BeTips.net

Some people find that after setting up a PCMCIA network card, they still get a „Network device failed to initialize“ error at boot time. Either reinserting the card or manually restarting networking will usually get you online after seeing this dialog, but who wants to go through that each time?
If this is happening to you, add this line to /boot/home/config/boot/UserBootscript, probably near the top (and certainly before launching any network services):

cardctl reset &

Several users have found that the laptop will now boot normally, with no alerts from network services, and everything working peachy.

In BeOS 5, BeMail grows some new features, including the ability to spell-check email on the fly. While typing a new message, tap Alt+; (alt semicolon). All potentially misspelled words will turn red. Right-click on any red word and a list of possible alternates will appear in a context menu. If you don’t find the alternate you’re looking for, select Add.
That’s fine for adding one word at a time, but what if you want to add or remove a batch of words to your dictionary all at once? Just open /boot/beos/etc/word_dictionary/user in a text editor and make your changes. To modify existing dictionaries, edit any or all of:

/boot/beos/etc/dictionary
/boot/beos/etc/word_dictionary/geekspeak
/boot/beos/etc/word_dictionary/words

If you’re on a network with *nix or *BSD machines and need to access programs running on those machines from your BeOS machine, you’ll find everything you need to know about installing and running X services for BeOS in this article by Daniel Berlin, written for the former Be Magazine.
Once you’ve got things set up, you’ll find that the de facto standard program to startup X services, xinit, does not function properly on BeOS at the present. This in turn leaves users having to start up each service (ie. X, an xterm, a window manager, etc.) manually. There is however a simple workaround. Create a script that looks something like this:

Xbeos -ac &
sleep 1
xterm &
twm &

and name it xinit. Now make the script executable by typing

chmod 755 xinit

Drop the script into /boot/home/config/bin. The next time you want to start X, just type xinit, and you’ll have X, plus all the goodies pop up in one shot.

If you experience glitchy audio or video recording or playback on your BeOS machine, you can probably get better media performance by launching the Media preferences panel and check the Enable Real-Time Audio and/or Enable Real-Time Video options and clicking „Restart Media Services.“
When either real-time audio or video are enabled, buffers are locked into memory and are guaranteed not to be swapped out to disk. This way audio and video signal will flow smoothly even if the machine is thrashing virtual memory.
If you’re experimenting with digital video capture (via dvg or personalStudio) and find that your high-bandwidth captured video is dropping frames, make sure „Enable Real-Time Video“ is checked in the Media Preferences panel. Next, take a look under MediaPlayer’s Settings menu for the option „Preserve Video Timing“ and turn this off. Counterintuitive though it may be, disabling this option can greatly improve your framerate.
For digital video, you’ll also want to make sure you’re getting the most possible performance from your hard drive. Go SCSI if you can afford it. If you can’t, get a UDMA-capable drive, and make sure it’s recognized by your motherboard BIOS. You’ll see it reported at boot time if it is. Also, try running /boot/optional/experimental/diagnostics/ideinfo in conjunction with the raw device path of the drive. To get the raw device path, open a Terminal and type df. So, for example:

waxwing:501 home>df
Mount            Type     Total    Free     Flags   Device
---------------- -------- -------- -------- ------- --------------------------
/                rootfs          0        0 ------W
/dev             devfs           0        0 ------W
/pipe            pipefs          0        0 ------W
/boot            bfs       2811375  1151251 QAM-P-W
 /dev/disk/ide/ata/0/slave/0/0_2
/tink            bfs      35673088 15616390 QAM-P-W
 /dev/disk/ide/ata/1/master/0/0_0
/wensleydale     bfs      30006144  2805957 QAM-P-W
 /dev/disk/ide/ata/2/master/0/0_0
/ethyl           bfs      40009882  4951067 QAM-P-W
 /dev/disk/ide/ata/3/master/0/0_0
waxwing:502 home>ideinfo /dev/disk/ide/ata/1/master/0/0_0

Look for the Ultra DMA section. It should say this:

Supported modes:  0 1 2
Selected mode:    2

If the selected mode section is blank, you’re not getting UDMA support and you should upgrade your motherboard’s BIOS. For added performance, consider getting an inexpensive Promise FastTrack Ultra66 card. These are supported in BeOS, and will make sure you get every drop of performance from your ATA66 drive.
If you’re not sure whether you’re dropping frames, play 30 or so seconds of video in MediaPlayer, then pull down File | File Info. In the Info panel, click „More“ for details on framerate, codec, and other interesting stuff.

