NetPositive stores a default window size and position, recorded at the moment you close the last instance of all currently open Net+ windows. Therefore, when you tap Alt+N or Alt+L to launch a new NetPos window, it will appear in the size and position of the first opened window, not the one you’re currently staring at.
When closing NetPositive, make sure the last window you close is sized and positioned exactly as you like it. New Net+ windows will then appear with the same size and position.
If you don’t want NetPositive to save the last window position every time it quits, use the tip Access hidden NetPostitive settings to turn off the „SaveWindowPos“ setting. In this case, open a Terminal window and type:
rmattr SaveWindowPos ~/config/settings/NetPositive/settings
addattr -t bool SaveWindowPos false ~/config/settings/NetPositive/settings
That way, if you get your „perfect“ window position, you can turn off the preference to save it in the future, and it will be preserved forever.
For the brave, you can manipulate the window rectangle directly through the „DefaultBrowserWindowRect“ preference, though you’ll have to manipulate a RECT attribute to do so. Good luck.
There’s the usual caveat to not make business decisions based on these preferences always being there in this form; they are subject to change in the future.
In a future version (probably R5), the secret preferences will no longer be secret: there will be some sort of UI to set all of them; though the more arcane ones will likely require an extra step to get to them, so as not to confuse non-power-users.
StyledEdit doesn’t provide a convenient menu option or hotkey to quickly toggle text to bold or italics. However, it completely supports these variants when they’re built into your fonts. If you’re typing in Humnst and want to create bold or italic text, just select your text normally, pull down the Fonts menu, and scroll to Humnst, then over to bold or italic. It’s a bit of a pain, but hey, you still can’t do that in Notepad or SimpleText!
You can configure bash keybindings to suit your needs by creating an .inputrc file in your home directory. Mine looks like this:
set convert-meta Off set output-meta On Control-f: kill-word DEL: delete-char "\e[1~": beginning-of-line "\e[4~": end-of-line
This lets bash accept eight-bit characters, use ^F to erase word forward, the DEL-key to erase the character to the right of the cursor and HOME and END to jump to the beginning and the end of line respectively.
For a more thorough explanation of what configurations are possible than described in the bash manpage, you can look at the documentation for readline. (Sadly, the manpage for readline is not included with BeOS.)
Bring text files over from MacOS or Windows and they’ll display improperly in BeOS, which uses Unix-style line endings. While there are a variety of tools available on BeWare and BeBits that will take care of this, you can fix these files yourself by using the built-in tr command, for translate. You can get full details on tr with tr --help, but if you just want to fix files fast, here’s the ticket:
To fix DOS/Windows text files, use:
cat original_file | tr -d ‚ ‚ > new_file
To fix Mac text, use:
cat original_file | tr ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ > new_file
Pete Goodeve (pete@jwgibbs.cchem.berkeley.edu) adds the following alternative method and explanatory text:
If you import a text file from the Microsoft world to use under BeOS (or in Unix for that matter), you are likely to be frustrated by the carriage-return characters that precede every newline in the file (a habit that dates from the days of mechanical teletypes). There is usually at least one ‚control-Z‘ marking the end-of-file as well, probably adding to the confusion. These characters may simply show up as rectangles in StyledEdit, or worse, may interfere with compilation.
It is very simple to get rid of these with the following command line, typed in a Terminal:
tr -d \r\032 <original-text >clean-text
(‚tr‘ „translates‘ characters, ‚-d‘ means to simply delete rather than actually translate, ‚ ‚ represents the carriage-return character — with the backslash doubled so that is recognized as itself — , and ‚ 32‘ — all three digits needed — is the code for control-Z. ‚original-text‘ should of course be replaced by the name of the file causing trouble; ‚clean-text‘ is where you want to put the useable version.)
By the way, if you have to convert a lot of such files, and you have xicon, a script is available that does the same thing via drag&drop.
Have you ever wanted to filter your BeMail into a given folder after downloading?
Although Be’s built-in Find function is powerful and can be run from the command line (see Queries from Terminal), the problem with querying BeMail is that you can’t query all the attibutes you might like (e.g., "CC:").
The following BASH script queries for my new mail and then greps it for a search word, in this case, "beusertalk." Then it moves the results to a target folder, in this example, into the "New" folder (/boot/home/mail/BeUserTalk/New/). Although it is far from being fool-proof, it more or less gets the job done.
The second problem I ran into was automating the process, so that the filter ran when I got new mail. After a number of unsatisfactory attempts, I finally decided to on the following solution.
