BeTips.net

Take a look at the contents of your /boot/home/config/add-ons/Tracker directory and you’ll notice that all of the files stored there end with -X. For example, mine currently looks like:

ExpandMe.x86-X
Reveal Original-R
SetPerms-S
TermHire-T
Tracker Grep x86-G
ZipMe.x86-Z

These extra letters represent the keyboard shortcut you can use to access each Add- On. On the right side of your keyboard, hit Alt+Ctrl+letter. For example, Alt+Ctrl+T will invoke the TermHire Add-On and open a Terminal in the current directory. You can change these keymapping just by changing your Add-Ons‘ file names.

Before plunking down your hard earned cash to build a better Be system, a little bit of investigation is worthwhile. It’s almost always cheaper to buy a pair of lower price CPUs than one high priced CPU, and with BeOS, get better performance.

Non SMP Capable CPUs

AMD K5

AMD K6

AMD K6-2

Cyrix 6×86

Cyrix 6x86MX

Cyrix MII

IDT C6 (Winchip)

Intel Celeron*

*[Norman Boyd notes: Intel says Celerons are not SMP-enabled, but you can run them successfully in that mode on an Abit BP6 board.]
The K6, K6-2 and K6-3, and the Cyrix 6x86MX and Cyrix MII all have the MMX instruction codes, which BeOS is slated to support as part of the OS in R5. (Current Wintel support requires that applications be rewritten to handle it, or use one of the DirectX drivers).
The K6-2 and MII both support AMD’s 3DNow! instruction set, which as of this writing (20 February, 1999), is unsupported by the BeOS, and may remain unsupported.

SMP-enabled CPUs

Intel Pentium

Intel Pentium PRO

Intel Pentium with MMX

Intel Pentium II

Intel Pentium II Xeon

Intel Pentium III

Intel Pentium III Xeon

For the Mobile Pentium MMX 266, see below. The Xeon and the PRO are the only chips able to go quad or octal mount, if you’ve got the money to spend on the hardware for them. (The Xeon is definitely not cheap. On the other hand, haven’t you always wondered just how many Quicktime movies it would take to bring an octal Xeon server to its knees?)

Systems which may support SMP

AMD K7

Intel Mobile Pentium 266

Many sources have reported that the K7, given its ties with the Digital Alpha electrical pinout, will be SMP-aware. We can only hope, as it shows (with the .18 micron fabrication process and copper interconnects) the potential for low price, and blazingly fast speed.
The Mobile Pentium 266 should be SMP aware, but as of this writing, I havn’t been able to confirm it. It is of interest as being the fastest SMP-aware Socket 7 CPU, if it is, and may be an excuse to squeeze a bit more oomph out of your dual Pentium motherboard.

If you’re already in Terminal, there’s no need to reach for the mouse to shut down via the Deskbar. Just issue the command shutdown with one of the following flags:
shutdown -r (restart after shutdown)
shutdown -q (shutdown now without asking if open docs should be saved)
shutdown -d xx (where xx is the number of seconds to wait before initating shutdown — this lets you time the shutdown, e.g. to shut down in five minutes, use shutdown -d 300).

Ever get tired of hitting pageUp and pageDown in a terminal only to get a beep and tilde? All you have to do is hold down Shift and then press pageUp or pageDown and it actually works! Now you can scroll up and down in a terminal without reaching for the mouse.

