BeTips.net

Should you do something silly and your screen settings get all messed up, just tap Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12, and you’ll find yourself back at the default resolution of 640x480x8bpp.
One nice feature that Be has thrown in the Screen preferences panel is the ability to adjust position without using your monitor controls. With the panel open, hold down Ctrl, then tap the arrow keys to move your screen in the desired direction.
Don’t worry about the safety of this maneuver: Modern monitors will shut themselves off if they can’t handle the instructions you send them. Just undo the action you just did and you’ll be fine!

If you find yourself writing an internet address often, you can alias it to a simpler name. For example, I telnet quite often to a server at my old university: mumrik.nada.kth.se. I have aliased this to „mumrik“, so instead of having to type „telnet mumrik.nada.kth.se“, I can now type „telnet mumrik“. This alias will work with any program using internet addresses, NetPositive too, though it may be easier to make a bookmark there. Here is how you do it:
Edit the file /boot/beos/etc/hosts, create it if it isn’t there already.
Add entries with this format:
111.111.111.111 machine.domain.top alias
For example, my mumrik alias looks like this:
130.237.226.10
mumrik.nada.kth.se mumrik
I think you must have an endline after every entry, or it won’t be recognized.

While BFS is pretty stable, your physical hard disk is still subject to heat, wear, and tear. It’s possible for bad blocks to occur, and if they occur in the wrong place, you could be up the creek. If your system stops booting, try the techniques listed in Distaster Recovery. You should be able to run DriveSetup on your hard drive even if it won’t mount your partition.
Run the Surface Scan from DriveSetup to check for block integrity. Even if the test makes it all the way through without finding errors, it will move any data found in bad blocks to new blocks, which could mean that you regain the ability to boot normally. Almost like having a little built-in Norton Utilities. Certainly worth a try before reinitializing your drive.

In R4.5, Be includes detailed documentation on building custom initialization strings. You can access this documentation by clicking the „AT Commands…“ button in the Modem panel in the DialUp-Networking Preferences. Below are the pre-R4.5 instructions.
When you set up a modem under MS Windows, settings such as modem speaker volume and enable/disable call waiting are taken care of for you. Under BeOS, you need to understand the modem initialization string to control these features. The best place to look for a complete table of init string options is always in your modem’s manual or on the vendor’s web site. Here are some common ones that apply to US Robostics modems.
A new entry in /boot/beos/etc/modems.ppp might look like:

3COM_V90_mystring AT&F1S0=2L0S32=34

Explanations:
AT&F1 means: load default modem hardware configuration.
S0=2 means: modem answer incoming call after 2 rings.
L0 means: modem speaker set at low volume. To turn off speaker, use M0.
S32=34 means: diable X2 protocol, enable V.90 protocol.
Note: For every USR modem, the string AT&F1 should work fine, and you can append some or all of these options as you seee fit.
For more information, please go to http://consumer.3com.com/support/, select his/her product, and select „manual“ button. Download the .PDF technical reference file for full information about the initilization string.

Not only can symlinks launch documents and applications elsewhere on your system, but if you create a link to a folder, it will work as a „drag-and-drop tunnel,“ and any items dropped on the link will be magically transported to the destination folder. Let’s say you’re working on a project that you’re storing in /boot/home/projects/ reports/school/bebox/ and you’re taking a lot of screenshots for it.
Every time you take a screen, a targa file appears in your home directory, and you’ve got to move it to its destination later. Just create a link in your home directory to the remote directory, then drag your targas onto the link to move them.
This, by the way, can make for a great quick-n-dirty installation system that’s user- friendly and requires no scripting or programming.

Update: It’s now possible to install the real man utility, making this tip obsolete for some users.
Using the BeOS terminal environment can be frustrating when you can’t remember how a command works. BeOS includes a small collection of man pages formatted in HTML. This tip sets up the familiar (to UNIX folks) man for shell command documentation.
You can add the following shell function to your environment by creating or adding to your /boot/home/.profile. It simply looks for html files in the directory /boot/beos/documentation/Shell Tools/man1, and attempts to launch NetPositive to view them. Feel free to set up and substitute lynx for a terminal-only solution.

function man ()
{
  if test -f /boot/beos/documentation/Shell Tools/man1/$1.html ; then
    NetPositive file:///boot/beos/documentation/Shell Tools/man1/$1.html
  else
    echo "No manual entry for $1"
  fi
}

BeOS doesn’t include a free-standing icon file format — all BeOS icons live inside file attributes, so you can’t have an icon that’s not attached to another file. If you want to distribute icon packs with other BeOS users, just make a bunch of zero-byte files, such as empty text documents or empty folders. Give each of them one of your icons. Put them all in a folder, and zip up the folder. Since zip preserves attributes, it preserves your icons. Other users can simply open up the filetype dialog for each iconized file and drag or paste it into another filetype dialog of their choosing.
For an example of this technique in action, check out the Jean-Paul Sartre BeOS Icon Action Pack.
If you want to create a bunch of blank icon files at once, you can just tap Alt+N in the Tracker a bunch of times, or open a Terminal and type something like:

touch icon1 icon2 icon3

However, the emerging standard seems to be that icons have a filetype of application/x-vnd.Icon, so it may be easiest to just create one blank file with this type, and then tap Alt+D to create duplicates of the same type.

There are several ways to create BeOS icons from image files. Three methods are described here.

Via Icon-o-Matic

Double-click the icon well in any FileType panel. Once open, just drag any image for which you have an installed Translator into the main image area and it will be scaled appropriately. Then click the mini-icon well and drag the image in again, to make sure you’ve got both large and small icon sizes saved. Do a little touch-up if necessary, save, and you’re all set.

Via Thumbnail

Install a copy of Thorsten Seitz‘ excellent ThumbNail. Run any image for which you have an installed Translator through ThumbNail and it will create an icon from that image, then store that icon in that file’s icon attributes.

Image file icons created with Thumbnail

Via Photoshop

In Photoshop for MacOS or Windows, size your image to exactly 32×32 pixels and save it in .RAW format. Resize it again in 16×16 format and save under a different name. Move both raw files to your BeOS machine.
Create a new file, right-click it and choose Add-Ons | FileType. When the dialog pops up, drag your large image into icon field. It should change to the new icon. Then drag in the small version. You won’t get any feedback here, but it will have also been imported (you need the small version for Tracker list views).

[Editor’s note: The Magnify app is much improved in R4, and this tip is no longer necessary, though it does still work. It may potentially be useful from within scripts, etc.]
If Magnify’s 32×32 window is too large or too small, try launching it from the command line with a size argument, e.g.:

Magnify 4
Magnify 64

Magnify’s zoom factor is 8 pixels to one; this ratio is not customizable from the command line.

If you just came from the Windows (or non-Mac/BeOS) world and are confused about having to re-learn all those ’standard‘ keystrokes… I can’t help you.
BUT — you can turn the liability into an asset by also learning the Dvorak keyboard! The Dvorak keymap is built right-into BeOS — just select it in the Keymap preferences panel (or buy a dedicated Dvorak keyboard). Your fingers will thank you.
For more information, start at Yahoo!’s Dvorak Keyboard Resources.