To print in BeOS 4.5 or above using an unsupported printer, download BePrinter at:
http://www.bebits.com/app/861
OR
http://webhom e.idirect.com/~earlcp/Downloads/BePrinter.zip
BePrinter will allow you to print text files directly to your printer port without the need for BeOS‘ printer drivers. In the future, the ability to print images will be implemented (at the time of tip submission, BePrinter was at version 0.030).
After creating a CDBurner project file, you may want to print a track list — say, for an audio CD jewel case cover. CDBurner does not offer a text export option, but you can jimmy the text strings out of the project file manually with a little careful work in Terminal, by using the strings command.
strings examines binary files and sends all text strings buried within to stdout. Because there are more strings in a Burner project file than just the paths to the tracks, you’ll have to do some footwork to strip the results down to just what you want.
Let’s say you’ve got a CDBurner project file called „Cornbread.“ Open a Terminal in the directory where Cornbread lives, and type (or paste):
strings Cornbread | grep -A1 ^path | sed s@path.*@@g | sed s@--@@g | sed s@/.*/@@g > ~/cornbread
This will output a text file called „cornbread“ in your home folder. There are probably much better ways to go about this. If you have a better grep/sed string to accomplish the same job, please submit it.
If you want to apply a custom layout of attributes and sort orders to existing folders that currently have generic layouts, you’ll need some query templates — one for each filetype you want a custom Tracker layout for.
By default, you should have several of these installed already — take a look in ~/config/settings/Tracker/DefaultQueryTemplates. Some applications also install new folder templates — for example, RipEnc installs a folder template for MP3 files.
Once you’re happy with your layout, you’ll need a quick way to apply that layout to any folder, which involves copying the attributes of the template folder to the target folder with the copyattr command. Add something like this to your ~/.profile:
alias mpt="copyattr ~/config/settings/Tracker/DefaultQueryTemplates/audio_x-mpeg"
Now, make sure the target folder is closed and cd to the directory one level above the target. For example, if you want to apply your MP3 template to /boot/home/data/MP3/artists/H/Humperdink, then close Humperdink and cd to /boot/home/data/MP3/artists/H. The easiest way to do this is to use a tool like Summon or TermHire, which let you open a Terminal in that folder from the Tracker. Now just type:
mpt Humperdink
When you double-click Humperdink, it will have inherited the layout of your MP3 folder template. You can make aliases for as many Tracker templates as you have installed.
The Sounds preferences panel (Be Menu | Preferences | Sounds) lets you control whether or not sounds are associated with common system events, like when your computer starts up, for instance.
A very underused feature of this scheme is the ability of developers to add custom sound events for their applications, and to have them be configurable by the user.
The question is, what happens if you download program x, it adds a huge array of custom sound events, and you decide to delete the program? You’re left with a bunch of sound events listed in the Sounds preferences panel that you have no use for. It makes for a rather ugly looking and confusing preferences panel.
This is where ‚installsound‘ comes in. installsound is a Be-supplied command line application located in /boot/beos/bin that will add, list, test, clear, and remove sound events from the Sounds preferences panel. To remove sound events, open a Terminal and type:
installsound --remove eventname
So one may type:
installsound --remove "New E-mail"
for example. The offending sound events will be immediately nullified!
One of the long-lasting traditions with every successive release of the BeOS is the sample code archive (/boot/optional/sample-code). It’s a collection of feature-light, but nevertheless useful programs and pieces of code that developers are free to learn from, or to incorporate into their applications.
Note that if you’re using BeOS Personal Edition, you’ll need to download the sample code separately.