If your Web server returns logs in standard format (with each hit represented by one line of text in the log), you can easily use grep to extract useful data on your recent traffic. For example, I run the BeOS Tip Server as an adjunct to Birdhouse Arts. Since both sites are on the same server (actually, they haven’t been for a long time, since this site now runs on BeOS, but you get the idea), they share a common traffic log, but I like to follow the number of hits on just the Tip Server each week. Hits in the log look like this (without the line wrapping):
www.birdhouse.org 209.211.101.75 - - [18/Jul/1998:03:14:44 -0700] "GET / beos/tips/archive/tip103.html HTTP/1.0" 304 - www.dnai.com 38.232.165.5 - - [08/Jul/1998:13:10:57 -0700] "GET /~waxwing/ dreams/confirm.htm HTTP/1.0" 200 844
The distinguishing characteristic of the Tip Server hits is that all of them include the string „beos/tips“ in them. To sort out only those hits from a log file called waxwing.log, I use this grep string, remembering to „escape“ the forward slash:

grep beos/tips waxwing.log 

This spits back a list of Tip Server hits, and now all I have to do is count the number of new lines in this command’s standard output. There are a few ways to get this number, but the easiest is to run the output through the wc command, using its -l flag to count new lines. Thus, typing:

grep beos/tips waxwing.log | wc -l 

yields „3754“ or some other number. Since I get a fresh web log every week, I know how many hits the Tip Server got that week. If you have many such strings to check on regularly, write a script containing a series of greps and write the results to a report file.

This tip depends on knowing how to use Alert boxes from the command line – – read that tip first.
If you and a friend are both running BeOS, you can use alert boxes to communicate with one another. For example, telnet into your friend’s machine and type:

 alert "Loan me five bucks?" Yes No 

A dialog will pop up on his screen. If he clicks Yes, „Yes“ will be spit back out to your command line, and vice versa.
Here’s a screenshot on using Alert boxes, taken from the BeOS Bible.

There are a number of great ripping and encoding solutions available for BeOS, including RipEnc. And you can always save CD audio tracks straight to AIFF or WAV directly from CDPlayer.
But unbeknownst to many, BeOS also includes a command-line CD player and ripper that works from the shell. To learn its usage, just type

play

without any arguments. The command will report the path to your raw CD device, along with all allowable arguments and parameters. You’ll see something like this:

home>play
Usage:  play device [command [param]]
 Valid devices:
   /dev/disk/ide/atapi/0/slave/0/raw
 Valid commands:
   0 [n] - play from track n [1]
   1     - pause
   2     - resume
   3     - stop
   4     - eject
   5 n   - set volume to n (0 <= n <= 255)
   6     - current position
   7 n s - save track n to file s
   8 [c] - scan in direction c (f = forward, b = backward)

So to play track 7 on this system, you would type:

play /dev/disk/ide/atapi/0/slave/0/raw 0 7

because 0 means play, and 7 is the track number, fed to play as an argument. Of course you’ll need to change the path to the CD device to reflect your own system. To save track 7 to disk as raw audio, use something like:

play /dev/disk/ide/atapi/0/slave/0/raw 7 7 ~/data/sounds/filename.raw

Obviously, it would be a simple matter to write a script that would take the number of tracks on a CD as an argument, and rip the whole thing to disk.

If you have problems with NetPositive crashing when launched, you may be dealing with a corrupt settings file. Try deleting your /boot/home/config/settings/NetPositive/settings file. It may be crashing trying to write its settings out to the file before it quits. If that doesn’t work, try blowing away your /boot/home/config/settings/NetPositive/NetCache folder in case you’ve got a corrupt cache.

Since R3.1 will automount your Windows partitions, and because BeOS uses Windows-format TrueType fonts, you can have all of your Windows fonts available to BeOS without copying all of them over and duplicating hard disk space.
Just make a symbolic link from c:windowsfonts to /boot/beos/etc/fonts/ttfonts, rescan the cache, and you’ll have hundreds of fonts at your disposal.
Note: Don’t try this if you’re using ATM 4.0 in Windows. See this tip for details.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by the fact that the Home and End keys in BeMail go to the top and bottom of the document rather than to the beginning and end of the line (argh!!!), there’s hope yet — BeMail employs overrides to the system text engine to emulate a few of the more popular emacs key bindings.
The ^ symbols below represent the Ctrl key.
^e end of line
^a start of line
^b back 1 char
^f forward 1 char
^o open new line
^n next line
^p prev line
^k kill to end of line
^y paste kill buffer