BeTips.net

There are a few misconceptions about World O‘ Networking floating around out there.
First of all, you don’t need the WON setup tool itself to browse Windows shares — you can just use cifsmount or ezmount as described elsewhere on the Tip Server.
Second, to be able mount MS shares from BeOS, you don’t need to start da_hood or ksocketd. If you know the IP address and MS server and shared resource names, you can do this task using only cifsmount/ezmount.
Third, if you experience strange misbehaviour (100 % processor load, browsing errors etc.), try commenting out the ‚ksocketd‘ string in /boot/beos/system/boot/Netscript.

Using the „Scale to Fit“ option in the Backgrounds panel can result in images that don’t look as good as they could, and consumes a few additional system resources.
To speed things up, rescale your original images to a more managable size, using „Massive Picture Converter“ or The Awesome Resizer .
Both of these apps support batch conversions so you can mass-convert a gallery of artwork for use as backgrounds on different Workspaces, or for use with Cycler.
You can get some really nice background artwork from Propaganda, Digital Blasphemy, or resources.themes.org, or for more BeOS Specific Images, the BeNews Media Center.

The GoGo MP3 encoder may choke on certain types of WAV files, such as those sometimes generated by SoundRecorder. The solution is to pass gogo a header offset parameter of zero, i.e.

gogo input output -offset 0

To add Korean character and input support for BeOS there are a few things you need:
Korean Fonts
These are two fonts you can grab from ftp://cat1.snut.ac.kr/pub/BeOS/fon ts/: Cyberbit, which is a unicode font that will also allow you to read Japanese and Chinese fonts. Gulim-Che which is similar to the Haru Japanese font but with Korean characters. If you are only using Korean, than just download the Gulim-che font. It will be faster as it uses less memory. Expand it to your /boot/home/config/fonts/ttfonts directory.
You now have to change Font preferences and select Gulim-che for both normal and regular. I have yet to find a monospaced font for Japanese and Korean. Even Haru Regular which is monospaced doesn’t show up under the monotype font choices. Email me if you know of a CJK monospace font that is selectable.
Only applications that you open after this will have these new fonts. So you’ll have to close all applications (including, Deskbar and Tracker) and restart them for the font options to take effect.
Korean Input Method
You now need to get the Korean input method HanBe. There is an English readme so installation should be easy. I had a kernel debug screen come up on the first reboot, but that disappeared on the second reboot. It has not happened again so I’m crossing my fingers it was an isolated incident.
CJK Netpositive
Lucky for us, Takayuki Ito has patched Netpositive to allow it to read Chinese, Japanese and Korean pages.
Korean Text Editor You will now be able to type and read Korean in any UTF-8 unicode encoded document or email message. However a lot of Korean fonts are encoded in EUC_KR encoding. Fortunately, there is patched version of KEdit called HKEdit which supports this encoding.
Since you can now browse in Korean, you can browse the pages at the Korean BeOS user group BeKrage, for further info.

Next time you’re looking for a quick fix of BeDope, tap Ctrl+Alt+Shift+… in NetPositive. You’ll have to fill in the … part, because I’m not giving away the whole Easter Egg.
Hint — the rest of the key combo is obvious.

As of BeOS 5.01, you can grow or shrink a selection in the Tracker by holding down Alt while clicking. In other words, you can select a range of files without dragging, much as you would use the Shift key to select a range of files in Windows Explorer — select a file, hold down Alt, and select another file… all the files in between will be selected.
Stuart Adam (drake@madasafish.com) notes that you can still use Shift to select additional individual files that aren’t within the currenet selection range.
Note: This feature comes to you thanks to the OpenTracker project; 5.01 is the first BeOS release to include code changes from the open source community.

With BeOS 5.01, the Tracker gains the ability to get all Tracker windows out of the way simultaneously. Just hold down your Option key (right Ctrl or left Win on most keyboards) while double-clicking the title tab of a Tracker window. Great way to clean up your mess quickly.
You can also close all Tracker windows at once with Option-Command-W (Alt+Win+W). A future version of Tracker should also support this via the close button.
Note: These feature come to you thanks to Steve Klingsporn’s (steve@buzzlabs.com) contributions to the OpenTracker project; 5.01 is the first BeOS release to include code changes from the open source community.

There are many ways to edit, shorten, lengthen, move, and crop the beginnings or ends of video clips in Adamation’s personalStudio. While it’s possible to do some tasks by dragging clips around in the filmstrip, you’ll get the best performance, the most accuracy, and fastest edits by mastering the controls on the Clip Edit tab, which let you precisely control in-points and out-points for any selected clip.
While the functions of the Clip Edit tab are documented, its basic concepts may be unfamiliar if you haven’t done much NLE (non-linear editing) work before. Mastering the Clip Edit tab will make your work in personalStudio much easier and smoother.
Editing can be done either in Program mode or in Source mode. The latter lets you work with the clip as a piece of raw media, unencumbered by the rest of the project. Some of the Clip Edit controls are disabled when in Source mode, by logical necessity.
Each of the four main buttons specifies the type of action to be performed on the currently selected clip at the currently selected point in time.

