BeTips.net

In all likelihood, your BeOS system will never go down beyond the point of recovery. However, it can happen. If your system is so hosed that you can no longer boot, your only hope is to recover your personal data and do a clean install (which re-initializes the partition). But how do you recover your data if you can’t boot?
The answer is: Be Prepared. BeOS includes a copy of mtools in /bin, so you can copy files to a floppy disk if necessary, even if you can’t access your Windows partition. mtools work just like simple DOS commands, e.g.

mcopy filenames a:

And of course, nothing beats a good backup system. There are a couple of commercial backup solutions availalbe for the BeOS, though you can get a whole lot of mileage out of plain old zip. See Creating system backups with zip for details.
Start by booting your system from the boot floppy and installation CD. It’s important to use the CD so that you’re not just booting from the hard drive via floppy. Hold down the Spacebar as the kernel begins to load and you’ll get the option to Rescan for Bootable Partitions. Select this and let it find your CD-ROM (it may take a couple of tries). Boot from the CD and let it run until it gets to the License Agreement screen. At that point, hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D. This will launch DriveSetup so you can mount your hard drive (assuming it’s mountable at all). Note that the mount point will not be /boot, as that’s now occupied by the CD.
Close DriveSetup and you’ll be back at the Agreement screen. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T to launch Terminal and change directories to „/. Get a directory listing and you can see where your hard drive is mounted. At this point, you can copy files to a Windows partition or use mtools to copy important data to floppies. Remember that you’ll lose your attributes if you copy BeOS files to a non-BFS file system, so zip up your files first, if possible!
You have one last shot at resuscitating your installation before reinstalling. Copy /boot/beos/system/boot/* from the CD to your hard drive and try rebooting normally. If it works, you’re in business. If it doesn’t, at least you have your important files on floppy and can re-install with peace of mind.
If you suspect that your hard drive has corrupt sectors, try using DriveSetup’s Surface Test tool.

This one may be obvious, but some people don’t notice it right away. You can tell at a glance which of your icons represent links to files — rather than files themselves — by looking for the light grey underline beneath them.

If there are lengthy Terminal commands you find yourself typing over and over again, why not create a nice, easy-to-remember shortcut? Unix‘ alias feature is, of course, part of BeOS, and all you have to do to take advantage of it is to insert aliases on your /boot/home/.profile file.
For example, if you find you always want long, complete directory listings rather than the short, filename only listings provided by ls, add this line to your .profile:
alias ls=“ls -l -a“
The next time you launch Terminal, typing ls will remap to the long format. Another useful one might be an alias to FTP to your server, for instance:
alias ftb=“ftp mysite.dnai.com“
Use your imagination.

If you use the telnet built into BeOS to connect to machines on other platforms and are having trouble logging in, the reason is probably that Be’s telnet terminal type is set to „beterm.“ To fix it, try changing the TERM environment variable in the Terminal first:
export TERM=ansi (or TERM=vt100, or whatever works for you). You should also make sure the BeOS Terminal is set to use ISO Latin 1 encoding.

The BeOS demo CD is no longer available from Be, but if you’d like to know whether your system is ready to run BeOS before carving out a partition on your hard drive, just put a BeOS installation CD (either Pro or one you’ve created from Personal Edition) in the drive and boot from floppy or by telling your computer’s BIOS to boot from CD. If you can make it all the way to the first graphical installer screen, you’ll know that your motherboard chipset and video card are basically compatible. To test for sound, network, and other I/O card compatibility, you’ll need to go farther.
From this point, you can manually launch the rest of BeOS. After clicking Agree at the installer screen, hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T on the left side of your keyboard to open a Terminal. Type:

/system/Tracker &
/system/Deskbar &

and you’ll be running BeOS. Minimize the Installer – don’t close it, or your system will reboot!
Andreas (korp@bigfoot.com) adds the following:
As an alternative to launching Tracker and Deskbar manually, you can hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up TaskManager, and click „Restart the Desktop“ to have them launched automatically.

The Network preferences panel stores all of your settings in a text file: /boot/home/config/settings/network. If you need to establish a setting that the prefs panel doesn’t make available, open up this file, make your edit, save it, and then restart networking.
This can be useful if, for instance, you want to hack around with Richard Burgess‘ NAT’s hidden features.
Other than hacking around with hidden features, and perhaps learning how networking in the BeOS does its thing, this tip isn’t as useful as it used to be (when a lot of software installs required that you edit your network config file).

You probably already know you can minimize a window by double-clicking the title tab. But if you want to just get something out of your face fast without minimizing it out of view, try right-clicking on the title tab. The window will blink back behind all other windows.

If you have problems keeping your PPP connection alive, it may help to send out regularly spaced ping commands to keep communication between you and your ISP alive. Here’s an addition you can make to your ppp-script, as well as a small separate script that sends out ping commands whenever the connection is up.
Add to ~/config/etc/ppp-script:
——————–

if [ "$1" = "up" ]
then
touch /var/tmp/ppp_up
sits there
keep_alive &
date "+%D %T sess $3 started on $2 as $4" >> /var/log/online.log
MediaPlayer /boot/home/config/sounds/Startup Sounds/GoodVibesStart.aiff &
[ $( roster | grep "GimICQ2" | wc -l) -eq 0 ] && { Workspaces 3 ;
/boot/home/apps/GimICQ2/GimICQ_x86 & }
fi
if [ "$1" = "down" ]
then
if [ -f /var/tmp/ppp_up ]
then
touch /var/tmp/ppp_down
rm /var/tmp/ppp_up
date "+%D %T sess $3 closed" >> /var/log/online.log
MediaPlayer /boot/home/config/sounds/Startup Sounds/DarkStart.aiff &
else
if [ -f /var/tmp/ppp_down ]
then
rm /var/tmp/ppp_down
else
MediaPlayer /boot/home/config/sounds/System Beeps/BoingAlert2.aiff &
fi
fi
fi


Now create this script: /boot/home/config/bin/keep_alive (don't forget to chmod this to 755):
while [ -f /var/tmp/ppp_up ]
do
ping -c 1 -s 8 www.be.com
sleep 10
done

So these two pieces of code work in tandem to keep your connection humming along happily. You don’t need to launch any Terminal windows, press any Ctrl-C to quit, or anything else messy. Just connect and disconnect manually from the Deskbar replicant.

If your BeOS installation (or subsequent attempt to install a boot menu) goes horribly wrong for some reason, you may find that you can no longer boot into NT or 95. Reading the documentation thoroughly before you begin should help you to avoid this.
If things get screwed up anyway, you should be able to restore your original master boot record by typing fdisk /mbr at a DOS prompt. In most cases, this will return things to the way they were before. Note that, contrary to popular belief, fdisk /mbr does not restore a backup of the boot record — it simply writes the Microsoft boot record.
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!

If you’re able to connect to the Internet but can’t pull up any Web pages successfully, the problem is almost certainly missing Domain Name Server (DNS) entries. Without a DNS server, the browser can’t resolve the names of Web sites into their actual IP addresses. This is the same in BeOS as it is in all operating systems. Obtain a pair of DNS server addresses from your ISP and enter them into the fields in the Dial-Up Networking panel. Similarly, if you’re using a network interface card for your connectivity, you’ll need to enter DNS entries in the Network preferences panel.
Restart networking and you’ll be good to go. Note that you may need to restart NetPositive as well.