Pulling down the Be menu and selecting About BeOS will show you a few basic factoids about the hardware and operating system version you’re running.
But if you hold down Command+Control or Alt+Control and pull down About BeOS you’ll get a graphical display of the amount of RAM currently being used by the system.
The important thing to remember here is that you shouldn’t be alarmed if you see most of your RAM being used by BeOS — this doesn’t mean it’s a memory hog, it means the system is taking full advantage of the RAM you’ve got. In other words, this is a good thing, not a bad thing. This, in fact, is why accessing this panel is not as obvious as it might be. People are so accustomed to thinking that low memory usage equates with greater efficiency that people consistently thought the panel was in error, or misunderstood what Be was doing here. Memory readouts in BeOS are inherently misleading because of the BeOS memory model. So to avoid confusion, Be hid the panel.
There’s an easily solved problem with Apple LaserWriters (12/640 & 16/600). The problem (assuming that you have properly connected your BeOS machine to the LaserWriters in the same AppleTalk zone via ethernet & checked the „Enable AppleTalk“ box in the Networking preferences) lies in the name of the printer. The BeOS uses „/ in the pathnames to the printer, ergo the name of the printer cannot contain a „/. You will have to use the Apple LaserWriter utility software to change the name of the printer to something a little more amicable („Fishy LaserWriter“ works well for our 12/640).
If you’re having trouble with setting up a PPP or network connection under the BeOS, the first and best place to look for assistance is the BeCenter’s Internet Connection Guide, which covers ISDN, all sort of modems (including software modems or „Winmodems“), DSL, cable modems, LAN configuration, and more. The guide is very comprehensive.
In addition, Be hosts its own PPP Troubleshooting Guide , which offers information straight from the horse’s mouth
BeOS includes a port of the famous Unix „fortune“ command, which delivers a random pseudo-profundity when you type „fortune“ at a Terminal prompt. To get your fortune told every time you launch the Terminal, open up the file /boot/home/.profile and add these lines:
/boot/beos/bin/fortune
printf "
"
[Editor’s note: NetPositive 2 has much better cache-handling features. Upgrade and you won’t need this tip!]
NetPositive’s cache will get large if you don’t trim it, but who wants to have to check repeatedly? It’s possible to have the cache files erased on startup, but that can be a pain if you reboot often or don’t use your computer for extended periods.
The following chunk of code, when placed into your UserBootscript (/boot/home/config/boot/UserBootscript) will clear NetPositive’s cache on startup, but only when it exceeds the size in K specified as „max“ below, which is currently set to 4 megabytes in this example.
let max=4096 let size=`du -s $HOME/config/settings/NetPositive/NetCache | cut -f1` if [ $size -gt $max ]; then rm -f $HOME/config/settings/NetPositive/NetCache/* fi
You can switch to another workspace from the command line by typing simply:
Workspaces 4
This command will actually take you to workspace #5, since workspaces are numbered starting with 0. While it’s always easiest to use the keyboard shortcuts to switch between workspaces, this can be extremely useful if you want to launch various applications in various workspaces from your UserBootscript. For example:
Workspaces 4 Terminal & sleep 2 Workspaces 3 NetPositive & sleep 2 Workspaces 0
The sleep commands may be useful to give an application the opportunity to load fully before moving on.
To take a screen grab in BeOS, hit the PrintScreen key on your keyboard. This will create a bitmap dump of the current screen contents in /boot/home called screen1.tga. You can then open this file in any targa-capable image editor, such as ShowImage, for further editing, cropping, etc.
See also: Don’t hit Alt+PrntScrn
You don’t have to speak machine language to the Queries dialog to get it to do cool things like finding all of yesterday’s mail (for instance). Queries are really smart, and understand plain English where time and dates are concerned. All of the following words are understood and properly parsed by Be’s queries:
yesterday
today
tomorrow
Monday
hour
week
month
year
last
next
and more. That means you can do things like look for all the People files created on your system „last month“ or all the movies accessed since Wednesday, or all e-mails received „after yesterday.“
When in Terminal, typing ls will get you a list of the files in that directory. Doesn’t tell you a whole lot, though. If you want to learn more about your files, type: ls -l to get a „long“ listing. This will bring up something like:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 baron users 3488 Jan 21 21:30
Some of this is obvious, some of it isn’t. The first letter tells you whether it’s a directory or a file. If it’s a directory, the „-“ will be replaced by a „d.“ The rest of the block represents the file’s permission settings. Nine characters, which are actually three groups of three letters each. The first three are Read, Write, and Execute permission settings for the owner (which is always you, until Be implements a full multi-user system). The second three are for the group, and the final three for the rest of the world.
„1“ represents the number of hard links to the file. So, in:
-rw-r--r-- 2 arthurvl infstud 44 Feb 26 15:06 linkdemo
-rw-r--r-- 2 arthurvl infstud 44 Feb 26 15:06 linkdemo2
The files linkdemo and linkdemo2 are actually one file with two entries in the directory. The next group is the size of the file in bytes, then, obviously, the time and date stamps.
Typing ls -a will show you All files, including hidden system files. ls -l -a, or even ls -la will show you all files, including hidden files, in long format.
Thanks to Arthur van Leeuwen for details on hard links in this tip.
You probably already know you can switch between all your available Workspaces by holding down the Alt key and tapping the „F“ keys (F1-F12). But there’s another cool shortcut you can use to toggle between the last two Workspaces used — hold down the Alt key and tap ~ (that’s Alt+tilde — tilde is the squiggle character next to your 1 key).
This functions sorta kinda like Windows Alt+Tab task switcher — if you keep different apps in different Workspaces, you get basically the same effect.
Mac users — use the Command key instead of Alt.