Some users, particularly those with Abit motherboards and Viper V330 video cards have reported a problem with the mouse cursor. Specifically, the mouse cursor either doesn’t appear or appears once but doesn’t move. Note that this is not a mouse problem — the mouse still works and you can click on things (but it’s hard to hit things! 🙂
The problem turned out to be that the video card must be assigned an IRQ in order to get interrupts for mouse movement events. This setting is disabled in many BIOS. After turning it on the mouse works perfectly.
Other AGP video card users can determine if this is their problem by lauching a terminal, typing „poke“ then „pci“ and looking for a device on bus=01 (the AGP bus). If the interrupt_line is either 00 or ff, this could be the problem.
Want a cool way to shuffle your backgrounds everytime you restart? Well look no further. This handy dandy little script seems to work great. What you need to do is point the Backgrounds preferences panel at a particular image, then use this script to suck a random image out of another directory and overwrite the image Backgrounds is pointing to every time you reboot.
First make a copy of one of your backgrounds and call it something like „background.jpg“. Put it in a directory where you can pretty much ignore it, like „/boot/home/config/settings„.
Now you need to set your background in the preferences to „/boot/ home/config/settings/background.jpg„.
Next, drop all the backgrounds you want to appear in rotation into a single directory. This script assumes that location is /boot/home/Backgrounds.
Ok, now the easy part, edit your „userBootscript“ file and add the following code:
N=`date +%S` N=`expr $N + 0` I=0 for file in /boot/home/Media/Backgrounds/* do I=$[$I + 1] done N=$[($I * $N) / 60] for file in /boot/home/Media/Backgrounds/* do if [ $N -eq 0 ] then cp $file /boot/home/config/settings/background.jpg break fi if [ $N -ne 0 ] then N=$[$N - 1] fi done
You will need to change „/boot/home/Media/Backgrounds“ to your background folder, and then after you restart twice, you’ll be all set.
In addition to telnetd, BeOS has the ability to accept logins via the serial port.
Connect any serial terminal to your BeOS box’s serial1 with a null-modem cable. Set your terminal speed 19200bps. Type at the BeOS prompt
$ getty serial1 19200 &
then hit Enter at your serial terminal. You will see the login prompt:
(hostname) login:
Type your user name and password to log in.
Anyone who’s struggled with the small, unresizeable file panels in Windows will appreciate the fact that file panels in BeOS are fully resizeable, and that the size you set them to will be remembered between one session and the next.
In addition, you can control the sort order of columns in file panels just as you do in the Tracker, by clicking column headers. Of course, you can also drag them left or right to establish which columns are displayed at the left, which on the right, etc.
Want to see additional columns? Right-click on one of the column headers to access a context menu with options similar to the usual Attributes menu. Want to get rid of a column? Just drag that column header out of the file panel altogether. Want to get it back? Right-click and hold on one of the remaining column headers; a context menu will appear in a moment, much like the usual Attributes menu.
No doubt you’ve noticed when organizing your bookmarks that one of the attributes available to you is „keyword.“ However, if you start adding keywords to your bookmarks, you’ll notice that they don’t appear in query results. This is because BeOS does not index the META:keyw attribute by default.
Keywords attached to bookmarks are, however, incredibly useful if you actually take the time to add them. To enable bookmark keyword searching, open a Terminal window and type:
mkindex META:keyw
Note that keywords you’ve already added will not become immediately searchable, though all new ones you create will be. If you want to make previously added keywords searchable as well, copy (don’t move) your entire bookmarks folder to a new location, and then back again. The act of copying them will cause all of the keyword attributes to be written to the index.
Now you’ll have much better luck uprooting obscure bookmarks you created long ago that don’t have a memorable word either in the URL or in the title.
You don’t have to mount CD’s, Zip disks, etc, manually. Let the BeOS do it for you!
Right-click on the Desktop and select ‚Settings…‘ from the ‚Mount‘ submenu.
Now, in the ‚Disk Mount Settings‘ window, select ‚All Disks‘ in the ‚Automatic Disk Mounting‘.
You can set options for what disks to mount during boot as well, if you want only your BeOS volumes to show up, or if you want HFS (Mac), FAT16/32, NTFS or Linux partitions as well.
If you want to get more selective about it, see the tip Selective volume mounting.
[Editor’s note: In R4.5, the same effect can be achieved without editing modems.ppp. Just click Custom in the Modems panel and use the instructions below. If you do choose to edit these files by hand, note that they’re flagged read-only, so you’ll need to run chmod a+w on them before editing, and then chmod a-w afterwards. ]
To turn off that annoying modem speaker, edit the entry for your modem in the modems.ppp file located in /boot/beos/etc folder. I opted to keep the original init string for my modem alone and created a modified version below it as follows (This string is for U.S. Robotics modems, though you should be able to append M0 to any init string to make it work with your own modem):
Original: Sportster_V90 AT&F1S32=34
Modified: Sportster_V90_Silent AT&F1S32=34M0
The M0 at the end turns off the speaker (M1=speaker on until connect; M2=speaker always on (default); M3=speaker on after dial, until connect). Save the file, then just go into the Dial-Up-Networking preferences panel and select the new modem string you just created (Sportster V90 Silent in my case).
Voila! No more screeching modem!
If you don’t hear the dial tone from the modem after you followed all advice from this server (Create jumpered device, set initialization string…), check the „speed“ when clicking the „Modem“ button in „Dial Networking“. The default speed is too slow. I set it to the maximum speed and everything works fine.
While working on an image in ArtPaint and looking for just the right zoom level (magnification), try clicking and holding on the „Mag: …“ section of the status bar, just to the left of the + and – symbols. Drag your mouse left and right and the image will be zoomed in and out in real time, with astonishing speed and responsiveness. Try that in Photoshop!
If you would like to move your .bash_history file to someplace less obtrusive than your home directory, simply create or edit a file in /boot/home/config/boot called UserSetupEnvironment and add the following line:
export HISTFILE= "<path>/<filename>"
Once you reboot and then start a new Terminal session, the history file will be created in the location you specified.
If you prefer no history file at all, the following will do the trick:
export HISTFILE=""