BeTips.net

The BeOS x86 install CD includes a directory called BeLaunch which allows you to launch BeOS by clicking an icon. Even better, it includes a DOS batch file called beos.bat which lets you launch BeOS without having to wait for Windows to load first.
Copy the BeLaunch folder to you hard drive, CD to that folder, and type beos. If everything is set up properly, you should boot straight into BeOS. The included notes say it doesn’t work on dual-processor machines, but it works fine on mine. If it works properly, you’re all set to boot into BeOS without launching Windows.
As your machine is booting, keep your finger on the F8 key. When you see the line „Starting Windows 95,“ hit F8 and choose Command Line Only from the menu to arrive at a DOS prompt. You can now CD to the BeLaunch directory and type beos.
To make it even easier, rename beos.bat to b.bat and move or copy the file into your C: root so you don’t have to CD to the right directory first. Alternatively, add the BeLaunch directory to your path.
To automate all of this even more, see the tip Create a Win95/BeOS Boot Menu.

Some people complain that it’s hard to distinguish pop-up menus with their wealth of offerings from a plain button with it’s single action. Visually both look identical…but.
The BeOS has a nice preference panel: /boot/beos/preferences/Menu which offers the ability to set the menu fonts and their sizes (somewhat). You’ll also find a „Color Scheme“ entry here which lets you set the background of the menus to a new color (the text will remain drawn in black).
Now for the tip: Adjust this background color in some pleasing way (purists might slightly lighten or darken from the original gray (r=g=b=219), while the more bold will do as I and simply reduce the green value to 29), you always have the option of the „Default“ button to get you back to the original.
Any new programs run after this will have the new looking menus, both pop-up and regular. This will make it very simple to tell buttons from pop ups!

If you’re in Terminal and you’ve just slid a removeable disk into its bay (like a SyQuest, Jaz, or CD-ROM), you don’t have to go digging around in the Tracker menus to mount the new volume in your filesystem. Be has provided us with a much friendlier version of Unix‘ mnt command.
Give your disk a second to spin up, and type mountvolume -r -l. BeOS will scan the system bus and let you know which volumes are either already mounted or are available for mounting. Then all you have to do is type mountvolume diskname where „diskname“ is one of the members of the disk list that mountvolume came up with.
The new volume will be mounted in the root — so if you had a Zip disk called BeZip, you would just type cd /BeZip to access it.

You can actually launch many GUI apps from the command line, as long as they live somewhere in your path (for example, in /boot/beos/apps/) . For instance, just type NetPositive or StyledEdit at the command line to launch them normally. The nice thing is, you don’t have to hunt around for the icon. Even better, you can pass filenames or URLs to these apps as arguments. For instance, to get to this site from the Terminal, type:

NetPositive http://www.betips.net/

Or open a pre-existing text document called „foobar“ by typing:

StyledEdit foobar

You can even open a second Terminal window by simply typing Terminal.
There are times when doing something like this could take over control of the command line for a while. For instance, opening a URL might require first invoking the dialer and then finding the site, during which time you wouldn’t be able to use Terminal. To avoid this, designate the task as a background process by following it with a &. For instance,

NetPositive http://www.betips.net/ & 

will assign a process ID and return control of Terminal to you.
Many apps will also print debug info back to the shell if you start them from the command line rather than from their icons. This can be useful for troubleshooting misbehaved applications.

In addition to the many standard Unix tools Be has included in /boot/beos/bin, there are also a couple of custom tools that make it easy to view and change a file’s attributes.
To view a file’s attributes from the Terminal, type listattr filename.
However, this will only show you the byte size, name, and type of the attributes. It won’t show you its value (contents). To see contents, use the Tracker Add-On AttributeViewer. To add attributes to a file type addattr fieldname value filename
For example: addattr huey duey foobar will add an attribute named „huey“ with a value of „duey“ to a file called foobar. To remove attributes, use: rmattr fieldname filename. You can get more details on usage by typing addattr –help .
Better yet, check out the following shell scripts that use this and other commands to process multiple files…
email_conv – Email Conversion Package, at
http://www.box.net.au/~jaq/ema il_conv.zip
[Editor’s note: URL no longer functional].
People Porter, at
http://www.betips.net/software/

Do you run a few handy programs (Workspaces, PoorMan, etc.) automatically every time you use BeOS? Have you come to think of these programs as an integral part of the OS experience? Would you rather not have them listed on your deskbar?
If you select any program and go into the FileTypes add-on, you’ll see a little checkbox marked „Background App“. If you close your app, check this, save it, and re-run it, you’ll notice that the app runs, just as before, but there’s no entry for it in the Deskbar!
This tip is also very useful for things like app-launching strips and docks (e.g. DeposIt, Launchpad or ToolDock).
NOTE: Make sure that you have some form of I/O with the program if you intend to hide it, and that you either are comfortable with ps and kill, or have some kind of process control software, when doing this, because if you hide the app, it’s not quite so easy to bring it back without the Deskbar entry! I turn the log file on for PoorMan so that I can check its progress, and I tend to never hide Workspaces, but I have Geb’s ProcessController for quitting it gracefully and allowing a restart if I do so by accident.
The single and multiple launch radio buttons are used to allow or prevent the application from launching multiple copies of itself.

If you want to reply to a message in BeMail, and quote only a portion of the message text, select the text you wish to quote BEFORE using cmd-R (or „Reply To Sender“ from the menu). The new mail message window that opens will contain ONLY the text that was selected, and it will be quoted.
This tip also works in BeatWare’s Mail-It.

From time to time, you may find it useful to have a text record of a particular directory listing. For instance, you may need to mail a list of all the JPEGs in a project folder, or you may need to send documentation of what’s going on on your hard drive to a software vendor. This is something that Tracker can’t do, but it’s easy with bash (Terminal).
Fine-tune your listing until you’ve got it right, then just use „>“ to redirect the output, then specify a path and filename. For example:
ls -l -R *.jpg > /boot/home/Desktop/jpegs.txt
This will look down recursively from the current directory, creating a detailed listing of files ending with the .jpg extension, then spit the results to a file called jpegs.txt on your desktop.