Ah, the work of a news editor is never done... yellowTab has just published an array of news, and two of them in particular will interest the end-users.

First, and something that you've all been waiting for, RC1 has gone into production. The master has been sent to the press works and duplication is ongoing.

Second, and this is great business news, the German and English schools in Argentina will from now on provide it's students with Zeta to work on. yT's CEO Torsten Linde had this to say: "We're very excited about this. There has always been tremendous interest in BeOS and Zeta in Latin America where it seems people are more open to new things. As a result every pupil at the participating schools will have individual access to a computer running Zeta. This is pretty amazing considering that in Germany pupils quite often have to sit two or three to a computer.". This is great news indeed.

Last but definitely not least, Paragon Software's Partition Manager is being ported to Zeta under a recent agreement between the two companies. They will bring BFS support onto a commercial partition manager, something that hasn't happened since the SE of Partition Magic some years ago. Paragon will also distribute Zeta in Russia and the CIS.

So as you see, a very good news mix. yellowTab and it's members have been working hard at it, and these deals are another proof of that.
Thanks to Jason for the mail about this one, and since I never stop working (poor me), I just had to write about it.

BeDoper's parent company "404" is now releasing all of their software and hardware under the Nethack General Public License.

One interesting item is the Vickie arcade... So if you're interested, click the link above to read it all.
Over the years, several Be UserGroups, or BUGs, have popped up of which some are still alive and are perhaps even stronger than ever, some have disappeared, and a couple of others just more or less went into a coma, and in some cases are getting a wakeup call again. Curiously enough, most of the existing usergroups have no clue of what the other usergroups are up to. And that's a bugger. Time to do something about that and do a series of articles about some of the BUGs out there. Starting off with Italy (click on read more below)

This year, Frans van Nispen and his pregnant girlfriend (due exactly on my birthday!) were at BeGeistert again, and now that Refraction is starting to look very smooth, Frans held a presentation about it. I assume you have seen screenshots of Refraction or at least heard about it before (if not, head over to the website of Frans' company Xentronix right away). The version of Refraction in the presentation was already newer than the most recent beta available for those who already bought Refraction.

Hit read more to also read a short Q&A I did with Frans during BeGeistert.

As you all know I have been to BeGeistert last weekend (if you didn't yet know, scroll down to the review). This meant I wasn't able to bring you news updates. Well, here they are. So many things happened or were announced this past weekend that even Eugenia did a small news update on OSNews about the recent developments around BeOS.

"BeGeistert isn't structured but very nice to be. I think that's because the BeOS users are originally people from the creative side, graphics and music and stuff, and those people aren't very organised. In comparison, the majority of FreeBSD convention visitors are system administrators and are much more routined and very much on their own," a first-time visitor to the event replied to my question how he liked it around there. It wasn't really possible getting you some info straight from BeGeistert, so here is what's been going on at BeGeistert in a nutshell.

Apart from this review I will post a few interviews I performed at BeGeistert. Unfortunately, Nicholas Blachford wasn't there this time, since I wanted to ask him a few small questions about it. They were basically answered by Axel D?rfler when he showed his OpenBeOS-PPC port as far as it booted.

In case you've ever been wanting a BeBox, here's your chance to bid on it at eBay (click link to go there). BeBoxes are extremely popular since there aren't many about (only about 1800 in various types and revisions), in specific not the 200 mHz ones, of which one was sold, also eBay, not so very long ago for US $2,080.55. Still, the 67 mHz and 133 mHz versions are being sold for quite some money just the same.
Wow, after an increased number of votes, the results of the previous poll are a bit curious, and only 2 answers got a real lot of votes. Catherine Zeta Jones was of course the absolute winner (she's cute... it must be in the name), but SHEEP!?!? I mean, is yellowTAB supposed to have a yellow-sprayed sheep the same way Milka has a purple-painted cow? Should they hand out a free yellow wool jersey when you buy Zeta RC1?

Obviously, it was hard beating the previous polls, but this idea was born today in front of the central train station of D?sseldorf while we were getting ready to leave after BeGeistert, and I think it can proudly stand beside the previous polls held. Thanks to Ithamar and mmu_man for their share in this.
Nicholas Blachford already announced a successor to the Pegasos boards to be under way at BeGeistert 010 half a year ago, but at that time he was unable to reveal too much about its features. He did come with the news that a PowerPC port of OpenBeOS for the Pegasos II is under way.

A little over a week ago, IBM already published the specs of the Pegasos II, and now Genesi themselves opened up and officially introduced the Pegasos II, which comes shipped with the operating systems MorphOS and Debian GNU/Linux.

A remarkable fact is that this announcement is done right before BeGeistert is held, so I would not be surprised if Nicholas Blachford is going to say more on this subject the coming weekend.
3sat will Monday 20th October - 21.30 present yellowTAB's operating system Zeta, on their popular TV program about computer technology called neues. computer und mehr.

3sat will bring their viewers a short presentation of Zeta and yellowTAB's computers.