BeTips.net

Let’s say you want to create a disk image for burning to a CD. You need to create a filesystem within a BFS (BeOS File System) file, mount it as a new volume, and copy all your stuff into it. Here’s how:
Create a file with dd. In a Terminal type:

dd if=/dev/zero of=image.img bs=1024k count=640

Replace 640 with the size in megabytes you want the image to have. Then type:

mkbfs 2048 image.img; sync

This will create a filesystem in the file. It’s important to use a block size of 2048 bytes here, because BeOS can’t handle logical blocksizes that are smaller than the physical sectorsize of the device. Since CDs use 2048-byte sectors, you need to create 2048-byte blocks. „sync“ needs to be called because otherwise you might get an error message when trying to mount it. Lastly, mount the image:

mkdir /mnt; mount -t bfs image.img /mnt

The (empty) „disk“ will now appear on your desktop, and you can start copying stuff into it normally. When you’re done, unmount it and and burn image.img to a CD.
Warning: If you’re using BeOS R3, attempting to mount a file will lock up your system.
Peter Schultz (pete at beforever dot com) adds that you can also give the image a volume name while you’re creating it, or create the volume without an index. The complete mkbfs usage options are:

mkbfs [-noindex] [block_size] device_name [volumename]

You’re probably familiar with the Identify option on the Tracker’s context menu — it tells the Registrar to try and assign a MIME type to a file if it doesn’t have one already.
You can run the exact same process from the Terminal, with one of these two commands:

mimeset -f filename
mimeset -F filename

The first one functions exactly like Identify, while the second will change the file’s type if it’s not correct. The nice thing about these as opposed to using Identify is that you can run them from within scripts, or even over your entire hard drive.

[Editor’s note: Be aware that neither Be Inc. nor the Intel Corporation support overclocked systems or Celerons run in a dual configuration. While most people have good success with dual Celerons, remember that If you run into problems, you’re on your own.]
You can run dual Celerons with BeOS without any modifications. Simply use the ABIT BP6 motherboard. This board accepts two 370 PPGA CPUs.
If you don’t want to buy another motherboard, you can physically modify your Celerons. If you dont want to do these modifications yourself, or don’t have the necessary tools, you can actually buy a slot 1 to socket 370 adapter card designed to let you use two Celerons in a dual configuration.
For instructions and links to hardware sites that carry dual-ready adapters, go to http://www.kikumaru.com/ pc/celeron/index_e.html. (They even have a picture of Pulse with two over-clocked Celerons running at 412MHz 8-)).

With the exception of Pineapple, most of the BeOS newsreaders have serious problems with stability and functionality. While not as fancy, the command-line client slrn is 100% stable, very fast, and has great hotkeys. Unfortunately, setting up slrn can be a little tricky if you’re not familiar with command-line apps. Here’s what you need to do to get up and running with slrn:

1. Download the precompiled slrn installation distribution from BeBits (you no longer have to compile and set up libraries for slrn source code!)
2. Open /boot/home/.profile in a text editor and add a line like this:

   export NNTPSERVER=news.isp.com 

   (using the name of your own news server, of course). Then, type into a Terminal:

   source ~/.profile

   to activate the new environment variable.

3. Look in the doc folder of the slrn distribution for a file called slrn.rc. Move this to your home directory and rename it to .slrnrc.
4. Open .slrnc in a text editor and change a few lines. Anything you want to make active, you’ll have to uncomment by removing the % signs. For example, the lines:

   %hostname "YOUR.HOSTNAME"
   %set username "jd"
   %set realname "John Doe"
   %set replyto  "jd@somthing.com"
   

   might become:

   hostname "dnai.com"
   set username "bounce.waxwing"
   set realname "Scot Hacker"
   set replyto  "bounce.waxwing@dnai.com"
   

   This will set both the From: line and the Reply To: line to read bounce.waxwing@dnai.com. Season to taste. If you want a signature block appended to each article you post, uncomment the .signature line, then create a .signature file in your home directory. Farther down in this file, you’ll find that you have complete control over the colors slrn uses for different parts of the articles it displays. This can be very useful if you run your Terminal in non-standard colors, or can’t stand the garish greens that slrn uses by default.

5. Now you need to create a default list of newsgroups. Initialize this file by typing into a Terminal:

   slrn -f .jnewsrc -create

   Later on, you can add or remove groups to .jnewsrc from slrn’s interface, or just open it in a text editor and restart slrn.

6. You should be good to go now. Just type slrn to run the news reader. It’ll probably take a bit of getting used to, but it’s not hard. Press ? at any time for help on the current screen, and read through the docs that come with slrn.
7. The only other tricky thing about using slrn is that every time you post or respond to an article, it invokes the vi shell-based editor by default. This is great if you like vi, but sucks if you don’t. Fortunately, you can set the editor to be anything you want. Open up .slrnrc again and look for the line:

   %set editor_command "jed '%s' -g %d -tmp"

   and change it to

   set editor_command "StyledEdit '%s'"

   If Pe is your preferred text editor, use this instead:

   set editor_command "lpe '%s'"

   Now when you post or follow-up to a news article, it will be launched into a graphical editor. When you save and close the editor window, your changes will be passed back to slrn for posting. Very cool.

