You can split the Be menu into sections. For example, you might want to create one section for commonly used folders (i.e. home), one section for commonly used programs (i.e. NetPositive), and one section for all the other programs (which you can further subdivide into folders rather than just using one big Applications folder).
Open your /boot/home/config/be folder in the Tracker and make sure you’re in List View mode. Everything here will be sorted alphabetically. To force something to the top of the list, rename it with a leading space. To put something above that, use two leading spaces, and so on (BeOS alphabetizes a space prior to any letters).
Now, if you want spacers between each of your groups, you need to create a blank file with a blank icon, then name it something like "--------------------". To create a blank file, launch a Terminal and type:
cd ~/config/be
touch blank
To give the new file a blank icon, right-click it and choose Add-Ons | FileType. Double click the icon well (the empty grey box on the right side of the panel), and click „New Icon“. The steel blue pixels represent transparency, but you can’t save the icon until you make a change, so select the little pencil in the toolbar and click the „T“ button (which stands for „Transparent“). Click once in any pixel, then click the same square again to restore its transparency. Now you can pull down File | Save, close Icon-o-Matic, then do File | Save in the FileType panel.
The file „blank“ should now have a totally transparent icon. Now, rename „blank“ to a bunch of „-„s (I used 30 of them, which seemed to be about the right length).
Take a look in your Be menu and you’ll see your new separator. If you have more than two groups, just copy the separator and add a space to the beginning.
The Tracker looks something like this after creating a zero-byte file named „——————-“ with a blank icon.
In some cases, you may have folders with tons of subdirectories or containing hundreds of files, and you want them to appear on the Be menu for easy access but you don’t want to wait while they’re automatically expanded as you your mouse rolls over them. This little trick will let you open the folder by selecting it in the Be menu without any risk of it being expanded into the Be menu.
Type the following into your favorite text editor:
/boot/beos/system/Tracker '[FULL PATH TO FOLDER]'
Save the file with a name of your choosing into the ~/config/be folder. Launch a Terminal and type the following:
cd ~/config/be chmod +x '[NAME OF FILE YOU MADE ABOVE]'
That should do it, be sure to put the full path to the folder you want in the first part. Leave out the brackets [] in both parts. You may want to attach a custom icon to the file so it doesn’t appear as a plain text document.
If you have multiple BFS volumes on your system, and if you’ve changed your primary boot volume at some point, you probably have a giant swap file hanging out on the old boot volume(s) that’s no longer being used. Open a Terminal and type:
cd /old_boot_volume/var ls -l
You should see a file called swap. If you’re sure this is not your current boot volume (and you don’t intend to use it as a boot volume again in the near future), type:
rm swap
If you use a disk space utility like FreeSpace, you’ll immediately see a massive gain in reclaimed disk space. Because swap space is created automatically at boot time, this is not a dangerous procedure.
This tip is classified as a Warning because BeOS does nothing to guard against the storage of huge, unnecessary swap files, nor does it warn you about their presence.
Update: The version of Pulse described here is included in BeOS 5. This tip remains for users of BeOS prior to R5.
Want more control over the Pulse utility? Be’s Daniel Switkin has hacked the default Pulse utility to include color preferences for the regular app, the standard Replicant version, and the Deskbar replicant version. This newsletter article tells the whole story, and includes a link to a new version of Pulse you can compile in the BeIDE (open the .proj file for your platform and pull down Project | Make, or tap Alt+M).
When the build is complete, you can replace the version of Pulse in /boot/beos/apps with the new one.
Initially, the interface won’t look any different. Right-click in any grey area to access the new options.
NetPositive’s author offers this tip on a potential cookie bug.
I’ve found an easily fixable problem that likely affects a lot of NetPositive users. This problem will be corrected in NetPositive 2.2, but if you’re running something earlier (including 3.0d3), this tip applies to you.
Lots of sites that use Microsoft IIS servers and cookies (I know that www.staples.com, www.towerrecords.com, and www.cdpoint.com are examples) will incorrectly report that the browser does not support cookies.
The problem is due to the fact that NetPositive reports to the server that it is running on BeOS, and the server, seeing an OS that it does not expect, actually fails to send the browser one of the cookies that it is later looking for. This problem is easily corrected by modifying the browser information that NetPositive sends to not include the OS. [Editor’s note: The unfortunate side effect of this fix is that page views will not appear in site’s traffic logs as BeOS visits, and it’s nice to be counted. I suggest applying this fix only if you’re having cookie problems.]
If you’re being bitten by this or other cookie problems, then QUIT ALL RUNNING COPIES OF NETPOSITIVE (very important), open up a Terminal window, and type in the following two lines:
rmattr BrowserString ~/config/settings/NetPositive/settings addattr -t string BrowserString "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; NetPositive/2.1.1)" ~/config/settings/NetPositive/settings
(Note that the last two lines there need to be entered on a single line in the Terminal).
Normally, I laugh at Microsoft conspiracy theorists, but some days, you gotta wonder. To be honest, though, I’d bet a lot of money that this is an innocent oversight on Microsoft’s part and is nothing sinister.
Be’s Howard Berkey offers this information on a bug in the PPP connection script that shipped in R4.5.1
A few of you have mentioned that the new Grand Unified Standard PPP connection script that shipped with 4.5.1 has caused your connections to fail (where Standard PPP used to succeed). Let me apologize for this inconvenience. The script was tested against many ISP’s, both internally at Be and by many helpful people on BeDevTalk, but of course, it is impossible to test against every ISP and so we are seeing the fallout from that unfortunate fact now.
