If you’re having trouble getting your supported printer to work in BeOS, enter your system’s BIOS and make sure the parallel port is set to „ECP.“ As of BeOS 5, only ECP mode is supported; other modes were shown to be too unreliable.
In NetPositive 2.2, you can grab any non-linked section of a web page with your middle mouse button and drag the page up or down, side-to-side, much as you can with Adobe Acrobat. If you find a web page that’s both taller and wider than the current window, you can actually drag pages diagonally through the window with a single motion.
One of the great things about surfing with NetPositive is that it’s so easy to open links in a new window — just click with the middle mouse buttton or mouse wheel. Unfortunately, Opera does not offer this great usability feature (well, not without right-clicking and navigating the context menu). It does, however, come close — just hold down left Ctrl+Shift while clicking a link to open that link in a new window.
Because BeOS may one day go multi-user, and because it’s possible for users to hack BeOS into custom configurations, and for a variety of other reasons, it’s a bad idea to hard-code system paths such as /boot/home or /boot/beos/bin. BeOS provides a mechanism that will identify the proper directory for any given purpose. These directories are stored in the Storage Kit, and can be located from the shell with the finddir command.
You’ll find a complete list of „magic names“ in the Global Constants and Defined Types section of the BeBook (see the „Directories“ section). For example, one of the defined names is „B_BEOS_SYSTEM_DIRECTORY“. If you open a Terminal and type:
finddir B_BEOS_SYSTEM_DIRECTORY
the shell returns:
/boot/beos/system
If you type:
finddir B_COMMON_ADDONS_DIRECTORY
the shell returns:
/boot/home/config/add-ons
and so on. So the right way to find the user’s home directory from within a script would be something like:
UserHome=$(finddir B_USER_DIRECTORY)
The value of $UserHome on most systems will then be /boot/home, but the script won’t break in the future if things move around.
Because BeOS 5 has an MP3 decoder built into the operating system, you can do cool things like dragging MP3s directly into CDBurner without decoding them to WAV or AIFF first (see screenshot). This makes it incredibly easy to make custom audio CDs from your existing MP3 collection.
But as you’ve probably discovered before, original CDs are recorded at varying levels. When you create a mixed CD, you find that the volume changes from one track to the next. Annoying. To fix this, select a track in CDBurner and adjust the Gain slider. You can use the Preview function to hear how the track’s volume now sounds relative to the previous or next track.
You can also adjust fade-in / fade-out lengths by using the red draggers in the lower part of the window, or enter them numerically into the right fields. Note, however, that some users have experienced static on the resulting CD when using the fade sliders in BeOS 5. Hopefully this bug will be fixed in a future release.
Joachim Seemer ( J.Seemer@gmx.de) adds:
Another great way to level the volume of a bunch of tracks is the commandline program BeNormal. This app, however, only works on WAV files.
If you pull down File | About in CDBurner, you’ll see a list of burners known to work in BeOS (i.e. tested by Be or their partners). However, user reports show that CDBurner actually works with a much wider range of drives — anything MMC3-compliant may work. In general, this probably means that anything on the support list for the *nix cdrecord application may work. Click here to see if your burner is on the cdrecord list.
However, note that cdrecord also supports drives that aren’t necessarily MMC-3 compliant. Therefore, you know that a drive that works with CDBurner will also work with cdrecord. The converse, unfortunately, is not necessarily true. The absolute best burner compatibility list is hosted at the BeOS Journal — see http://www.beosjournal.com /BIAcdburners.shtml.
If you get an error message from CDBurner that looks something like:
error: cannot read write cache page 05:24:00
then the drive manufacturer had an unusual idea of what „MMC3-compliant“ means. You may want to try Marcus Overhagen’s CDManager instead. No guarantees, but worth a shot.
Tyler Riti (fizzboy@mail.utexas.edu) contributed to this tip.
Many new BeOS users complain that they’re able to make a dial-up connection, but that they can’t access any web sites, check email, etc. This is a dead give-away of a DNS resolution problem.
According to Be’s tech support team, 3 out of 4 PPP connection problems are resolved by telling people to manually enter the DNS server address in the Dial-Up Networking panel. Apparently, Windows is able to retrieve DNS addresses automatically from some ISPs (I wasn’t even aware of this; I always entered them manually in Windows as well). People are so accustomed to having Windows do this for them that it never occurs to them that they might need to enter DNS server addresses manually.
Check your ISP’s web site or call their tech support team to ask for the IP addresses of their DNS servers. This information should also be present on any sign-up sheets you received when you got your account with them.
If you have a cable modem setup (such as @Home chello, etc.), you may or may not have trouble getting online in BeOS, depending on how they set you up (you must also have a BeOS-compatible network card, of course). First, try setting up your connection with DHCP enabled in Network prefs. Theoretically, that should work, though there are multiple flavors of DHCP, and not all of them work with BeOS.
If DHCP isn’t working for you under BeOS, try calling your ISP’s tech support and asking for a static address. You’ll need to obtain this information and enter it into Network preferences:
If they won’t give you a static address, you can grab your current dynamically assigned address from within Windows by opening a DOS window and typing:
IPCONFIG /ALL
Copy the IP address and use it in BeOS. It should be valid for a few days, until the DHCP lease expires. With some providers, the lease will expire after a day or two of non-use, so if you’re online every day, you may never have to reconfigure.
[Editor’s note: This trick works with the Trash too, and presumably any system icon — to change your Trash icon, open the Tracker in QuickRes and drag icons from other FileTypes panels into the QuickRes icon editor.]
BeOS R5 comes with a programmer’s resource editing tool called „QuickRes“ (/boot/develop/tools/experimental/QuickRes). After experimenting with it a bit, I noticed that opening certain system files revealed many familiar icons.
In order to change the BeOS logo on the Deskbar…
/boot/beos/system/Deskbar).
/boot/beos/system/Deskbar and choose „Open With…“ | QuickRes.
With a little work, you’ll be able to make a custom icon to show all your friends!
If you make changes to environment variables in scripts such as ~/config/UserSetupEnvironment, you don’t need to wait until your next reboot to activate the changes. Instead, just use, e.g.:
source <filename>
This has the added advantage that if you make a mistake in your setup, you still have a running system to work with as you make further changes.