		 Stretch
Clip Front			Clip Back
		  Shift

These are mode buttons, not action buttons. Clicking one of them does not cause anything to happen; it only sets a „state“ for personalStudio so it will know how to behave when you click one of the InPoint or OutPoint buttons, which do the actual moving, clipping, and trimming.

Time Shifting

Let’s say you want to move a clip backwards or forward in time. If you want to move it to a position after or before another clip on the same layer, drag it to the new relative position in the Storyboard. If you want to keep it between the same two clips but need it to start a few seconds earlier, do this:

1. Select the clip (either on the Storyboard or on the Filmstrip).
2. Scrub to the exact point in time where you want the clip to start.
3. In Clip Edit, click the lower button (the Shift button).
4. Click the In Point button to make the beginning of that clip equal the currently selected point in time.

If you want the clip to end rather than to begin at the selected time, click the Out Point button instead. This will cause the end of the selected clip to occur at the currently selected point in time.

Trim the Beginning or End of a Clip

1. Select the clip.
2. Find the point in the clip where the edit should end. In other words, scrub to the first frame of video after the stuff you want to delete. Use the Frame Forward button to inch forward one frame at a time until you find the exact spot.
3. Click the Clip Front button on the Clip Edit tab.
4. Click the In Point button. This tells personalStudio to make the current point in time the new beginning time for this clip. In other words, it deletes (or, rather, hides) everything that comes before the current time point.
5. Because you’ve clipped the front of a clip rather than the back, the newly created blank space is not automatically deleted. To correct for this, scrub to the last frame of the previous clip and use the Time Shifting technique above.

To trim the end of the clip, use the same technique but use the Clip Back and Out Point buttons instead.
The Stretch mode button in Clip Edit works with the same principles, but should be reserved for use with still images or titles. Stretching video requires interpolation of data and the results will not be good on your final rendering. However, you can get some interesting effects by shrinking video clips in Stretch mode (though the audio will get weird; you’ll want to mute the audio on that clip and overlay some other music or sound effect to compensate).

The CDBurner application is geared for burning audio CDs — just drag an audio file in any format known to the Media Kit (MP3, WAV, AIFF, etc.) into the burn window and go. Because CDBurner uses the Media Kit for this, it’s also capable of detecting the audio track in movie files. For example, try dragging a bunch of AVI movies into the burn window. The resulting audio CD will contain just the soundtracks from those movies (other movie formats should work as well).
If you want the actual movies, you’ll need to burn a data CD rather than an audio CD. Read Creating Data CDs at BeNews for more information.

There seems to be a good bit of confusion over the question of where to install applications under BeOS. For the most part, people disagree over whether to install 3rd-party apps under /boot/apps or under /boot/home/apps.
Unlike Windows, BeOS doesn’t care where your apps live, and you’re free to drag them to any location after installation without breaking them. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t recommended locations. If you read the tip The right way to find system paths you’ll find that the system preserves an internal list of „known locations“ for certain system objects, the home folder, preferences, and applications, and that you can learn these locations via the finddir command in conjunction with global constants defined in the Storage Kit. If you type:

finddir B_APPS_DIRECTORY

the shell returns:

/boot/apps

Note that this is distinct from:

finddir B_BEOS_APPS_DIRECTORY

which returns:

/boot/beos/apps

As savvy users know, BeOS maintains a distinction between user-level and system-level paths throughout the system. However, part of the confusion stems from the fact that many users are confused over which directories belong to the system and which belong to the user. As you know, the home folder and its subdirectories belong to you, and Be promises never to mess with them. However, this doesn’t mean that home is the only folder you’re allowed to touch. In truth, the system owns the /boot/beos hierarchy, and you own everything else. This means that, contrary to popular belief, /boot/apps is indeed a user-level directory.
Note also that when you download a SoftwareValet package, the default location of the installation points to /boot/apps, since it’s using the B_APPS_DIRECTORY constant to find the location. This is further evidence that Be considers /boot/apps (or a subdirectory hierarchy you create below that folder) to be the preferred location for 3rd-party / user-level applications.
There’s another good reason not to store your apps under the /boot/home hierarchy: BeOS may one day go multi-user, at which point your home folder will not be accessible to other users logged onto your system. Since you probably want to have your apps available to all users of your system, you want them to live in a shared location not specific to any particular user. Of course, that’s fairly academic, since BeOS isn’t currently multi-user and if/when it ever does become so, you’ll be able to drag your apps to a new location without breaking them, but it’s worth considering. I also personally think its cleaner to use the home folder for data and to keep the apps separate, for the same kind of reason you wouldn’t install applications under C:My Documents in Windows.
Conclusion: Yes, of course you’re free to install your apps wherever you want. But in the controversy over where one should install them, I believe that /boot/apps is the better choice. It’s defined as the preferred location in a system-wide global constant, SoftwareValet points to that location, it’s multiuser-safe, and it keeps your apps and your data clearly separated.