8. If you want to be able to reply to messages via email, look for the line reading:

   %set sendmail_command "/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t -oem -odb"

   and change it to:

   set sendmail_command "mail you@somewhere.com"

   Note that you’ll need to have the email daemon running in order for this to work properly (enable it from the E-Mail Preferences panel).
   Note that you must manually insert hard returns before every 80 characters — slrn won’t post articles with soft-wrapping. The character counter in Pe’s status bar makes this easy.

9. If you don’t have a full-time connection, or if you pay for connect time, you might want to grab slrnpull from BeBits. Configuration instructions are included in the package.

One small bummer about the current distribution is that if people look at your usenet post’s headers, you will appear to have posted from a Unix machine. To properly brag that you’re posting from BeOS, you’ll need to make a small modification to the slrn source code.
Downoad the slrn and slang complete packages from ftp://ftp.yoyo.org/users/jmd/
Unpack both of them in /boot/home/Desktop/dev (this path is hard coded somewhere in the source). Open the file /boot/home/Desktop/dev/slrn/src/post.c . Find the section

and change it to:

Save and close, run make, and replace your old slrn binary with the new one.

If you’re creating custom attributes for your files, you’ll almost always want to give them a datatype of „string.“ However, for some purposes, you’ll want to use integer values. If you do this, and you want to be able to search on those attributes later, you need to take care to create the right type of index. If you simply type

mkindex <attributename>

you won’t get any results in your queries because mkindex will assume you’re making a string index. Instead, use the -t flag with mkindex to specify its datatype, e.g.

mkindex -t int <attributename>

Now you’ll get search results on your integer queries. Note that integer queries have to do numeric comparisons — wildcards won’t work. In other words, if you have a value of 554, you can’t search on *5* , but you can search on >=55 or <= 55 or ==554 .

If you run BeOS as the only operating system on your machine, you’ll notice that the Bootman menu imposes an unnecessary 5-second minimum delay as it waits for you to make a choice from the boot menu. While it would be nice to have a 0-second option, there’s a good workaround.
Go into DriveSetup and change the active partition to the BeOS partition you wish to boot from. Then, from Terminal, type:

writembr [devicename]

For example:

writembr /dev/disk/ide/ata/0/master/0/raw

Note that you only need to specify the devicename under R4. Under R4.5+, the correct device is probed for automatically.

As Gobe’s Bruce Q. Hammond posted in BeOS Central’s Gobe Workspace, you can easily add new shapes to Gobe’s toolbar.
First, draw a polygon/bezier curve or freehand shape. Then, right-click on the shape and select „Add to Toolbar.“ Now when you click-and-hold, or right-click the custom shapes tool, (The Star Tool) you will have a tool to make your shape. You can make custom clouds, thought balloons, wierd stars, etc..
Note… just the shape is saved, not the style (color,etc).
The added shape is saved in the subdirectory „Shape“ in Gobe Productive’s installation folder. If you want to get rid of the shape, all you have to do is to delete the appropriate file in that folder. As the filename is a bit cryptic, you might want to rename it right after creation into a more recognizable one, to avoid confusion.

Most mail clients have extensive filtering capabilities, so that incoming mail can be automatically sorted into various folders. The drawback to this system is that you end up jumping around from one folder to the next looking for new mail. A great, BeOS-only solution to this problem can be found in one of Postmaster ’s coolest features: Virtual Folders.
You can set up Virtual Folders to pick up all mail that has ‚New‘ in the status attribute. Then all you have to do is access your ‚New Mail‘ virtual folder and read all your new mail. The mail will automagically disappear after you have moved to the next item (since it won’t be marked as New any more), and will be safely nestled in it’s assigned folder (according to your filters).

While most downloadable drivers will come with their own installation routines or scripts, this general rule should always apply. In case you ever need to install a driver manually, or if an installation routine fails, it can be handy to know.
User-installed drivers (including those for audio, video, scsi, gameport, whatever) should be placed in:

/boot/home/config/add-ons/kernel/drivers/bin

Be-provided drivers are located in the corresponding system-level directory:

/boot/beos/system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/bin

Once the driver has been placed there, create a link to that driver in an appropriate subdirectory of:

/boot/home/config/add-ons/kernel/drivers/dev

(similarly, links to Be-provided drivers will appear in the corresponding system-level directory).
For example, to install a video driver, you would place place the driver in bin and a link to that driver in:

/boot/home/config/add-ons/kernel/drivers/dev/graphics

Never install drivers in the system-level parallels of these directories (under the /boot/beos hierarchy).

If you typically store your image collection on a disk volume other than /boot, and then try to use one of those images for your Desktop background, you’ll find that the image is no longer your background the next time you boot. This is because the boot volume is mounted first, the Desktop is drawn, and then the other automountable volumes are mounted. To avoid this situation, you might want to create a directory on your boot drive just for storing background images.
If you’re feeling brave, you can mount the image volume sooner in the boot process by using the mountvolume command from within the system Bootscript (/boot/beos/system/Bootscript), rather than from within UserBootscript. But remember — you’re officially not ever supposed to mess with system-level components like Bootscript. Do this only if you know what you’re doing.