YellowTab has been developing Zeta (beos but without the name). I haven't played with it nor have I heard anything about it other than that they are working on it. I think there are some other opensource projects underway as well. My guess is, just like the beloved Amiga, Beos is dead and those still working on it don't realize the corpse is cold already. Arg, now i brought up Amiga <reminisces>
I checked out Zeta. Found a LiveCD for version 1.1 (1.2 is most current, but no LiveCD). I wasn't overly impressed, just a little nostalgic.
But it got me to reading and researching and I came up with something much better, the Haiku project (
http://haiku-os.org/learn.php), an open source revival/recreation of BeOS R5. I downloaded the latest nightly build and was able to run it in VMWare with some help from the
Haiku wiki. Because it was a VM, there wasn't any hardware acceleration (killing a lot of the media experience that BeOS is so known for), but still, it gives me hope that I'll be able to use BeOS again in some capacity in the not too distant future.
*tear* Be....we've missed you....