BeTips.net

If you don’t like using the right mouse button for some reason, you can still access context menus. Just left-click and hold the button down (as if you were going to drag/drop, but leaving the mouse stationary.) The context menu will appear after a slight delay.
The delay is controlled by the double click speed in the Mouse preferences panel. When the double-click speed is set very fast, the delay is so small that the context menus appear to be activated directly by a left click. Ironically, this also makes it easier to avoid having to double click at all — a simple left click followed by selecting ‚Open‘ will suffice.

While using BeatWare’s e-Picture, hold down the Shift key while selecting Window | About e-Picture. You’ll get a 3D starfield behind the rolling credits. Click repeatedly on the credits to see other 3D simulations.

If you use FTP from the command-line, there are two ways to get a progress indicator to monitor the progress of your transfers:
1) Before beginning the transfer, type hash. You’ll see one # symbol for every 1024 bytes transferred.
2) After the transfer has started, right-click the file in the Tracker and choose Get Info from the context menu. It’s size will be dynamically updated in the Info panel as the download progresses.

As you’ve probably discovered, you can navigate through a folder full of BeMail messages by tapping Alt+Up or Down arrow. To make this experience really smooth, click the Date column header in the Tracker to sort your messages by date, either forwards or backwards. Otherwise, you may end up returning to a message you’ve already read as you page through the morning’s mail.

NetPositive 3.0d3’s HTML filtering capabilities allow you to filter banner ads from pages that you view. To set it up, every time you see an ad image in a page, right-click on the image and choose „Filter this image in all sites“ from the „Filters“ submenu. Then, open up the ~/config/settings/NetPositive/Filters folder in the Tracker and edit the filter string down to the minimum sensible string that will generate a hit for the ad banner. (It’s best to look for strings like ‚/ads/‘ and such in the img src attribute). With a handful of these filters in place, you will see very few banner ads while browsing.
Read the release notes that come with NetPositive 3.0d3 for more details and hints on effective filtering.

Every time you establish a PPP connection, BeOS looks for a script at /boot/home/config/etc/ppp-script. If found, its contents are examined, and any commands it contains are run automatically. Thus, you can easily have your mail client and web browser launched automatically every time you go online (for example). You’ll probably need to rename ppp-script.sample to ppp-script. If you want to edit the script, you’ll need to make it writeable:

chmod a+w ppp-script

Because the script is already marked executable, you’ll need to open it with File | Open in your text editor (or right-click and choose Open With…). The script can then be customized with the following arguments:

$1 = "up" or "down"
$2 = interface name
$3 = unique cookie for this session (seconds since midnight, Jan 1, 1970)
$4 = IP address used

Here’s a sample script that launches NetPositive and Mail-It when the connection goes up:

if  test ${1} = "up"
then
    /boot/apps/net/BeatWare/Mail-It/Mail-It &
    NetPositive &
fi

Roman Filippov adds the following useful additions to the techniques above:
It’s a good idea to check whether the application is already running before starting it since extra workspace switching can be annoying. An easy trick below does the job:

if [ "$1" = "up" ]
then
	 [ $( roster | grep "NetPositive" | wc -l) -eq 0 ]  &&  NetPositive &
fi

You may also want to add a notification sound, such as one of the system sounds provided by Be or one you’ve recorded yourself:

 #!/bin/sh
 if [ "$1" = "up" ]
 then
 	MediaPlayer ~/config/sounds/Startup Sounds/GoodVibesStart.aiff &
   [ $( roster | grep "NetPositive" | wc -l) -eq 0 ]  &&  NetPositive &
  fi
  

You can also switch workspaces first. For instance, if you like Mail-It to
reside in workspace 3 and NetPositive in workspace 4, this can be helpful:

if [ "$1" = "up" ]
then
	MediaPlayer ~/config/sounds/Startup Sounds/GoodVibesStart.aiff &
 	 [ $( roster | grep "NetPositive" | wc -l) -eq 0 ]  &&  { Workspaces 3 ;
 NetPositive & }
	 [ $( roster | grep "Mail-It" | wc -l) -eq 0 ]  &&  { Workspaces 2 ;
 /boot/apps/net/BeatWare/Mail-It/Mail-It & }
 fi
 

