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 […]

There is a simple way to share your bookmarks between Mozilla for BeOS and Windows (this works for Phoenix too). Mount your Windows partition and navigate to the Application Data directory for the version of Windows you are using. Windows 2000/XP: /[windows partition]/Documents and Settings/[username]/Application Data/ Windows 9x/ME: /[windows partition]/[windows directory]/Application Data OR /[windows partition]/[windows […]

Create a BeOS Personal Edition CD that’s as slick as Pro’s CD By Jess Tipton Draft version 1.1 as at August 29, 2002 Edited by Chris „Technix“ Simmons. Edited for BeOS Tip Server by Cyan Helkaraxe. Introduction This article by Jess Tipton and edited by Chris „Technix“ Simmons will guide you through the process of […]

You can use your choice of Tracker add-ons to quickly open a Terminal on the current Tracker window, but what if you want to go the other way and open a Tracker window on the Terminal’s current directory? There are a number of ways to do this, but the easiest way I’ve found is to […]

Tired of having the words „Welcome to the Beos Shell“ greet you every time you launch the terminal? Navigate via Tracker to /boot/beos/etc/profile. You’ll need to make this file writeable. Right-click and select Get Info, then click on the little arrow at the lower left next to „Permission.“ Make the file Writable by Owner. Next, […]

If you are bored of the plain black and white colour file listings when you type „ls“ in your Terminal, you can actually make the ls command colour the files based on their type (not mime type, but directory, symlink, etc) and extension. If you add the switch -C or –color to the ls command […]

If you want to apply a custom layout of attributes and sort orders to existing folders that currently have generic layouts, you’ll need some query templates — one for each filetype you want a custom Tracker layout for. By default, you should have several of these installed already — take a look in ~/config/settings/Tracker/DefaultQueryTemplates. Some […]

You can have the title bar of your Terminal session always report the current working directory. For example, if the current directory is /boot/home/Words, it will say that in the Terminal session’s title tab. Just add the following function to your /boot/home/.profile: function path_title() { echo -en „33]2;`pwd`07“ } PROMPT_COMMAND=path_title Open a new Terminal and […]

BeOS queries can make your life easier in ways you might not expect. This method uses queries to allow you to find and launch any file quickly, regardless the current directory. For example, if you’re sitting in a Terminal at /boot/home and want to edit a file living in /boot/home/projects/reports/March/daily… you don’t have to cd […]

After editing your .profile or UserSetupEnvironment, you need to „source“ or basically „re-read“ the file’s contents into memory in order for the changes to take effect. I’m lazy, and „source“ is 5 letters too many. Just type: . .profile (or . ~/.profile if you are not in your home dir) instead of source .profile Isn’t […]