Choulth has posted the first part of his own user-side Zeta review on his Zetablog. Unfortunately it's only in German, so that's why for everyone's pleasure I have attempted to translate the review at the best of my abilities. Check read more for the entire scoop.

Talking about reviews anyway, Fran?ois mmu_man Revol wrote a BeGeistert review in English, which you can read over here. English translation of Choulth's Zeta review, part 1. I give no guarantees on whether everything has been translated correctly, but I think it's pretty good.

Hands on Zeta, part 1

My site is called Zetablog because it's the weblog of a Zeta user. After a small phase of using and orienting, first with a fairly general over view, then followed by smaller and more in-depth daily writings.

Installation
The installation already happened at BeGeistert, last Saturday. On my system it had a few problems during installation. How come, I can't really say, others had no problems at all, although from one guy I knew he couldn't install because he was using an USB mouse.

In total I have installed, or let's say tried to install, Zeta about 6 times before I realized that it was totally unnecessary because the installation stops after some 70%, and just resumes after some time. Pretty funny behaviour, I'd say.

The Installer in itself is awesome. One can install several default combinations, for example minimal, internet-ready, and of course the full installation, but also selecting and deselecting categories and individual applications is possible. The installation lasts in between 5 and 20 minutes.

When the applications have been installed, the MIME-types are being registered. Here there are still a few flaws, such as ZIP-files that aren't recognized automaticallyby the system. That error shouldn't be difficult to fix.

The system
The ready installed system is typically BeOS, and anyone would feel right at home. All applications are neatly ordened in the Zeta menu by category - ah that's how I like it, I always had to that manually with all of Zeta's predecessors.

Since I had already selected German as default language, the entire system was naturally in German, including Zeta-native applications like JukeBox, ZumL and TimeLiner. Other applications without localization are of course still in English.

First positive impressions:
* The SVG-Tracker is hot
* The USB stack works immediately, my USB ZIP-drive even turns on
* The themes for Zeta are lovely to see - that's no bloatware, that is just a good enhancement of a custom desktop
* The wallpapers of several DeBUG menbers are also extremely cool, kudos to Elwood and co.
* It's stable, just because of a problem with the driver for Intel network cards I ended up 2 times in Kernel Debugging Land (KDL)
* Fantastic choice of sofware. Obviously some of them are from BeBits, but this saves newbies lots of downloading and searching - and these applications are mostly just stable

First negative impressions:
* The used driver for my TNT2 Ultra video card causes flickering lines at higher resolutions
* The amuxki-driver [ed. note: huh?] initially doesn't work. I posted the solution on DeBUG, but according to Bernd the problem has already been solved
* A few links in the Zeta menu are dead

One or two other matters I summarized in a Gobe Productive file, which goes to yellowTAB in the next few days. The second part of this "Zeta Exploration Review" will also contain a few screenshots.