Zeta Oddities

Lets ignore that Zeta's ever existence was quite odd!

I recently recovered a HP xw4600 workstation from the WEEE cage in work (well, I just didn't put it in instead) with the intention of trying to beat BeOS R5 on to it. 

This machine is from 2009, which is very new for R5, but many of us were still using R5 in 2006 on contemporary hardware so its not too much of a stretch. But R5 definitely won't work out of the box - SSE2 processors seem to cause some trouble that requires kernel patching, the dual 3Ghz CPUs will cause severe clock problems without a further fiddling; and the 4GB of RAM will stop booting without a hacked bootloader to limit visible RAM. And I sort of need a decently working BeOS system to actually build such an image from in the first place.

So, to Zeta. I've got a "legit" - as in its a real CD - copy of this which I was given by magnussoft in return for building VLC for Zeta; but I can't find it. ISOs are not hard to find. 

Its from 2007, so might work. I believe it has an AHCI driver, but just to be sure, I set the machine to IDE emulation, and was able to boot and install the OS.

But my wireless mice are not properly recognised. The buttons work, ish, but moving the mouse just flies the cursor up to the top right hand corner. And the only (non ADB) mice I have are Logitech wireless mice; so whatever is wrong with one is wrong with all of them.

Also, it crashes if I insert the wireless receiver after boot, and under any circumstances it gets slower and slooowwweeeer and sloooooooooooowwwwwwwwweeeeeeeer until eventually stopping responding. This doesn't seem to happen with the receiver unplugged. 

But this is 1.21 - the last version was 1.5.1. Lets give that a try! Having used my very last blank CD burning the Zeta 1.21 image, the updater ISO had to go across as an ISO on a USB key, which initially hung the entire system on insertion... but could be got on eventually. 1.5 installed, but the mouse still doesn't work - and its near impossible to even past its login screen without a mouse. 

1.5.1 was then installed... and broke the entire instance. It looks like the on-boot patching of libbe is the problem; but as the Zeta installer has (probably deliberately) broken live-CD functions, that's not fixable without a reinstall or some other booting OS with BFS write support... Haiku should work come to think of it.

Anyway, I'm fairly sure there were no changes to the USB stack in any way after 1.21, indeed most of the big leap in modern technology support (big RAM, faster CPUs, USB2, AHCI) over Dano was exceptionally early in the products life;with bundled apps, multiuser and multi-language support taking priority after that

This is when I remembered that my BeOS laptop has a burner and more than enough storage to hack together an image to burn. Lets try conventional R5, with the few changes, once I get some more CDRs. And a PS/2 mouse and keyboard, I guess - the machine has the ports. I might go buy the cheapest wired mouse in Tesco and give Zeta a final go though.

Update: It also doesn't seem to work with the Broadcom onboard NIC - it sees it, but never gets an IP.