BeTips.net

WindowsME does not allow Real Mode DOS execution. Therefore, in order to successfully run BeOS 5 Personal Edition with WinME, you must create a BeOS boot disk.
The same applies for Windows NT4/2000/XP. To create a new boot disk, insert a fresh floppy and run c:/beos/CreateBootFloppy.exe. When the process is complete, reboot your machine with the floppy in its drive.
If you already have a working BeOS partition elsewhere, you can run makebootfloppy from within BeOS rather than the Windows equivalent.

If you hold down the Windows key (Option on the Mac) while doing an Identify in Tracker, you will force the re-identification of the file(s).
This means that the system’s sniffer rules will be used to reset the file’s type – a process which includes examing the file’s extension (if any) or examing the first few lines of the file for known header data.

This tip augments the tip Change Your Icons. That tip is for changing individual icons (including folder icons). This is a special tip for changing your folder icons system-wide.
Select your new Icon, right click on it and navigate to Add-Ons | Filetype. Leave the FileType window open.
In Tracker, navigate to /boot/beos/system/Tracker and open its FileType add-on.
In the Tracker’s Supported Types list, select the Folder entry.
Drag the image from your new icon’s icon well into the Tracker’s Folder icon icon well. Hit Alt+S to save and enjoy!

In Lotus 123 and Excel you can edit the contents of a cell after pressing F2. The Gobe Productive Programmers have been raised on MacOS and BeOS, so this keystroke is not present. However, there is an alternative:
The keyboard shortcut for editing a cell is right-control (option) + arrow left or arrow right for the beginning and ending of the cell respectively.

So you want to hack up a quick script that will, for example, clear your NetPositive cache and history, delete all those temporary buffers that vi leaves around, and best of all, empty the Trash.
On first thought, you might think this would be a simple task, just:

rm -rf /boot/home/Desktop/Trash/*

Right? Right? Wrong!
There are two reasons why that won’t cut the mustard. First, if you have trash originating from more than one volume, only the trash coming from your boot volume will actually be deleted. Secondly, you won’t get any visual indication of the emptying process, like you would if you were to empty your Trash via Tracker.
So, you might get fancy and whip this out from your little bag of tricks:

 ugly=`find /*/home/Desktop/Trash -path /boot/home/Desktop/Trash - prune -o -maxdepth 0 -printf '%p/* %p/.[^.]* '`
rm -rf $ugly 

Well, that will get rid of one of your problems, but you’re still not going to have any visual indication of the emptying process.
Hey! Why not tell Tracker to just empty the Trash for you:

hey Tracker 'PDEL' of Trash

That’ll do ya. So the answer is deceptively simple. All you have to do is tell Tracker to empty the Trash, just as you’d do it directly from the Tracker itself. Gotta love those BMessages.

In 3dMixer, when you look at the mixer view (the 3dview), you can hit + and – to zoom in and out. You can also press P to toggle a particle animation on and off. Press D to get the 3D model to auto-rotate.

Interested in making a raw CD image or ISOunder BeOS? The easiest way to do so is by using Burn-It Now, a visual application. However, you can also create ISOimages via the Terminal with a little command called cat, which allows you to view the contents of any file and includes a few other little-known functions.
First open a terminal and cd to /dev/disk. Under disk their are three directories called scsi, virtual, and ide. This is where knowledge of your system hardware has to come in. Here is an example of creating an ISO from a CD-ROM drive connected to the primary ide channel as a slave device:

cat /dev/disk/ide/ata/0/slave/0/raw > ~/mycd.iso

As you can see, /ata is the IDE controller that the CD-ROM is connected to. After ata the directory under it 0 is the physical channel the CD-ROM is attached to. If your CD-ROM were connected to the secondary channel, then 1 would be used instead of 0. Slave is pretty much self-explanatory, but again, if the CD-ROM is the master on the chain then master would be used instead of slave. After slave comes 0 again and if I am correct 0 is the actual CD-ROM drive.
Finally, raw is the raw data in binary form on the cd. The output of the command is redirected to another file via the little arrow in the command above — in this case we output to mycd.iso under our home directory.
For SCSI users it is pretty much the same, e.g.

cat /dev/disk/SCSI/0/6/0/raw > /boot/home/mycd.ISO

is for a CD-ROM drive connected to the primary SCSI controller 0, set to id 6 on the chain with device name „0“.
In order to burn this ISO to CD, you have to use cdrecord which is covered in another tip. cat is a very powerful command and can do some damage if you experiment with it without caution. cat will overwrite disk partitions, which can be good or bad. I used cat to back up a 4MB Linux ext2 file system on an IA flash disk. I could then easily restore the Linux partition whenever I wanted to return the device back to normal operation.

If you have a Gigabyte GA-7ZX motherboard and the on-board AC97 audio seems „choppy,“ try setting the „real time“ option to ON in the Media preferences panel.
This should also work for other motherboards utilizing this audio chipset.

Archive types that are unsupported by Expander can easily be added. Three such examples are bzip2 (.bz2), lha (.lha,.lzh), and xbin (.hqx) or for .arj and .rar.
First add the following rules to /boot/home/config/etc/expander.rules:

"application/mac-binhex40"    .hqx     "xbin -l %s"
"xbin -v %s"
"application/bzip2"     .bz2     "bzip2 -dc %s | tar -tvf -"
"bzip2 -dc %s | tar -xvf -"
"application/x-lharc"    .lha     "lha l %s"
"lha x %s"
"application/x-lzh"      .lzh     "lha l
%s"
"lha x %s"

Now launch the File Types preference panel and add these file types to the application group if they haven’t been already. Come up with a type name such as „bzip2 archive,“ then add the internal name which is the part after „application/“ — in this case use „bzip2“.
Now, open the Expander executable with FileTypes and add them to its list of supported types. Save your changes and go back to your new types in File Types and make Expander the preferred application for them.

You can paste into any Terminal window simply by right-clicking. If you just typed a big string of commands and want to repeat one of them, scroll up in the Terminal window (Shift+Page Up also works), select the text you want to reproduce, and right-click on it. It will appear at the right of the prompt.