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My Realtek 8139 based card was detected flawlessly and I was online in under a minute after creating a profile, typing in my network settings, etc. I get the feeling there are far more network drivers bundled with ZETA than ever and this is a good thing. There were no speed issues or lockups as reported by early BONE testers. It just works.
My Creative Labs Audigy2 Platinum does not work with ZETA 1.0. Even though it does show up in the Media preferences I was unable to produce any meaningful sound out of it. The Media Kit seems to know all about the card, what ports and features it has, but no amount of tweaking to the various settings would produce meaningful sound other than an empty hiss heard when toggling the Line-In input mute box. So much for the MediaOS. I was quite disappointed and I feel this has tainted slightly my review experience, unfortunately.
Thanks to Rudolf Cornelissen's excellent driver my NVidia GeForce 4 MX440 64MB worked flawlessly, including video overlay support with VLC when playing movies. Nothing odd to report here.
This time around USB support has improved to the point that any usb thumbdrive I inserted into the machine showed up fine. One of the usb "mp3" drives I tested also has what they label as "encrypted mode" where you can lock the device in Windows using a password utility supplied with the device and it will not unlock unless the proper password is entered. Locking the device in Windows and then inserting it into ZETA had an effect alright.
The device no longer appeared in the mount submenu nor could I mount it manually. I suppose that is neat but I was a bit dissapointed. I thought perhaps ZETA might ignore the locked mode and allow me to see it anyhow. Too bad. :(
Printing support is greatly improved. There must be a couple hundred printers I could add to ZETA and since I had an HP LaserJet 4000 handy I tested it. Success! It took me all of 30 seconds to physically hook up the printer, choose from the add printer menu, and fire off a test page. The ZETA printer test page is not highly informative however. I would have expected to see at least the printer name and model listed, along with a date/time stamp, and perhaps even the version of CUPS installed.
The test page consists of three groups of star shapes along with text for each group to the effect: "If your printer is color and has a working CMYK print cartridge, you should be able to see cyan, magenta, yellow and black below:", etc. A little odd wording, I think. Doesn't the printing system already know if my printer is capable of color or not? All I'm saying here is the print test page could use a little more information, and be a little smarter about it.
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