BeTips.net

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() { […]

This tip builds on the information in the tip Title your Terminal. If you’d like the title of your Terminal windows to reflect the current working directory, you need to do two things: 1) Edit your .profile file (in your home directory) and add the line PROMPT_COMMAND=~/config/bin/term 2) Create a file called term (or use […]

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 […]

Update: The bulk of this tip is preserved for posterity, but in the editor’s humble opinion, is unnecessarily complex. If all you want to do is burn audio CDs, BeOS includes the „CDBurner“ application, which makes the process incredibly easy. CdManager is also excellent. If you want to burn data CDs, I recommend downloading WriteCD […]

If you find yourself frequently needing to get to a specific directory location in the shell and you’re already looking at it in the Tracker, download a copy of Sander Stok’s Summon add-on. Install it in ~/config/add-ons/Tracker and rename it with the letter of the hotkey you want. If you name to be able to […]

Update: All of the principles in this tip still apply, but you can get most or all of this done much more easily with FlipSide’s MP3 Army Knife. Since you’ll probably soon be using a BeIA-based home stereo component to play all of your MP3s through a central home server, you want to make sure […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]