BeTips.net

If your ESS ES1868-based card is silent after installing BeOS, don’t despair. You should be able to get the card working with the steps below.

1. Download the AudioDrive drivers from BeBits.
2. Go into Preferences | Devices and find the item „ISA PNP Devices“.
3. Under that item you should find some ESS- related entries.
4. Pop up the „Config“ dialog for every item in this entry and disable (by selecting corresponding „Disable“ item in configuration menu) „devices“ which have no IRQ & DMA allocated. You should end up with one or two devices active.
5. Install the drivers downloaded in step 1.

In BeOS 5, Be makes it much more difficult to accidentally delete important system files from the Tracker. Try deleting anything under the /boot/beos hierarchy and you’ll get a warning dialog requiring you to hold down the Shift key while pressing OK. However, this „idiot-proofing“ doesn’t extend to the BeOS shell.
If you want a similar level of protection when using the Terminal, try this:

cd /bin
chmod 555 *

Repeat for any directory in which you want overwrite protection. To delete things from this directory, you’ll now need to chmod them back to a user-accessible permission level.

The current (R5.03) version of Be’s RealPlayer has very limited network settings. Although it would be nice to be able to set how long to buffer before playing, you can’t.
A workaround is to: start the clip and start it playing. Then, as it begins buffering, pause it. Keep it paused and it will keep downloading the clip, buffering more and more. You can also do this again after you’ve been listening for a while.
Note : This is only effective for non-live feeds.

In Mail-It 3.0, there is a bug in the address book „type ahead“ search function. You should be able to type the first few letters of a person’s name, nickname, or comments, and have the set of displayed People files narrowed to just those that match those criteria. However, if you have a lot of People files without email addresses (100 of my 600 People files had no email addresses — these were relatives and old contacts that had been synched from my Palm long ago, which I kept around because the phone numbers and street addresses were still useful), those people will be shown as part of the found set, which can render address book searching nearly useless. In other words, a search like „hack“ (for Hacker) that should have shown four results was showing 104 results, which was not very helpful.
Here’s how I fixed the problem:

1. Close Mail-It.
2. Open /boot/home/people and sort your people files by email, so all the people files with blank email fields ones show up at the top. Drag this subset to a temporary folder.
3. Open a Terminal and cd to the temporary folder. Type:

    addattr META:email "foo" *

4. Back in the Tracker, drag these People files back into /boot/home/people.
5. Re-launch Mail-It and try address book searching again. All fixed.

In Mail-It 3.0, the number of unread messages in a folder doesn’t appear next to the folder name automatically, as it did in Mail-It 2.x. In 3.0, you get separate columns for read and unread counts.
However, these are probably not visible by default, as they’re positioned farther to the right, out of view. To control this, widen the folder list view until you see the two new columns, and drag them in so that they’re visible. To turn one or both of them on or off, click and hold the small widget in the column header for that view.

In Mail-It 3.0, you can replace the default mail folder icons with custom icons from any image. Right-click a folder and access its properties, then drop any image into the small blank box at the upper right. The 16×16 icon for that image will be used instead of the folder icon.
To remove the custom icon, select the small box in Properties and press Delete (Alt+X won’t work, as it does in FileTypes panels).

With beta 4 of DivX:) for BeOS, you no longer need a script to hear audio, and you now have access to a DivX:) encoder. However, the audio library you need to hear sound in DivX:) movies is not included in the distribution. Grab L3codeca.acm out of the package at:
http://pe rso.club-internet.fr/ches/dvd/divx/divx_3.11alpha.zip
and put it in ~/config/add-ons/media/decoders along with the other Windows libraries. Restart the media server (from the Media preferences panel), and you should hear sound with movies that have an MP3 or raw audio soundtrack.
To create DivX:) movies in BeOS, save them as AVIs from personalStudio, then use Be’s MediaConverter (but note that a Media Kit bug currently forces you to use Raw Audio rather than MP3).
Useful DivX information can be found in the DivX:) discussion forum. A DivX:) for BeOS forum can also be found there.

While Adamation’s personalStudio 1.5 does not include a title scroller by default, you can hack the effect fairly easily.
First, put your titles on a separate layer. Use the „Slide“ transition between your title clips, and make sure you’ve set an actual transition length (i.e. if you set the default transition length to 0 seconds in the preferences, change it to 2 or 3, or manually adjust the overlap between title clips).
To control the direction of the slide, select the transition in the storyboard and click the FX tab. Use the four directional arrows to alter the slide direction.
Using this technique, you can create a credit sequence where each credit „pushes“ the previous one out of the way from any direction, or keep them all running in the same direction. Hopefully an actual scroller will be present in a future version.

Typically, if you want to edit an icon (such as one you might find in a downloadable icon pack at BeBits), you need to access its FileType panel by right-clicking and selecting Add-Ons | FileType. While this isn’t terribly difficult (and you can always use the Alt+Opt+F shortcut), you can set things up so they launch in FileTypes with a quick double-click. Here’s how:

1. Open the system’s FileTypes preferences panel and select the „application“ supertype on the left.
2. Click Add… . For the Type Name, enter „Icon File“. For the internal name, enter „x-vnd.Icon“.
3. Close and re-open FileTypes. You’ll now find Application/Icon File in the hierarchy on the left. Select it.
4. In the Preferred Application section, click „Select“ and navigate to /boot/beos/preferences/FileTypes. BeOS will warn you that this may not be an appropriate association. Click „Set Anyway“.

Now when you double-click an icon file, FileTypes will launch, and a FileType panel for that icon will be launched in front of it. You can edit the icon by double-clicking in the icon well to bring up Icon-o-Matic.
Unfortunately, Icon-o-Matic cannot be launched as a seperate application, without going through FileTypes first.
Bonus tip: Once this is set up, you can also launch an icon in FileTypes by double-clicking an icon in a Get Info panel (select a file and tap Alt+I).

With R5, the Tracker gained a very useful feature that lets you see at a glance where you are in the filesystem. Tweaking this setting will enable display of full pathnames in Tracker title tabs, rather than just the current folder name.

To enable this feature, open the file /boot/home/config/settings/Tracker/TrackerSettings and change the line

ShowFullPathInTitleBar off

to

ShowFullPathInTitleBar on

After saving the file, you’ll have to restart the Tracker for the changes to take effect. This is important, because otherwise changes will be lost with a reboot. The easiest way is to invoke the Team Monitor by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL. There you kill the Tracker, activate the Team Monitor again, and press „Restart Desktop“ to restart Tracker and Deskbar.
Other tips dealing with the TrackerSettings file:
Bring back the Disks window
Mounting shares on the Desktop