distributable "virtual" BeOS installation. The installer created a virtual BeOS image in a file on the host OS, and the computer could then boot into BeOS using a boot disk or via the installation of Bootman (the native BeOS boot manager.) Be Inc intended this release to be a taster and to draw users into buying the Professional edition, which was fully installable to a physical hard drive partition. Unfortunately, many users discovered that it was a trivial task to install the personal version to a real partition, and so Be Inc ultimately lost much of the sales potential for the product. Both YellowTab and Magnussoft learnt from this, and therefore did not offer a version of Zeta that could be installed without purchasing a license. German language – the Zeta initial builds and much of the packaging was geared towards a German-speaking audience. This was reduced in later versions, but the first few BETA releases and release candidates had many oddities where Zeta would fall back to German, no matter what locale was set. Version 1.0 of Zeta included a badly thought out activation component, which requires a code to be entered and authenticated via a remote server before the nag screen will stop and full functionality is restored. The nag is fairly easily circumvented by replacing the executable called with a stub executable, but the activation was incredibly poorly executed and often failed. The activation was removed by the 1.21 release. Cease of distribution A cease of distribution letter was posted by Magnussoft on 5 April 2007. See also Comparison of operating systems References External links ZETA 1.5 Review – Reviewed by Thom Holwerda for OSNews BeOS Proprietary operating systems