When the Zeta RC1 master was brought in for duplication, yellowTAB knew that there were some flaws in it. Because it would still be some time before RC1 was actually going to hit the customer's doormat because the CDs were still to be pressed and shipped out, they spent the time well in order to create Patch 1. IsComputerOn has had a sneak preview. Care to read more? (or read it in French or Japanese...)
NOTE: Eugenia of OSNews has the world premiere (read it here). I feel that both Eugenia and I shed some light on different aspects and that both are definitely worth a read. Patch 1 is a normal SoftwareValet Package exceeding a little over 5 megabytes. It offers two separate installations. Those who went for the Full installation when installing Zeta RC1 should choose the Standard Install, others are recommended to pick Minimal Install.
The patch updates several system processes such as the Tracker (it seems that its speed also has improved) and the Deskbar, but also comes with an entirely expanded and improved PersonalSettings preference panel, fixed and updated drivers, libraries and binary utilities (mv, dd, df, ls, mkdir, rm, rmdir, ...), as well as the most recent versions of BeBochs, People, Squeezer, TimeZliner and Vision.
The Zeta menu with QuickLaunch and SVG icons.
In addition it corrects the MIME types, increases the functionalities of QuickLaunch and installs several translators for among others markup languages and MS-Office formats. And talking about translators, the Japanese localization is nearly entirely ready and is also put into the patch, while I myself am still working hard to get the Dutch localization ready.
The updated Personal Settings and the newly added Apple theme.
Three new themes are included; "Apple", "WinXP" and "WinXP_Silver". The last two are replacements for already existing yet buggy themes. All three contain entirely new features. Dragging the sides now resizes the window, and dragging when holding down the shift-key down moves it. The scroll bars respond to mouse-over and mouse-down, and text in the title bar is shadowed.
Not all icons are in SVG yet...
However, most remarkable about the patch is the impressive list of SVG icons that already update the existing icons during the installation process. Unfortunately still not all icons are in SVG such as ZIP files and text files, but I'm sure those will also be replaced quite soon, especially now that SVG is also being used in the Zeta menu, as you can see on the screenshot below.
SVG icons are now also shown correctly in the Zeta menu.
The patch is installed in one or two minutes and requires a reboot because of the updates to the system. Seen all the issues Patch 1 resolves, it is well worth anyone's time to run it before starting to explore Zeta.
Added note: This review covers an earlier version of Patch 1 than the one that will be available for RC1 customers. The final patch may contain even a small amount of more additions.