin shipping to partners and resellers within the next couple of weeks. It is also currently available for pre-order. MagnusSoft have also released 1.21 version of the ZETA LiveCD, as reported by OSNews and ICO. The CD image files can be downloaded from ZETA-OS.com.
As reported by HaikuNews and IsComputerOn, developer Gerasim “_3dEyes**” Troeglaszov has released an unexpected treat for the BeOS community: an NTFS driver with exerimpental write support. NTFS, the filesystem used in current versions of Windows, has been readable in BeOS since at least R4.5 – but until now there has been no way to create or edit files on an NTFS volume from within BeOS. Shortly after the release of the driver for R5 systems, details were posted on ICO about a version for Haiku. The software is reported to be quite stable and doesn’t contain any known bugs, but as it is an early test version, the developer doesn’t recommend using the driver with partitions that contain important data. So if you like to live dangerously – or if you don’t mind creating an NTFS image file to test with – install the package, do some testing, and report any bugs you find to Gerasim.
As Chris Simmons of HaikuNews also spotted, The BeZilla team have recently begun releasing Firefox builds which are built from the branch that is due to become Firefox 2.0. Previous buids have typically been bleeding-edge “Minefield” builds – and as the Firefox page on BeBits notes, bleeding-edge bulids contain “the latest and greatest features, but often the latest and greatest bugs, too.” Builds based on the 2.0 codebase should be a bit more stable and comparable to official Firefox releases on other platforms.
ICO has a new post about work underway to add support for PXE booting to Haiku, courtesy of Marcus OVerhagen. PXE allows a computer to boot directly from a server, rather than from a local disk; it’s typically used in environments where a network of diskless terminals boot from a single server, or (as DaaT mentions in the ICO post) where a bootable installation image is made available over a network.
In the last few months, there has been quite a bit of uncertainty surrounding yellowTAB, Magnussoft, and the future of ZETA development. Thom Holwerda has written up a good summary in his recent editorial over on OSNews, it helps simplify the rather convoluted sequence of events. And more recently, Thom posted an interview with Rene Weinert of Magnussoft who clarifies a few points related to the current status of ZETA. Probably the most significant detail mentioned in the interview is that Magnussoft only owns the distribution rights for ZETA – development will continue to be done by a separate team that includes (or is, presumably, lead by) Bernd Korz. Speaking of Bernd, his blog has a new post with a few details on the team that will be handling ZETA’s development in the future. The post mentions that the various yellowTAB domain names will be going offline in the near future, but it’s pretty light on specifics overall. At this point, we still don’t know (for example) what company will employ the development team or how many of the existing yellowTAB developers will be retained. We’ll post more details as they become available.
HaikuNews is reporting on a significant change to Haiku’s OpenGL support. Jerome ‘Korli’ Duval has adapted the Haiku OpenGL subsystem to use addons – in addition to adhering to the general BeOS development philosophy of modularity, the addon system should make things generally easier for anyone who wishes to write HW OpenGL drivers for Haiku.
As has been reported already by… pretty much everyone else, there have been some recent significant software releases and updates. First up, recent days saw an update to a veneered and generated… I mean revered and venerated BeOS application, Pe – the Programmer’s Editor. It’s hard to imagine, but the folks maintaining the open source version have managed to make improvements to the best text editor in existence (and I say that as someone who has heavily used EditPlus, Arachnophilia, BBEdit, vim, EMACS, and JOE). The new release adds a ruler along the top, a button to quickly enable/disable soft-wrapping, the UI is now much more font-sensitive, and Pe now has support for passive FTP. Next, Tigerdog has posted a new version of the HaikuFox Theme, his NetPositive-esque theme for Firefox; as always, he’s been hard at work making tweaks and adding new visual touches to the theme. And lastly, Slaad recently posted a set of utilities for users of multi-monitor setups, descriptively named MultiMonitorTools. The suite inlcudes two applications meant to be bound to SpiceyKey shortcuts: MonitorSwitcher, which moves the current window to a different monitor, and LocalFullScreener, which makes the active window fill the current monitor (the zoom/maximize button apparently makes a window fill both monitors). They sound quite handy, makes me wish I could find an affordable KVM switch with multi-monitor support.
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