BeOS 5 includes a new filesystem integrity checking tool called chkbfs, which can examine your filesystem for lost or misallocated blocks and repair them automatically (if you purchased the Pro Edition of BeOS, chkbfs will have run automatically at the end of the installation process).
To run chkbfs again at any time, open a Terminal and type:

chkbfs /boot

Substitute /boot with the name of any volume. Errors will be repaired automatically. I recommend doing nothing else with your computer while chkbfs is running.
If you want chkbfs to run a test without actually making changes, use the -n flag. You can also use the -f flag to force free’ing blocks even if there were problems.
Users who have encountered the occassional unremovable file should find that particular long-standing problem cleared up at last.

This is one of those tips that makes a lot of people slap their own foreheads. If you’re trying to establish a PPP connection but find that you get disconnected right after connecting, check to see if you checked the „Save Password“ checkbox in Dial-Up Networking preferences. It’s easy to forget to check this, and then try to connect via the Deskbar, where you have no UI to tell you you’re connecting without a password. It’s worth taking a look to make sure…

If you want to run the Ultimate Bulletin Board discussion system on your BeOS web server (such as the discussion boards here at the Tip Server), you’ll find that everything works pretty much out of the box… with one exception: Newly generated HTML files produced by scripts have not yet had their MIME types set properly. Because some BeOS web servers (notably Robin Hood) examine the MIME type of each file rather than using a MIME database like other servers, the generated pages won’t be served without running mimeset, or settype, or right-click Identify, or by double-clicking the file in the Tracker. If you’re using Apache or Xitami, note that these servers do MIME via extensions rather than BeOS filetypes. They should be immune to this problem.
The solution is to modify the source code of the scripts so that they give the generated HTML documents the proper MIME type immediately after generation. The file generation code is stored in an UBB library file.
Open up ubb_library2.pl and look for the string:

chmod (0777, "$ForumsPath/$ExactPath/HTML/$HTMLPageName.$FileExt");

This was around line 434 in the version of the scripts I downloaded (but was at a different line in the pro version I upgraded to). Immediately after that line, add this block:

@SetType = ("settype", "-t", "text/html",
 "$ForumsPath/$ForumIs/HTML/$ThreadNumber.html");
system (@SetType);

The only other change you need to make is to change the path to perl in all of the forum scripts, though that should be fairly obvious. This is, of course:

#!/boot/home/config/bin/perl

If you enter the URL of your favorite search engine into the preferences panel of NetPositive 2.2, then open a new browser window, you’ll find a new „flashlight“ icon on your toolbar, linked to that site. Of course, you don’t have to enter a search engine — you could use this feature for quick access to a secondary homepage, or any other URL.

If you’ve installed BeOS 5 Personal Edition and found that double-clicking MIDI files doesn’t work, it’s because your MIDI player may be looking for the old big_synth.sy synthesizer file. In BeOS 5, this file has been replaced by Patches111.hsb.
To fix this, create a link named „big_synth.sy“ to Patches111.hsb and all of those older midi programs will work. Open a Terminal and type:

ln -s /boot/beos/etc/synth/Patches.hsb
 /boot/beos/etc/synth/big_synth.sy

Of course, you can always copy bigsynth.sy over from an older R4.5 installation, but this method works fine.

If the Tracker or Deskbar should ever crash on you, or if your icons suddenly all turn into plain blue squares (a rare, random, and mysterious occurence), you can „restart the desktop“ easily, without needing a Terminal window open.
Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the Team Monitor. If you see a „Restart the Desktop“ button, click it. If you don’t, select either the Tracker or the Deskbar in the threads list and kill it off. When you bring up the Team Monitor again, the „Restart Desktop“ button should be there.
An easier way to kill off the Tracker manually might be to use the Vulcan Death Grip.