Appended to the end of this message is a new PPP script to try. I would appreciate it very much if you could all try the Standard PPP setting, and if it does not work for you (and Standard PPP DID work for you in R4) then try the Alternate PPP setting. If you experience problems with these, please contact me in private email.
To try this new script out:
1. Make a backup of the file /etc/servers.ppp by renaming it to /etc/servers.ppp.backup
2. save everything below the „cut here“ line in the following script into /etc/servers.ppp
3. restart networking and try the new PPP dial scripts
Thank you again!
Howard Berkey
Standard_PPP Teu dw dppp dS Alternate_PPP S Unix_login Te|ogin:|du|assword:|dw S Unknown_Type_1 Te|name:|du|assword:|dw|>|dppp S Unknown_Type_2 Te|name:|du|assword:|dw|>|dpppsdefault S Manual Te
This tip builds on information in Creating BeOS Boot Floppies, showing you how to create custom boot floppies including specific drivers.
The -base option is explained as specifying from which partition the floppy boots. Reading the /bin/makebootfloppy shell script, it turns out that the script creates a boot floppy by gathering necessary files (the kernel and drivers) from an existing BeOS partition, and the -base option specifies from which partition it gathers the files.
A possible usage of this option is that, for example, when you have installed any additional device drivers and don’t want them to be included in a new boot floppy, mount the CD and type as follows:
$ makebootfloppy -base '/BeOS R4.5 x86'
This will give you a „pure“ R4.5 boot floppy, with no extra drivers. [Technically, this example may be inappropriate because additional drivers will not be included anyway as long as they are installed under your home directory, not in the system directory. But it does illustrate the point.]
Additionally on the R4.5.1 boot floppy there is a virtual disk driver included as ..../drivers/dev/disk/virtual/fmap. This driver is not installed in your R4.5.1 partition, so you can’t create an R4.5.1 boot floppy exactly equivalent to the original one Be provides as an image file. (I don’t know what the driver serves, though…)
If you are a purist, you can install the driver as follows:
(Insert the R4.5.1 boot floppy) $ dd if=/dev/disk/floppy/raw bs=128k skip=1 | gzip -cd | tar xvf - -C /boot beos/system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/dev/disk/virtual $ cd /system/add-ons/kernel/drivers $ mv dev/disk/virtual/fmap bin $ mimeset -f bin/fmap $ ln -s ../../../bin/fmap dev/disk/virtual/fmap
Now you can create a R4.5.1 boot floppy with the virtual disk driver included.
Theoretically, we should be able to use this technique to install BeOS from/to an unsupported storage device/interface, given an appropriate device driver. For example, a driver for a certain SCSI PC Card may make it possible to install BeOS on notebooks in the „ordinary“ manner via an external SCSI CD- ROM drive, without transplanting the hard disk nor using my BeWrite utility.
Be’s Brian Swetland says:
„Essentially, the difference between makebootfloppy and makebootfloppy -cd is that the second one has, in addition to the zbeos bootstrap, a tarfile with the kernel and drivers so that you can boot from non-bios-visible-devices (like CDROM drives). „
If you are missing some stations in Be’s TV app or you’d like to have those channels in the right order with a recognizable name, here’s what to do.
You have to create a text file tvfavorites in the folder /boot/home/config/settings/Media/bt848/. Here you fill in the stations‘ name and the corresponding frequencies (in hertz), seperated by a tabulator. Like this:
1-ARD 175500000 2-ZDF 182500000 3-BR 55500000
The stations‘ names cannot exceed 15 characters and mustn’t contain any white spaces.
Before the new table is used you’ll have to restart the Media Services in the Audio or Video Settings part of the Media Preferences Panel.
Concurrently running applications vie for attention from the processor in accordance with their priority level, as managed by the system’s scheduler. If for some reason you want to increase or decrease the priority of a given application, use:
prio thread_id priority
To see the current priority level of any given thread, run ps. Thread IDs are listed in the first column, priorities are listed in the fourth column.
If you have Jake Hamby’s port of Ghostscript and BeOS R4.5, you can create PDF files from any BeOS application.
In the Ghostscript directory, there is a bin subdirectory with several shell scripts. The script „ps2pdf“ converts Postscript files to PDF files. Copy or move it up a level, to /boot/apps/Ghostscript. (This assumes you’ve installed Ghostscript according to the directions, and /boot/apps/Ghostscript is in your PATH environment variable. Alternatively, you could add /boot/apps/Ghostscript/bin to PATH.)
To create a PDF file, first you have to create a Postscript file. Doing this is simple under R4.5–set up a Postscript printer in the Printer Preferences panel to print to a file. Then when you print from any application you’ll be prompted for the filename to create.
Then, from a terminal prompt, type ps2pdf [filename] to create a PDF file (if you’d created a file called document.ps, you would type ps2pdf document.ps).
If you have xicon, you can give the ps2pdf shell script drag-and-drop capability.
PDF files can be displayed under BeOS with BePDF and Ghostscript itself (just type gs filename.pdf at a shell prompt). Ghostscript also has the ability to print PDF files. (Read the documentation for more information on this ability. If you download the „pslpr“ shell script from BeBits, it will let you print PDFs and Postscript files to any Ghostscript-compatible printer without having to know Ghostscript’s command line options.)