There are two more things you might want to do: Determine when you’ve gone off-line, and add a line to the connection log so you can keep track of online sessions:

if  [ "$1" =  "up" ]
then
	touch /var/tmp/ppp_up
	date "+%D %T sess $3 started on $2 as $4" >> /var/log/online.log
	MediaPlayer ~/config/sounds/Startup Sounds/GoodVibesStart.aiff &
	 [ $( roster | grep "NetPositive" | wc -l) -eq 0 ]  &&  { Workspaces 3 ;
 NetPositive & }
	 [ $( roster | grep "MailIt" | wc -l) -eq 0 ]  &&  { Workspaces 2 ;
 /boot/apps/net/BeatWare/Mail-It/Mail-It & }
fi
if   [ "$1" = "down" ]
then
	if [ -f /var/tmp/ppp_up ]
	then
		rm /var/tmp/ppp_up
		date "+%D %T sess $3 closed" >> /var/log/online.log
		MediaPlayer ~/config/sounds/Startup Sounds/DarkStart.aiff &
	fi
fi

When using the Tracker in Icon or Mini Icon views, files are displayed by default with their names as their titles. However, you can use any attribute you like in these views. Try this:

1. Switch to List view
2. Use the Attributes menu to show/hide various attributes
3. Drag the column header of your favorite attribute all the way to the left
4. Switch back to Icon or Mini Icon view

The icons will now be labeled with the attributes that were shown in the first column, rather than the actual filenames. You can use this technique to display icons with with any attribute, such as file sizes, modification dates, e-mail addresses, or bookmark URLs.

Displaying People files in icon view with their email addresses rather than their names.

The following little script will help you if you not only want to grab a few audio tracks but whole CDs in one go:
——–Begin Script————-

cddrive=/dev/disk/ide/atapi/0/slave/0/raw
track=
alltracks=`play $cddrive 0 0 | wc -l` 		#get number of Tracks on CD + one
echo
echo "Number of Tracks on CD is: " `expr $alltracks - 1`
echo
if  [ "$1" = "all" ]		#see if you want to grab whole CD
	then
	track=1		#beginn with Track 1
	echo "Starting to grab the whole CD..."
		while [ $track -lt $alltracks ] 	#continue until all Tracks have been saved
	do
		play $cddrive 7 $track "Track$track"	#Saving Track No n as "Trackn"
		track=`expr $track + 1`
	done
	echo
	echo "All Tracks have been saved to disk."
else
	echo "Grabbing following tracks: $*"
	for each
	do
		play $cddrive 7 $each "Track$each"	#Saving Track No n as "Trackn"
	done
fi

——–End Script————-
However, there is no error handling, so type carefully or implement one yourself. Note also that you may find it easier to simply use Marco Nellisen’s excellent CDDA filesystem driver, which makes CD ripping completely unnecessary under BeOS, since it lets you view the tracks on your CDs as if they were already .WAV files!
You’ll find more information about the shell CD player play in this tip.

If your keyboard and mouse hangs after a cold reboot, this might help:
Enter your machine’s BIOS / PnP-PCI setup and change IRQ12 to „Legacy by ISA only.“ (This option may appear differently, depending on your specific BIOS).
The problem is caused by the fact that the PS/2 port (where your mouse/keyboard are connected) may not like sharing PnP IRQs. If your PnP BIOS decides to add another card to IRQ12, the port may hang.

Jonathan Hall (jonathanhall@compuserve.com) adds:
I have had the frozen mouse problem and have found a work around for it. The mouse is a Logitech wheel mouse on PS/2, and the pointer would freeze at boot. I fixed it by telling BeOS that it was a two-button mouse.

tom costin (tomcostin@mindspring.com) adds:
If neither of these work, go into your bios and change „Assign IRQ to VGA to yes“. Worked for me…
[Editor’s note: These bugs should be cleared up in a future release]

This tip builds on the information in the tip Title your Terminal.
If you’d like the title of your Terminal windows to reflect the current working directory, you need to do two things:
1) Edit your .profile file (in your home directory) and add the line

PROMPT_COMMAND=~/config/bin/term

2) Create a file called term (or use any name, just make sure that the PROMPT_COMMAND from step 1 matches this name) in /boot/home/config/bin. This file should contain the following code:

echo -e "33]2;`pwd`07" 

Restart Terminal, and your title string should be /boot/home. It will change as you change directories, because PROMPT_COMMAND will be executed every time you issue a command at the Terminal prompt.

Cash Erler (erlercw@yahoo.com) adds:
Change the echo -e in the script to echo -en.
This will show the working directory in the titlebar and will not print the extra newline each time (which Terminal doesn’t do normally, and can be annoying)

Peter Folk (pfolk@gargtech.com) adds: The command from this tip wasn’t correctly quoted, so it didn’t make it through the HTML system. The correct command is below:
echo -en '\\033]2;TextInTitle\\007'