New in R5 Pro’s sample-code archive is the ability to compile all of the individual sample-code projects at once. To compile everything at once, fire up a Terminal and issue the following command (all on one line):
/bin/sh -c „cd /boot/optional/sample-code ; cp makefile.all makefile ; make ; rm makefile“
Let it grind for a while, and voila! You’ve now compiled every individual project. To make everything on a version of BeOS older than R5, you can simply create a text file called ‚makefile‘ in /boot/optional/sample-code, containing the following:
SUBDIRS = folder1 folder2 folder3 folder4 default .DEFAULT : -@for f in $(SUBDIRS) ; do $(MAKE) -C $$f -f makefile.all $@; done
Where folder1 is the name of the first folder that contains sample- code projects, folder2 the second, and so on… After you’ve done this, simply type the following into a Terminal to compile everything:
/bin/sh -c "cd /boot/optional/sample-code ; make"
Richard Burgess‘ implementation of NAT (http://www.rickb.com/software/) for BeOS is a standby for anyone sharing their BeOS machine’s Internet connection with other machines on a LAN.
If you’d like to run a server (web, telnet, ftp, etc.) on a machine within a LAN that has its link to the Internet through a BeOS machine running NAT, you can set up Static Port Mapping. Static Port Mapping forwards packets received on a given port to any machine on your LAN. Read the NAT documentation on how to set this up.
What is not covered in the documentation is how set up Static Port Mapping so that (for example) incoming requests on port 8080 are forwarded to a machine on port 80. This is useful (for instance) if you’re already running a web server on your BeOS machine, but you also want external access to a web server on a machine within your LAN. Ports cannot have more than one application controlling them, so you must enable this workaround.
To enable this workaround, you must first set up Static Port Mapping via NAT’s GUI configuration tool, using the port you want open on the BeOS machine as the port. The address is the machine on your LAN that you want the packets to be forwarded to.
Next, open up /boot/home/config/settings/network in a text editor. Toward the bottom should be a block containing NAT’s configuration. It should look something like this:
nat: PORT_MAP0 = 80-80:192.168.0.2:80:3
There should be a block of information above the PORT_MAPX field(s), we’re only interested in the PORT_MAPX fields though.
After you’ve made your changes, save the file. Then restart networking.
You can have the title bar of your Terminal session always report the current working directory. For example, if the current directory is /boot/home/Words, it will say that in the Terminal session’s title tab. Just add the following function to your /boot/home/.profile:
function path_title()
{
echo -en "33]2;`pwd`07"
}
PROMPT_COMMAND=path_title
Open a new Terminal and try cd’ing around to see how it works.
Peter Folk (pfolk@gargtech.com) adds: The command from this tip wasn’t correctly quoted, so it didn’t make it through the HTML system. The correct command is below:
echo -en '\\033]2;TextInTitle\\007'
After installing/upgrading Windows, you’ll lose bootman. To get back into BeOS, you typically need a BeOS CD or boot floppy (once booted, just re-run „bootman“). If you don’t have a CD or boot floppy, this technique will get you back in business.
Command Prompt Only“ C:/> FDISK
Set active partition
$ bootman You can use this trick on most OSes that can set other partitions as active. You can use this technique from DOS 2.x on. I also believe you can use this method with WinNT, OS/2, and linux with their versions of fdisk.
While there is an application on BeBits for voice communication over the Internet, it seems to crash often. We have found another possible solution for voice communication trough the web.
First, set up SoundPlay to broadcast an audio stream. Recommended settings for lame are
lame -b 16 -m m -x -r - -
Enable the stream to receive clients.
Next, set up the microphone: open the URL requester and type „input://“ instead of a URL, then hit the Play button and your one way stream is ready. The other party must set up the same setting as you have. Now each of you can connect with MediaPlayer or CL Amp to the other IP adress or domain name, as applicable.
It is even possable to create a meeting environment with several people at the same time — just open more MediaPlayers to connect to others.
Happy talking!
A helpful Be engineer provides the following information:
As of BeOS 5.03, there are two SB128 issues. One is that the sound „crackles“ after some time and you need to restart the media server. This should be fixed in a future release of BeOS.
The other issue is that models 4750 (and possibly 4810) don’t make any sound at all. It appears that, at least for the 4810, booting into Windows first kicks it into a mode where it works. SB 128 model 5803 has been reported as working.
Also, there are some VIA-based AMD motherboards for Athlon and the newer AMD CPUs, which don’t produce sound at all, even if the same sound card may work on a different motherboard or an Intel-based chipset one.