BeTips.net

Opening Invisible Directories

Not all directories on a given server machine are likely to be visible. This is especially true if your are logged on as a guest user. However, if you know the name of an invisible sub-directory, you can open this directory by pressing the Open button with no directory selected. Just enter the name of this directory when prompted. Assuming the directory does exist, you will be placed in this directory just as if it was visible to you.

Transferring Invisible Files

Not all files on a given server machine are likely to be visible. This is especially true if you are logged on as a guest user. However, if you know the name of an invisible file, you can download that file by pressing the Open button with no file selected. Just enter the name of the file when prompted. Assuming the file does exist, the download will proceed as if the file was visible to you

Unlike e-mail clients like Eudora that lock your messages into a proprietary interface, BeMail messages are individual files which can potentially be read by any mail reader designed to read plain text and a few attributes. This is a huge improvement over proprietary clients for a number of reasons, but one thing that may not occur to users immediately is that there’s no longer any reason for your messages to stay trapped in their original folder.
If an e-mail message is related to a report you’re writing, for example, why not just drag that message (or make a copy of it in) the folder where you’re keeping your report resources? There’s nothing special about your BeOS inbox — it’s just a plain old folder like any other. Change your way of thinking about mail messages (which may be hard to do after years of using other clients), and life gets easier!
Since BeMail messages use a funky naming format to guarantee uniqueness, you may want to rename it to something more intuitive.

If you prefer to use the Linux LILO utility over BeOS’s bootman, you’re nuts. But if you really want to, here are step-by-step instructions (note, however, that bootman does a great job of booting most operating systems, is much easier to configure, and is more visually appealing). It’s also important to note that even if you use bootman, Linux still requires the presence of LILO. However, since bootman is installed in the master boot record (MBR), LILO must be configured to reside in the boot partition, rather than in the MBR. You can do this by booting Linux from a floppy and re-running the LILO configuration utility. That said, here’s all you need to know:
in Windows:
1. extract zbeos file from BeLaunch (Windows boot utils for BeOS/x86).
in Linux:
2. copy zbeos into /boot/ directory in linux (there should be boot.b, chain.b, vmlinuz*, …)
3. backup your /etc/lilo.conf file
4. edit your /etc/lilo.conf file like this:
Hepcat719 (mjdavis@ilstu.edu) offers this lilo.conf to replace the old one; this should cause fewer problems…

--
bboot=/dev/hda
root=/dev/hda5
install=/boot/boot.b
map=/boot/map
vga=normal
delay=200
prompt
timeout=200
message=/boot/message
other=/dev/hda1
	label=win
	alias=w
	table=/dev/hda
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.15.ppp.rtc
	alias=l
	label=Linux
    vga=0x0f07
	read-only
other=/dev/hdb2
	label=Be
	alias=b
	table=/dev/hdb
--

5. run lilo -v to get verbose info what your lilo manager does.
6. reboot your machine
7. answer be when you are prompted by LILO: and it should work (at least it works for me here)

If you need to import the 8-bit BeOS palette (aka Color Lookup Table, or CLUT) into Photoshop or another imaging application on another operating system, try this:
1) Use the Screen preferences application to change your resolution to 8-bit. BeOS‘ 8-bit palette will appear as a grid.
2) Press PrintScreen to create a screenshot in your home directory.
3) Move the resulting TARGA file into your favourite paint program and tell it to grab a palette from the image.

Every time you run an ls -l command from within Terminal, your files look like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 baron users 85 Aug 10 01:42 Audio CD:5

You know from this tip that „baron“ represents the owner of the file and that „users“ is the group to which baron belongs. But until BeOS goes multi-user, the notion of file ownership is sort of an oxymoron. Still, to maintain POSIX compliance, BeOS needs to show someone as the owner. For now, that person is Baron, and you can see his record company and his bunny here.
If you’re sick of looking at Baron’s name and want to replace it with your own, look in /boot/home/config/boot for a file called UserSetupEnvironmentSample and rename it as UserSetupEnvironment. Open it in an editor and add these two lines:

export USER=yourname
export GROUP=yourgroupname

Save and close. Now either reboot, or type
source ~/config/boot/UserSetupEnvironment
Get another long format directory listing and you’ll see that you now own your own damn files.

