BeTips.net

If you use Pe as your text editor and need to find text buried in your documents in a hurry, resist the impulse to hit the usual Alt+F. Instead, tap Alt+I to turn on incremental search, then type the first few letters of the string you’re looking for. The first found instance of that string will be highlighted in the current document. The more letters you type, the more specific your search becomes. Tap Alt+G to move to the next occurrence of the string.
Get used to this feature, and you’ll never go back to plain old Find dialogs.

[Editor’s note: If you’ve got perl for BeOS installed, you can extend its functionality by downloading and installing additional modules from the CPAN network. Because modules can be installed directly from perl, you don’t even need a browser open. This tip explains both how to use CPAN from within perl, and how to get, install, and use the BFS attribute module, which lets you create perl scripts that treat BeOS file system attributes as a database. The Tip Server generates most of its pages on the fly with the help of this module.]
So, you want to install a module on your lovely perl system? But, you say, you don’t want to have to plow through ftp or webpages? Never fear, CPAN is here.
First, make sure that you’re connected to the ’net. Then, type

perl -MCPAN -e shell

You’ll see an awful lot of questions. Hit return to all of them until you see some questions relating to what continent you’re on, etc. Answer it, and then you’ll get a list of URLs you can use. You can enter multiple numbers on the line (e.g. „1 2 3 4“). After answering this, you’ll be dumped to the following prompt (or something similar):
cpan shell — CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.48)
ReadLine support availible
cpan>
You can search to see what Be modules are availible; since I’m conveniently telling you here that all Be-related modules are of the form Be::Foo, you can tell it to search for only those:
cpan> i /Be::/
(lots of crap you can ignore, followed by something similar to this:)

Module id = Be::Attribute
    CPAN_USERID  TSPIN (Tom Spindler )
    CPAN_VERSION 0.01
    CPAN_FILE    T/TS/TSPIN/Be-Attribute-0.1.tar.gz
    INST_FILE    (not installed)

Aha! Be::Attribute sounds mildly interesting. You can install it by typing
cpan> install Be::Attribute
(more crap…)
  /bin/make install — OK
cpan>
Well. Now that we’ve got it, what do we do with it? Type ‚q‘ at the prompt, and then at the bash prompt, type ‚perldoc Be::Attribute‘:

cpan> q 
Lockfile removed.
$ perldoc Be::Attribute
/bin/sh: nroff: command not found
=head1 NAME
Be::Attribute - get and set MIME file attributes
=head1 SYNOPSIS
  use Be::Attribute;
  $node  = Be::Attribute::GetBNode("/my/file/here");

(and so on…)
You should be able to figure out what to do from here.

More things you can do with CPAN

perl -MCPAN -e shell will get you back to the cpan prompt. From there, you can type ‚h‘ to see the commands availible, or use ‚i /foo/‘ to search for modules that have the pattern ‚foo‘ in their names, or ‚r‘ to see if there are updated modules you can install.

One final note:

Ignore the ‚Please, install Net::FTP‘ messages. Be’s perl doesn’t yet have socket support (as of 3 May 1999, at least) and it will not work.

You may have noticed that Icon-o-Matic’s File menu includes a „Dump Icon“ option. Selecting this item creates an icon data file at /boot/home/Bitmaps.h This file is of interest only to developers. The large and small icons are dumped into separate contructs:

Large: const unsigned char kLargeIconBits[]
Small: const unsigned char kSmallIconBits[]

NOTE: Multiple dumps appear to accummulate in this file, so you may wish to clear it as needed. The dumped icons may be copied to a new file and #included in your project to be used at will 🙂
Hope this helps you as much as its helped me.

If you are on the road a lot, and would like to get news in addition to your mail from your BeBox via pop3, enamel can help you. Just set the Target so that your news is sent as pop3-user in the pop3d_settings.

The PTT Smartvox (ISDN/Analogue modem supplied by the dutch telecom company) supports different types of connection. Add the following lines to the /boot/beos/etc/modems.ppp file to have BeOS support them all:

Smartvox
	PTT_Smartvox_ISDN AT&F&B54P1
	PTT_Smartvox_33K6 AT&F&B0
	PTT_Smartvox_V120 AT&F&B55
	PTT_Smartvox_X75 AT&F&B49

This Smartvox is identical to the Webstar modem from Germany.

If you have LS120, Jaz, Zip, Orb, or other removeable storage media, you can drag the icon for the mounted device to the Trash. Boom! Instant eject Mac style!
[Editor’s note: This option in no way interferes with the normal methods of unmounting volumes (right-click and choose Unmount from the context menu, use the Unmount menu in DriveSetup, or use the unmount and eject commands from the shell). If you feel that this option just perpetuates UI mistakes from the MacOS world, then don’t use it! It’s there as a convenience, to help users migrating from other platforms feel more at home.]

Netpositive has no option for sorting the order in which bookmarks appear in the pulldown menu. This is because, as NetPositive’s engineer Scott Barta says on BeOS Central, „I just put them in the menu in the order I get them from the OS“.
Thus, to re-order your bookmarks:
Select „Show Bookmarks“ and move all your bookmarks (including folders) to the Desktop or into a new folder on the Desktop.
The order in which you return your bookmarks to the NetPositive bookmarks Tracker window is the order in which they’ll be displayed in NetPositive.

Worldnet customers have a network user name and password because of the firewall, which looks like this:
user name: 123456789@worldnet.att.net
pw: abcdef-ghijklm
Most importantly, you’ll need to enter DNS addresses manually. These seem to work best:
204.127.129.1
204.127.160.1
If anyone needs further assistance, they can email me (Chris) at christiane1@att.net.
If you’re using AT&T Canada as your ISP, add the following line to /boot/beos/etc/servers.ppp:

AT&T_Canada  e ogin:s du
 assword: dw
S

Use these DNS server addresses:
Primary: 206.191.82.225
Secoundary: 206.191.83.225

If you’ve ever tried to change the icon for SoundPlay playlists via the system’s FileTypes preferences panel, you may have noticed that your changes don’t take hold, and the original icons still show up in the Tracker. This is because the Tracker looks first to see if the supporting application is specifying its own icon, and in fact, SoundPlay does do this.
To remedy this, right-click the SoundPlay application’s icon and choose Add-Ons | FileType from the context menu. In the Supported Types section, select „SoundPlay playlist file,“ then click once in the icon well and tap Ctrl+X to remove the icon. The icon you specified in the system’s FileTypes preferences panel will now appear in the Tracker as it should (or you can just change the custom icon right here in the SoundPlay filetype panel).

If you want to be able to double-click shell scripts to have them executed graphically (e.g. with the assistance of alert boxes), you may discover that the Tracker doesn’t pass the current directory location to the Terminal, and that file copy operations (as might be used for an install routine) don’t work as expected.
The solution is to use a variable like this in your script:

launchDir=$(dirname $0)

$0 is a special variable with the full pathname of the script. dirname is a command that takes a full path and chops out just the directory portion of it. Assign it to the launchDir variable, and you’ve got the directory the script is sitting in. Very convenient.