BeTips.net

If you’ve ever browsed a binary newsgroup, you may have found you have some difficulty extracting the encoded files. Fortunately, BeOS comes bundled with the command-line uudecode utility. Since files of type message/news are essentially plain text files, you can run news articles through uudecode to extract the encoded files:

uudecode filename

This will not work for files split across multiple messages – you’ll have to join the appropriate parts of the messages together for that – nor will it work for files that were not uuencoded to begin with. This should work with any newsreader that supports the standard Be message/news filetype for storing news. If you’re running slrn, you can save the post to disk and run uudecode on the resulting output.
Sometimes you’ll encounter files that were encoded in base64. Fortunately, Mail-It 2.0.x handles base64 just fine. Change the article’s filetype from message/news to text/x-email, open it up in Mail-It, and voila! You should find that the attachment is decoded perfectly, and some of the text of the message body may be readable as well, sometimes in the body, sometimes as a separate attachment.

If you’re creating new indices to enable searching on additional or custom attributes and you have more than one BFS volume on your system, remember that you must create the index on the volume on which the files are to live. Indexes do not span multiple volumes. If you create the index on the wrong volume, you’ll get no search results on your queries.
See also: Manipulating filesystem indexes

Some say that Be’s bright yellow title tabs are one of the interface’s most distinctive features. If you’re not a big fan of yellow, download WindowShade. This utility will let you change the colors of your BeOS title tabs and window borders.

WindowShade is a command-line utility which only accepts hexadecimal parameters for specifying colors. To make life easier, download WSFrontEnd, which is a graphical front-end to WindowShade’s functionality.
Place the WindowShade folder wherever you like, then drop WSFrontEnd into the same folder. Double-click WSFrontEnd and set the colors however you like. When you close WSFrontEnd, it will create a shell script called „setcolors“ in the same folder.
Now all you have to do is specify the path to setcolors in your UserBootscript, so the color changes are restored each time you boot BeOS. Here’s mine:

/boot/apps/utils/WindowShade/setcolors & 

For reference, the default tab colors in BeOS are:
yellow: 255,203,0
grey: 219,219,219

When creating replicants, make sure the app you’re replicating exists on your boot drive. If you replicate an app living on another volume, it will appear as a zombie next time you restart your machine, as the volume in question won’t have been mounted by the Tracker by the time the Desktop has been drawn.

While playing a project in 3dmiX, enter 3D mode with Alt+T, then tap the ‚P‘ key. Each of the pillars representing your audio tracks will send up showers of sparks in time to the music.

The Epson printer driver is broken in r4.5 for many models, particularly, those in the Stylus Color line. However, if you use the Stylus Pro driver instead you’ll probably find yourself up and running again.

If you’re security-minded, note that WON passwords are stored in /boot/home/config/settings/da_hood_pwd in plain text. Anybody with access to your machine who knows where to look will be able to read them.

If you have Dial-Up Networking set to auto-dial and you’re trying to use WON, you may find that your modem starts dialing every time you try to connect to a remote share. To fix this, enter the IP address of your Windows machine into the Gateway field of Be’s Network preferences panel.
Because WON uses DNS services, your request will attempt to dial because it’s looking for a DNS server. Making the Windows machine into the gateway gets around this problem. A future version of WON will probably correct this behavior.

Hold down Right-Ctrl+Shift (or Left-WinKey+Shift) and right-click on the Desktop. The Clean Up option will change to Clean Up All, which will let the Tracker auto-arrange all of the icons on the Desktop. This is the functional equivalent to pressing Alt+Shift+K in a Tracker window.

If you use slrn for reading usenet posts and want to save something you read to your hard drive, you don’t have to do the cut-and-paste mambo. Intead, press „o“ and you’ll be prompted for an output path. Enter a path/filename and the entire post, including the header, will be saved to disk.