Rather than viewing or grepping through your history file for a previously executed command, try tapping Ctrl+R. The shell will prompt you to type in a string, at which point you can type in the first few letters of an eariler command. Enter a couple of characters and the shell will show you the first command it finds in history that match that string. If the command displayed is close-but-no-cigar, type a few more characters to fine-tune the search. When the correct command is displayed, hit Enter to execute it.

If you have a 3-button mouse, you can use that third button in NetPositive as the equivalent to right-clicking and choosing „New window with this link“ or „New window with this image.“ This saves you the trouble of navigating the context menu that appears when right-clicking a link or image.
If you don’t have a 3-button mouse, you can simulate the third button by pressing Ctrl+Win while left-clicking, which is by the way a system-wide key combination.

When preparing partition space with a tool like fdisk, PartitionMagic, NT DiskAdministrator, or anything else, give the partition you intend to install BeOS to an intuitive name, like „BEOSHERE.“ That way the BeOS Installer can put the name in the Install Onto: pop-up menu, and you can be sure you’re not blowing away your Windows 98 (or other) partition.

The 24-hour trick suggested by Olaf van Es below has been made easier, thanks to the new Swedish Kit. Run the install-script and say no to the Swedish keymap (unless you’re a Swede, maybe 🙂 but accept the changing of the Deskbar and Tracker.
Warning! This works only with the R4.5 and R4.5.1/Intel versions of the Tracker and Deskbar. Attempts to run it on other versions will fail and possibly cause the Deskbar and Tracker to crash.
What follows are the old, manual instructions for those do-it-your-self’ers.

If you want a 24-hour clock in the Deskbar instead of the standard AM/PM display, you can do a bit of surgery on the Deskbar application itself.
Warning: Mucking around with applications in DiskProbe can be lethal to your system — don’t edit anything besides what this tip describes if you don’t know what you’re doing!
In Tracker, open up /boot/beos/system and make a duplicate copy of the Deskbar program. This will be your backup in case anything goes wrong. Next, drag the original Deskbar file onto your DiskProbe application. Hit Alt+F and search on the string: '%I:%M %p' (without the single quotes). Select it and type this string over the top of it: '%H:%M ' (without the single quotes). Whenever you edit strings in DiskProbe, it’s important to keep the number of characters identical — otherwise you could end up shifting the whole program code over to the left or right and breaking things. Thus, pay special attention to the spaces in the replace string above — copy it exactly.
Close DiskProbe, write the changes when it asks you, and the next time you boot you’ll have 24-hour time (alternatively, open a Terminal, then kill Deskbar with your thread manager of choice, then launch it again from Terminal by typing /system/Deskbar &.
After you’ve used the new Deskbar for a while and you’re confident it’s in good working order, you can delete the backup copy you made in the first step.

Bora Ayis (ayis@sasain.com.tr) adds the following:
As Olaf van Es showed how to change the time display from 12-hour to 24-hour, we can also change mm/dd/yy to dd/mm/yy by searching for %m/%d/%y and changing it to %d/%m/%y.

As powerful and amazing as BeOS queries are, they don’t do one thing that Windows Find does: search through text files for embedded text. Of course, you can still do this from the command line with grep, but if you’d like a GUI interface onto grep, a must-have utility is the TrackerGrep add-on.
Once installed in your /boot/home/config/add-ons folder, you can right-click any folder (or selection of files), enter a string, and hit enter. The add-on will build a list of files (in that folder and optionally also in its subdirectories) that contain that string. This is excellent for finding needles in the haystack of your old mail, for instance.