I named this script "mailbox" and placed it in my "mail" folder, /boot/home/mail/. (You probably have a simlink in there now called "mailbox" that links to the "in" folder). Now whenever I double-click on the mailbox in the Deskbar, it runs the script instead of opening my "in" folder. To complete the process, if it moved new beusertalk mail into the New folder it opens it up and then the last line of the script opens my in box.
targetfolder=$HOME/mail/BeUserTalk/New/
searchword=beusertalk
movedmail=no
newmail=$(query
"((MAIL:status=='*[nN][eE][wW]*')&&(BEOS:TYPE=='text/x-email'))")
for i in ${newmail// /\}; do
# replace backlashes with spaces again
file="${i//\/ }"
# if file contain the searched-for word, then move it to target folder
if grep -ic "$searchword" "$file"; then
filename="${file##/*/}"
if [ ! -e "$targetfolder$filename" ]; then
mv "$file" "$targetfolder"
movedmail=yes
fi
fi
done
/boot/beos/system/Tracker $HOME/mail/in
if [ "$movedmail" = yes ]; then
/boot/beos/system/Tracker "$targetfolder"
fi
One word of warning: If this script ends up moving a bunch of files, it might take a second or two before your "in" folder actually opens. You can move this line to the beginning of the script, if you don’t mind watching your email disappear.
Update: This is a legacy tip. It still works, but OpenTracker effectively solved this problem long ago by offering to remember which volumes were mounted under the last boot.
If you have multiple BFS partions on your system, you may only want some of them
to show up at boot time rather than all of them. Solution:
Add lines similar to these to your system’s user-level startup script:
/boot/home/config/boot/UserBootScript
/bin/mountvolume -unmount /BeFast BeFast /bin/mountvolume -unmount /no name no name
The ’s are because these volumes have spaces in their names which need to be escaped. BeFast and no name are the volume names…
Hope that helps your clutter. 😉
You can turn your People folder into an instant Rolodex. Open the People folder, and on the Tracker’s Attributes menu unselect all of the default attributes.
Now go to the bottom of the list and select only attributes under the Person sub-menu. Contact Name, Email Address, Home Phone, Work Phone and Group gives you a good working list for all your contacts.
The layout can be arranged more by sliding column header to created the order you like. Of course clicking on any column header will sort by Group or Phone Number for easy browsing. Since Tracker remembers every aspect of every folder’s layout, your customizations will still be there when you return.
Enjoy!
If your CD-ROM audio cable is connected to your sound card, you don’t need a BeOS audio driver for your sound card to play audio CDs. Heck, you don’t even need to have the media_server or media_addon_server running 🙂
Open up a terminal window and use the „play“ program (as described in the tip Rip CDs from the command line).
So to start playing a CD you would type:
play (your device) 0 (track number to start at)
Just typing play with no arguments will tell you which devices are valid.
Alternatively, you can play CDs without an audio driver if you start them from within Windows:
There are two ways to establish a file’s type from the command line. The first is to use the addattr command, like this:
addattr BEOS:TYPE text/html filename(s)
This works just fine when the file or files in question don’t yet have a filetype. If they do, the existing type will be overwritten with the new type.
To achieve the same effect but with somewhat simpler syntax, try the settype command, which can be used with a -t flag to establish a MIME type, or with an -s flag to establish a signature. For example:
settype -t text/html filename(s)
Finally, you can use -preferredAppSig preferred_app_signature to change the preferred application with which the file is associated.
Settype is great for batch-changing type or preferred application on some criteria, as in this little script, which gives a new type to each of the resulting files turned up by a command-line query:
for f in $(query "query string here" ) ; do settype -t "new_type_here" done
[Editor’s note: Several readers have contributed to the expansion of this tip. Tip Server editors have not verified the accuracy of information here, though everything looks fairly sound.]
When building a multi-boot system, always install Microsoft operating systems first, then BeOS, Linux, or whatever you like afterwards. This is not a requirement, but will probably make life easier since most versions of Windows have a nasty habit of installing their own Master Boot Record (MBR), overwriting any you might have had in place for other systems. The problem can be rectified by reinitializing System Commander, LILO, or whatever you use as a boot manager. Nevertheless, it’s easier to avoid all of this by letting MS have its way with your hard drive first, then installing your superior operating system second, third, etc.
Note: A possible caveat to this is the fact that the OS layed down first will reside closer to the inside of the disk platter and will enjoy faster disk access. See Maximizing disk throughput for more on that.
Here are some more detailed notes on the subject from an anonymous contributor:
My own personal experience is that Microsoft’s products are the most fragile, and likely to screw other OSes up, so I always install them first. Then I try to do as little as possible to disrupt them, i.e., don’t muck with partitions if you can help it.
Here’s what I’d do (caveat: it’s been a while since I did this):
0. Plan it all out on paper. Figure out how much disk space you want to give to each OS, and for Linux decide how you want to manage your multiple file systems and partitions. Windows should go on the first hard partition of your drive. BeOS and Linux are both very flexible about where they can go; BeOS R4 probably has the edge on really big disks, as LILO has difficulties if your boot partition is above the 8 gig point on your disk (as did R3).
