BeTips.net

With the exception of Pineapple, most of the BeOS newsreaders have serious problems with stability and functionality. While not as fancy, the command-line client slrn is 100% stable, very fast, and has great hotkeys. Unfortunately, setting up slrn can be a little tricky if you’re not familiar with command-line apps. Here’s what you need to […]

Open /boot/home/.profile and scan down until you find a line that reads: PS1=’$ ‚ Edit it so that it reads PS1=’$PWD> ‚ The next time you open up Terminal, the prompt will report the current directory, no matter what you do. PWD is a Unix/Be command meaning Print Working Directory — you’ve just told Terminal […]

To get a nice printout of which libraries are required by a given application, cut and paste the text below into your .profile. Once you’ve done that, you can just type getlibs appname (where appname is the name of the application you want to investigate) in your Terminal to find the needed libraries. getlibs() { […]

While the official place to put executable files that you’ve added to the system yourself and want to be accessible from any Terminal prompt is /boot/home/config/bin, many people who work with a lot of scripts find it useful to store them in a separate directory, to keep them separate from the uneditable, actual binaries living […]

The enormous GeekGadgets collection includes a ton of BeOS ports of common Unix tools. Unfortunately, these tools assume you know how to bootstrap yourself — the Amiga-centric documentation they come with won’t give you the slightest clue how to get them running on BeOS. Here’s a crash course: 1) Create a GeekGadgets subdirectory in /boot/apps […]

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 […]

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 […]

Telnet’ing to PINE on a remote server does not work with Terminal, since the environment variable TERM is set to ‚beterm‘, and PINE does not recognize this kind of terminal. This can be solved by typing export TERM=vt100 in the Terminal, or adding it to /boot/home/.profile. Depending on your Terminal needs, you can also use […]

If you type a command into Terminal, where does it look for the program you’ve specified? The system looks in a set of directories established in your PATH statement. A number of directories are specified in the default path as soon as you boot BeOS. But what if you want to add to that list? […]

By adding a few lines to /boot/home/.profile, you can extend the functionality of the bash shell in BeOS. For instance, you can use all those freaky ANSI tags to make the terminal prettier. Paste the following block into your ~/.profile (note that this stuff also works for bash on other platforms that support ANSI color […]