If you use an external SCSI CD-ROM drive, or if you have two CD-ROM drives and one of them doesn’t have a direct connection to your sound card, you can still listen to audio discs in that drive by using the cdda-fs driver. Just mount an audio CD and drag its corresponding WAV tracks (or the entire WAV folder) onto your audio player of choice.You can literally have as many concurrently running CD audio streams as you do drives.
Some spammers try to conceal themselves by hiding their IP address in a 32-bit unsigned integer representation (a „Dword“) of that address. In other words, you might see a URL that looks something like:
http://3436766298/file.html
Most browsers on most platforms will convert this integer back into an IP address automatically. But as of version 2.1.1, NetPositive will simply not handle the request.
If for some reason you’re desperate to see what a spammer has to show you, you can convert the Dword back into an IP address at this site. Alternatively, if you have perl installed, try this:
perl -e 'use Socket;$a=inet_ntoa(pack N,3436766298);print "$a "'
substituting the example Dword with the one you’re trying to access.
Certain BeOS utilities that run in all workspaces will grab focus when you switch between workspaces (the excellent DeposIt launcher, for example). This means that when you switch back to the original workspace, you’ll have to click in the app you were last using to bring it back to the front.
While you can disable this annoying behavior by setting DeposIt (or whatever) to run only in a single workspace, a better solution is to install hey and put this in your UserBootscript after the app has been launched:
hey DeposIt set Flags of Window 0 to 208 &
Want to know where we got the number 208? See the tip Control window look, feel, or behavior with „hey“.
If you regularly back up your BeOS system with zip, BeB, or anything else, why not back up your Windows data in the same session? Since BeOS can read FAT volumes just fine, you can make it all part of the same backup procedure.
If you do it with zip, your backups will even be readable from within Windows. If you’re scripting your backups, you’ll probably want to create separate archives from within the script — one for your BeOS data and another for Windows data, just so you can move the Windows archive over and deal with it separately if necessary.
And if you’re also using the Linux filesystem driver, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to back up all three operating systems from within BeOS.
The /tmp directory on your system is actually a symlink to /boot/var/tmp. The fact that it’s always cleaned out by a fresh boot may make it seem like a virtual directory, but it is indeed physical.
The contents of /tmp are erased automatically at boot time by a function in the system’s Bootscript. If for some reason you’d like for this not to happen (e.g. you might be creating a logging script that stores files here, which is probably not the best idea), place a blank file called .noerase in this directory and the system will leave its contents untouched at boot time. It will now be your responsibility to manually clear out any temp files that land here.
As noted in the tip Creating BeOS boot floppies, pt. II, I’ve finally made it possible to install BeOS onto notebook PCs directly from an external CD-ROM drive. Specifically, I’ve written a device driver for ATA PC Cards, which allows you to use an external ATAPI CD-ROM drive for BeOS installation. Just make a new installation floppy with the included driver and the rest goes in the ordinary manner, same as the Desktop installation.
The driver also allows you to run the BeOS R4.5 demo CD on notebooks from an ATAPI drive; you can examine how the devices in your notebook work (or don’t work) before purchasing and installing BeOS.
Note that the driver is still considered experimental and may not work well under some systems. Reports are welcome.
If you want to play a sound at shutdown, you can feed a file to SoundPlay with something like:
/boot/apps/SoundPlay-3.4/SoundPlay /boot/home/Desktop/a.wav &
The problem with this technique is that even with the &, SoundPlay itself will not exit when it’s done playing the track. That’s why SoundPlay has the (undocumented) „-x“ option:
SoundPlay -x file.mp3
will play the given file and exit when it’s finished. To have this happen at every shutdown, just add the line to /boot/home/config/boot/UserShutdownScript.
The RC5DES encryption cracking contest has a BeOS client. Unfortunately, this client will drop partially completed blocks when it is restarted unless you create a checkpoint file:
Now start the rc5des client. The next time you stop it, it will save its current data to the checkpoint file so that next time it’s restarted it continues from where it left off. No more lost blocks!
BeMail includes a little-known hotkey for adding the „>“ symbol to a block of text. Just select the text you want to quote and tap your primary modifier key (Ctrl or Alt) plus the right arrow key to nest the selected text in as many „>“s as you want. Likewise you can delete those „>“ characters again with the left arrow key.
Some ISPs apparently expect a ’newline‘ instead of a ‚carriage-return‘ at the login. This results in the PPP connection dying shortly after a connect. To fix this, open /beos/etc/servers.ppp in a text editor and replace all ‚ ‚ in the Standard_PPP line with ‚
‚.