Zeta is a modern, object-oriented operating system designed from
the ground-up to be lightweight, powerful and easy to use. Zeta
represents a continued development of the operating system BeOS.
With this user manual yellowTAB
will try to show you some of Zeta's capabilities. The manual is
not trying to cover all aspects of the operating system, but rather
give an introduction to commonly used features in the OS
it self and it's main applications.
yellowTAB has also added some tips on how to use applications that
are not part of Zeta. Just have in mind, that yellowTAB is not giving
any support on applications that are not part of the Zeta distribution.
One of the first things that you will notice using Zeta is it's
great performance. Zeta boots in between 10 and 20 seconds depending
on your computer. Zeta is a multithreaded operating system, which
means that it can handle multiple simultaneous tasks. The applications
are launching instantly. Media operations are faster than anywhere
else. Each task will get access to the kernel, even if the CPU(s)
is running with a full load. As a test you can start up playbacks
of some movies, MP3 files and an audio CD. Clutter your desktop
with as many windows you want and format one of your disks. How
does your system perform? Do you have any problems accessing any
menus are starting another movie? Despite all the processes running,
you menu request still gets a fast response from the OS, there's
no cursor lagging and no crashes. Some competing operating systems
do multithreading, but as far as we have experienced no one is as
responsive as Zeta!
The Zeta graphical user interface is clean and lightweighted, without
being unfamiliar. The interface was created with simplicity in mind,
os if you have ever used a personal computer before you should have
no difficulties working with the Zeta desktop, folders, menus and
files. How ever, the graphical interface can easily be customized
with other colors, fonts
and decors. Zeta is developed as an operating system that makes
use of a graphical user interface, but it also comes with a full
bash 2.0 shell for those who
feel more comfortable with working with a UNIX shell. Zeta takes
advantages of the long-established POSIX standard to guarantee that
Unix command-line applications can easily be ported. Hundreds of
POSIX utilities are included
with the OS, and many more are available on BeBits.
Zeta supports symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), and yellowTAB has
in Zeta's license no limitations on how many CPUs you are allowed
to have on your system when running Zeta. The operating system supports
up to 8 CPUs, and most of Zeta's applications are designed to take
full advantage of multiple processors. No additional tweaking required.
Plus, you can turn ON/OFF your CPUs on the fly with a click of a
button!
Zeta is an object-oriented operating system, in the way of client
/ server relations. The clients are usually applications and the
servers system objects. Example of servers are media_server, net_server
and the app_server. Another example on Zeta being object-oriented
is how it make use of data
translators. Data translators are objects that knows how to
read and write file formats, like psd, png, html and doc.
To make effective use of Zeta's multitasking and multithreading
capabilities, Zeta isn't limited to only one workspace
(virtual desktop). As you get used to have several applications
and windows open simultaneously, you will start spreading out your
work on to several desktops. Zeta allows you to have up to 32
virtual desktops. You can easily switch between the 12 first
of them, by making use the key combination Alt+Fx (for instance
Alt+F2 for workspace 2). Some applications can set a specific workspace
in it's preferences, which it will be running in by default. An
example of such an application is the e-mail client Beam.
Zeta uses the Be File System (BFS) as it is designed for high-bandwidth
media processing. The file system is 64 bit and can store files
that are petabytes big! The Be File System is a journaling file
system, which can best be described as a database. Zeta filetypes
are based on the Internet MIME-typing standard, and they can be
customized on a system wide basis, for individual files, or for
large groups of files. An example of an application making use of
attributes is yellowTAB's own developed Jukebox.
Zeta lets you do queries on those
attributes just like you would do queries to a real database. As
the attributes are indexed, the search results will be presented
lightning fast. As the file system is journaling the data integrity
is maximized, and you will not risk getting the file system corrupted
if your system goes down for one reason or another. You simply just
have to boot up your system again. No system integrity check or
desktop rebuild!
Zeta comes with a memory protection. All applications running on
Zeta runs in a protected memory area. This means that if one of
your running applications start misbehaving, it will not effect
any other running application or the system beneath it. You simply
just have to stop it and restart
it. Only data not saved within that application will be lost.
The great thing about Zeta is that it is so portable that you can
change your hardware, and Zeta will never ask you for drivers! If
the new hardware is supported, it will work out of the box. You
can even remove the hard drive that BeOS is installed, install it
to a completely different machine, and BeOS will boot like
nothing happened (provided that the new machine meets the hardware
comp. specs). Even if you have to install drivers for some reason,
just by copying the driver file to a directory will be enough most
of the times! Drag it, drop it, and that's it! You probably won't
even have to reboot!
To be able to make this user manual even better, yellowTAB needs
feedback from you as a user. We would like to hear from you, if
you find something wrong in the manual, something unclear or missing,
then send us a mail. Are there applications and features that we
should write about? We would also like feedback on the grammar and
spelling errors.
manuals@yellowtab.com
Lots of other documentation have been added to Zeta,
and can easily be accessed from the Deskbar:

Thank You for choosing Zeta as your operating system!
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