BeTips.net

If you’d like easy access to a system-wide volume control slider without having to dig around in the prefs panel, launch the Media preferences panel, select Audio Settings, and click „Show Volume in Deskbar.“ In addition to a rather elegant volume slider, you’ll now also have right-click access to the Media and Sounds preferences panels, as well as the MediaPlayer itself.

If your sound should die, or the media_server gets confused or funky (the wrong kind of funky), launch the Media preferences panel, select Audio Settings, and click the „Restart Media Services“ button to bring everything back to life without rebooting.

After having major problems trying to get my PPP connection to work under R4.5 on my PowerMac, I had an epiphany (and it didn’t even hurt … much). I switched the cables from the printer port to the modem port and vice versa. My muddled memory came up with a tidbit from the distant past about Apple doing something funny with the printer port on Macs — they enabled them for localtalk connections. Apparently hardware handshaking cables don’t work on the modem port.
Don’t forget to switch the setting in your Dialup Networking preferences.

R4.5 includes the new Team Monitor utility, which lets you kill teams graphically without using a third-party utility. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del once, and all running teams will be listed (the old Vulcan Death Grip still works, however).
Application teams are listed in black, BeOS system teams are listed in blue, and misbehaving teams are listed in red. Select any team and click Kill to put a mischevious team out of its misery. Note that this tool only lets you kill entire teams, not individual threads. If you need that level of control, you might prefer a utility like ProcessController.
WARNING: Hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del more than once will invoke a hardware reset.

If you want an audio file to be played on system shutdown, copy
~/config/boot/UserShutdownScript.sample to ~/config/boot/UserShutdownScript and edit it to include something like:

/boot/beos/apps/MediaPlayer ~/config/sounds/[sound file]

Then place a copy of (or a link to) your sound file in /boot/home/config/sounds.
Note: If you’re still using R4.0 then replace MediaPlayer with PlaySound.

[Note: This tip is recommended for advanced users only. None of these options should be used unless you already know what they mean and have some idea what their impact might be.]
If your machine includes some sort of funky hardware that makes BeOS unhappy, you may need to enter the boot options menu (press the Spacebar when the bootloader appears) and select Safe mode, disable SMP, Don’t call the BIOS, or even debug mode. If it turns out that you need to invoke one of these options every time you boot (which is rare), you can make these options permanent.
In R4.5, look in /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/sample and you’ll find the following files:

ata.sample
atapi.sample
awe64
kernel.sample
vesa.sample

Each of them includes various options relating to dozens of boot-time parameters. You should be able to determine what each of them do by opening them in a text editor and poking around. If you want to activate one of the options in these files, copy it to /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers and uncomment (remove the „#“) any lines you want to activate.
kernel.sample includes options mirroring the choices shown in the boot options menu, while the others will let you configure specific sound card settings, set vesa modes for graphics cards, and set advanced options for ATA and ATAPI devices.
You can also use the virtual_memory file to establish a swap file of a smaller or larger size than the GUI Virtual Memory preferences panel will allow. Note that setting your swap file to a lower size than recommended will probably impact performance, and is not recommended.

If your system freezes while booting, without giving any warnings, you may find that you can boot by entering the Safe menu (press Spacebar when the bootloader appears) and select „no DMA, don’t call BIOS, disable SMP support.“ If this gets you going, enter your system BIOS and disable any DMA modes for CD (CD is usually slave at IDE0 or IDE1).
Alternatively, see the tip Make boot options permanent.

The Find panel will let you build queries for all files modified after yesterday, or after last hour, etc. However, I’ve been stymied trying to ask for all files which have been modified in the last five minutes. Perhaps there’s an easy way to do it in the GUI, but since I wanted to start myself off in shell scripting, I thought I’d give that a shot. The following script does the trick :

Now=$(date +%s)
Older=$(expr $Now - $@)
echo Files modified in the last $@ seconds :
query -a '(last_modified>='$Older')'

If you paste that into a text file called recent, put it into your /boot/home/config/bin directory, and made sure it’s executable with :

chmod +x /boot/home/config/bin/recent

Then from the terminal you can just type recent 60 to get a quick list of everything modified in the last 60 seconds. Any integer parameter (within reason) should work — recent 300 for five minutes, or even recent 132 if for some reason you want two minutes and 12 seconds. 😉

BeOS 5’s PC Card support is somewhat different than it was in R4.5. These instructions assume you have BeOS 5 installed.
Insert your card, open a Terminal window, and type:

cardctl ident

Copy the „product info“ line or „manfid“ line to the clipboard. Type these lines:

cd ~/config/settings/kernel/drivers
cp pcmcia.default pcmcia
StyledEdit pcmcia

Add your card’s indentification, referring to existing ones, and paste the product info or manfid into the second line. Make sure to start the line with either „version“ or „manfid“ depending on which information you copied earlier.
Save the file, then remove and re-insert your card. Launch Network preferences. If your card is a network card, it should now show up as an available NIC. If it’s a modem card, it should show up under Modem settings as an additional serial port.
Note that BeOS 5 currently only supports NE2000 compatible network cards in addition to the ones that have explicit support. Even if your card shows up under Network preferences, there is no guarantee that it will work properly — you may still need a driver for it.
You should now be able to use the card whenever it’s inserted. The only minor annoyance with the PCMCIA implementation is that BeOS informs you (in the form of a dialog box) when it enables PCMCIA cards. You must press OK each time when booting up. To disable these messages, see the tip: Stop those annoying PCMCIA messages.
I have compiled an additional card database taken from Linux and FreeBSD, covering many ethernet pcmcia cards. Other notebook-related tools are available at that page as well.
If you don’t want to run cardctl or edit the card database, get the “ PC Card Wizard „, extract it, and run pccard-wizard.sh. The wizard will lead you through the process. Note that the wizard only works in R4.5.x (as of this writing), not R5.
For Be’s official how-to, see the PCMCIA section at Breaking News.
[Editor’s note: All of this will get much easier in a future BeOS release.]

See also:

Configuring an 802.11b wireless network card