My order at home is:
Partition 1: Windows 95 (someday I’ll upgrade to 98, I’m sure)
Partition 2: BeOS
Partition 3: Linux root partition
Partition 4: Extended partition
Logical partition 5: Linux swap
Logical partition 6: Linux /home (or /usr, or some damn thing)
Logical partition 7: Linux /var (or /home, or /usr, or some damn thing)
0.5 If you have a partitioning tool, partition your drive now, before you install anything. Otherwise, just use the tools that come with each OS (I used Linux’s fdisk to do my partitioning, but it’s not a tool for the faint-of-heart. But if you, like me, are too cheap to buy PartitionMagic, it can do the job, destructively.)
1. Install Windows, make sure it boots.
2. Install BeOS, DON’T install Bootman when given the choice.
2.5 Make sure Windows still boots.
3. Install Linux, DON’T install LILO if given the choice.
3.5 Make sure Windows still boots.
4. Boot into the BeOS (using the floppy), and run Bootman at the command line. See http://www.be.c om/support/guides/installing_bootman.html for detailed instructions.
5. Reboot your system without the BeOS Boot Floppy, and use Bootman to boot into every OS, one at a time, to make sure they all work.
IMHO, Bootman is better than the Windows NT bootmenu, and it’s *way* better than LILO.
Adam McNutt (kancept at wrtech dot com) offers the following notes on working alongside OS/2 installations:
The biggest difficulty in installing OS/2 on the same machine with BeOS is that it doesn’t recognise BFS, and will destroy your BFS partition if you install it after BeOS. I’ve learned to install the OSes in the YEAR they came out. Win95 in 95…98 is based on the same code. OS/2 in 96. Be 4.5 this year, etc.
Kurt von Finck (kurt.vonfinck@earthling.net) adds the following 10-step program:
MultiOS Machines – Clean Install -10 Steps!
A couple of extra tips on configuring a multi-boot machine. A few caveats. If you’ve never run a partitioning utility before (DriveSetup, FDISK, Druid), don’t bother with these instructions. They assume a moderate understanding of partitioning, and aren’t for "innocent-bystanders." These instructions assume a clean install with all HD partitions wiped. It also assumes use of the Be OS Boot Manager, but LILO can be installed post-facto by penguinheads.
- Partition your drive first by booting from the Be OS cd (or floppy) and choosing to set up partitions at the opening install prompt. DriveSetup will open, highlight the drive you want to partition.
- Select Setup/Partition/Intel from the menu. Define your partitions (remember, NT and 95 cannot see drives/partitions greater than 4GB and 98 not more than 8GB). Initialize your partitions. Don’t bother initializing Microsoft partitions from within DriveSetup. Linux is happy with a Native and Swap initialization by Be, but let the NT and 9x installers format their partitions.
- If you’re installing NT AND 9x, install 9x first. Make sure to set 9x’s partition as „Active“ before exiting DriveSetup and the Be installer! When you quit the installer, get ready to grab that Be CD when it gets ejected and toss that Win9x CD in, you have about 4 seconds…
- When installing 9x, exit the Setup program (if it autoruns or you forget to boot to a prompt) and format the c: partition from a DOS prompt. If the command-line Win9x shell can’t see more than 2GB, you might have to run FDISK. DON“T change any partitions, but make sure to enable large disk support (FAT32). If you run FDISK, you’ll have to re-boot, then format.
- Create a c:windowsoptionscabs directory and copy the contents of [CD drive letter]win9x from your CD to this directory. Run c:windowsoptionscabssetup.
- You’re installing 9x from your hard drive now, which is faster and eliminates the need to have the 9x CD around when you have to update drivers in the future. Make sure you don’t install Windows to c:windows.000 (which 9x will prompt you to do). Just install to c:windows and ignore the warning about overwriting a previous install. Once 9x allows you to boot normally to a desktop, move on…
- Now you can install NT. Let the CD setup run and format the partition on which you want NT from within the installer. Let it do it’s thing and like 9x above, when you can boot normally to a desktop, you’re done. You might want to get service pack updates done, though.
- Now install Linux. The native partition should be seen, as well as swap, but you can re-format if you want. Just use the proper partitions/free space! I won’t get as detailed as Windows products because Linux users should know the drill beforehand! However, make sure to install LILO to the ROOT and NOT the MBR (if you install it at all).
- After reboot, boot from the Be OS CD. Install Be and choose to install the Be OS Boot Manager (bootman). Select the partitions from which you wish to boot and give them prettier names than the volume names (yes, you may use spaces). Reboot to dual or triple-boot geek glory!
N.B. If you have a multi-OS machine with Be OS’s bootman and you have to re-install a Windows product, it’s gonna kill the MBR. Some folks will tell you to run FDISK /MBR to restore, but don’t bet on it. Better yet, boot from the Be OS CD and hold down the Spacebar during boot. Select a different partition from which to boot and point it at the Be partition on the HD. Boot to Be and run bootman from within the Tracker (nice GUI!) by double-clicking on /boot/beos/bin/bootman. Re-install bootman!