BeTips.net

As of R4.0, BeOS does not include a a GIF Translator (NetPositive has its own GIF-rendering engine), meaning you can’t create GIF images with BeOS „out of the box.“ Until Be resolves its issues with the Unisys patent that governs the GIF compression algorithm, there are several ways to create GIFS on BeOS:

• Daniel Switkin’s GIF Translator will give GIF-creation capabilities to all of your graphics applications. Switkin’s Anime GIF animator also has native GIF-creation support.
• BeatWare’s e-Picture will let you create GIFs will all kinds of optimizations, transparency, animation, etc.
• Sander Stoks‘ Becasso will let you create GIFs, but without any compression (Becasso uses the GIF-creation code from netpbm, below).
• Chris Herborth’s port of the netpbm toolkit will let you translate between just about any two image file formats in the world.

netpbm, unfortunately, makes you do everything in two or more steps, turning your image into a ppm file, and then that ppm file into the desired format.
After getting netpbm installed and working, create some scripts for yourself that will reduce this work to a single command. For example, the script below will convert a file from tga to gif with one command. If you have a file called ScreenShot.tga in the current directory, just type: makegif ScreenShot.
Save the following text as a file called makegif in your /boot/home/config/bin directory, then hack variants of it to accomplish any translations you like.

file="$*"
tgatoppm $file.tga > $file.ppm
ppmtogif $file.ppm > $file.gif
echo
echo Created $file.gif
rm $file.ppm
echo Remove $file.tga?
	read yn
	if [ "$yn" = "y" ]; then
		rm $file.tga
	fi

If you have tons of bookmarks, NetPositive may take a while to make them available; the browser will still load quickly and work just fine, but your Bookmarks menu may be empty until the whole bookmark hierarchy has been scanned.
If you have more than a 100 or so bookmarks, try moving some of your larger bookmark folders to another folder or partition. You can then make a symlink to the new location inside your bookmarks folder for easy access (though this symlink will not appear in the bookmarks menu — you’ll have to open Show Bookmarks and dig it up manually).

BeOS‘ query engine works just as well from the command line as it does from Tracker. In fact, it can do some things Tracker can’t especially when combined with other shell tools.
The easiest way to build a query is to construct it normally in the GUI query tool, then use the drop-down to switch to „Formula“ mode. Select the entire formula and copy it to the clipboard.
Now, in a Terminal window, type query "", then backspace so your cursor is between the quote marks, paste from the clipboard, and hit Enter. Now you can do things like build your queries into scripts, or run the query results through other shell tools to create lists (e.g. create a text dump of all your Person files who live in California).

If you run BeOS queries from the command line, be aware that they will include the Trash. The GUI query applet does not do this unless you specifically tell it to, but it can be a problem from the command line, and there’s no way to turn it off. You may want to filter your query results to make sure you’re not working with Trashed items, like this: query "((name=="filename")&&(BEOS:TYPE=="text/plain"))" | sed /Trash/d See Queries from the Terminal for basics.

As of release 3.2, if you use the mv command to move a file or batch of files from one directory to another, everything works hunky dory. But if you move those files to another partition on your system, they’ll lose all their attributes! This could be disasterous if, for example, you wanted to move an overstuffed mail folder to a dedicated data volume. This can be avoided by simply using Tracker rather than Terminal to do your file moving, or by zipping your file(s) first.

Even if you aren’t connected to an AppleTalk network, you may still be able to use printers on an NT-based network. If there’s a PC set up as an NT Server and it hosts shared printers, add "services for Macintoshes" to it and the BeOS will be able to see the printers as Appletalk printers.
Time to make friends with the Network manager….

If you’re having difficulty getting your modem or ISDN terminal adapter to work with BeOS, check to see if the modem came with a software configuration utility that works under Windows. Use it to program the modem in Windows, then return to BeOS and choose „Generic AT commands / pre-configured modem“ from the modems list in the Dial-Up-Networking panel. There’s no technical reason why such a modem should not work with BeOS.

Many installation and i/o card problems stem from the nightmare that is Microsoft’s Plug-n-Play specification — a huge kludge designed to handle a situation that BeOS already handles well enough on its own.
If you have problems getting network or sound cards to operate, disable their PnP functionality. You can usually do this either by using a software-based configuraton utility that came with the card or by changing a jumper. Check the card’s documentation for details.
On many systems, you can also disable PnP at the motherboard level by digging around in your BIOS setup. Look around in your BIOS for a setting labeled „Plug and Play OS“ or similar and disable it. If you have supported hardware that’s not working in BeOS for some reason, this is probably your best bet.
Note that if you’re also running a Microsoft operating system, you’ll have to set up all of your devices manually after disabling PnP.

Every blue moon or so the Deskbar will crash. An easy solution to this potentially bothersome situation is to create a symlink to the Deskbar on your Desktop and place it behind where the Deskbar normally resides on your system (You’ll find the Deskbar in /boot/beos/system/). Then, if it crashes, its merely a matter of clicking an icon to resume your normal computing (assuming Tracker is still running ;-).
To launch the Deskbar manually, just type:

/system/Deskbar &

into a Terminal window.

In Gobe Productive, you can add textures by dragging them onto the textures floating palette. As described in the documentation, this requires that the application be active so that the floater isn’t hidden. Since the Tracker’s selection isn’t visible, you can only drag one file at a time.
To import multiple image files as textures, put them into a folder, and drag that folder onto a floating palette.