Dockbert Lives?
Stephen B. - December 4th, 2005
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Dockbert, an application launcher/switcher similar to the MacOS X dock, may see revived development in the near future. IsComputerOn has reported that TeamMaui are looking for a C++ coder to continue Dockbert’s development. From the details posted, they plan to clean up the settings and existing features, as well as implement some new features such as a replicant drop area and support for 128px icons. It works quite well as both a launcher and a Deskbar replacement (I’ve used it alongside Deskbar for a few years now) but it doesn’t seem to compile with newer versions of OpenTracker, so an older version appears to be required to use Dockbert on R5. Hopefully, Team Maui will be successful in finding an interested coder to update Dockbert.
BitTorrent support on BeOS is somewhat limited at the moment. There exists a BitTorrent for BeOS package with a BeThon-based GUI, but it is several years old now and doesn’t work with many new torrents/trackers. Earlier this fall, a new multi-platform BT client called Transmission was posted on BeBits – it works with most current torrent files, but is currently command line only. Bryan Varner is reportedly working on a GUI for Transmission, but in the meantime I’ve written a short guide showing how you can get most of the benefits of a GUI BitTorrent client with Transmission and Jonas Sundstr??m’s ZooKeeper. Correction: I had incorrectly attributed the in-progress Transmission GUI to looncraz, while it’s actually being developed by Bryan Varner (of the loony bin). Mea culpa, ’tis fixed now.
ZooKeeper is a handy app that lets you save a shell command and run it on files by standard GUI methods like drag-and-drop and double-clicking. I chose to use it instead of XIcon because a ZooKeeper application can be set as the preferred application for a filetype. Once you’ve downloaded the files and unzipped them, open up the ZooKeeper folder and duplicate the ZooKeeper-O file (right-click on it and click Duplicate). Re-name the copy to something like BT-opener and then double-click on the icon; this is where you configure it. There are two text fields in the window, in the one called “Comand,” enter something like the following:
The first part is pretty self-explanatory, that’s the path to the transmissioncli binary on your system. If you have the transmission folder somewhere other than /boot/apps, you’ll need to enter the appropriate path to it (E.g., After you’ve entered the command, you should enter a path in the “Working dir” field – this is the folder where files downloaded by transmission will end up. Something like Next, we’ll setup BT-opener to recognize .torrent files as a supported filetype. Right-click on the BT-opener icon, click on “Add-Ons,” then click “FileType.” Click the “Add…” button, expand the “application” category (click the triangle beside it), then click on “BitTorrent File,” and click the “Add” button (see below if the “BitTorrent File” filetype isn’t present on your system). In the same window, click the radio box beside “Multiple Launch” – you can now close the BT-opener Application Type window and save the changes when prompted. Note: If you don’t already have the BitTorrent filetype on your system, it’s quite simple to add it manually. Go into Preferences (under the BeOS/Zeta menu), and open FileTypes. Click the “Add…” button, select “application” as the group, enter “BitTorrent File” as the Type name, and enter Once BT-opener is configured to support torrent files, you can drag any downloaded torrents onto its icon and they should open in transmission in a terminal window. You can also set BT-opener as the default application to handle BitTorrent files. The easiest way to do this is to right-click on an existing torrent file and then click on “Open With”. In the Window that appears, click on BT-opener in the list and then click the “Open and Make Preferred” button. From now on, double-clicking on a torrent file should open it in BT-opener / transmission. While this setup works quite well on my system, there are still a few improvements I would like to make. My default terminal size is much larger than needed for transmission, and while I have found some tips on setting the terminal window’s size via scripts, I haven’t had any luck getting it to work with the ZooKeeper command. Also, if you have multiple terminals open via this setup, there’s no way to tell which is which – it would be nice if the filename could be echo’d in the window / title tab. And last, you don’t get much control over where the downloaded files are placed – I would like them to go into the same folder as the torrent file, but all downloads go into a single folder. If you have any ideas on how the above improvements could be made, or If you have any other improvements to suggest, please EMail me or post in the comments.
Once upon a time – around 1999-2000, specifically – I was lucky enough to find myself present during one of the more exciting periods in the history of Be Inc. and the BeOS. A big aspect that made me enjoy being a BeOS user and enthusiast in those days was the amount of activity on the great BeOS-related news sites. In addition to informing the BeOS community, we were also inspired by the enthusiasm of editors like Scot Hacker and Dane Scott.
This gradual BeOS revival – and the availability of the BeOSNews.com domain name – inspired us to create a new BeOS news site. The site is in its infancy right now, but we didn’t want to wait any longer to launch and risk missing all the cool stuff going on in the BeOS world right now. So welcome to BeOSNews.com – we hope you enjoy it and feel free to post your comments! – Jason and Stephen, aslo known as the BeDoper guys
Surfing around the BeOS news sites, I ran across an interesting tidbit posted on LeBuzz back in September. Dane Scott recently put the Zeta media_kit through its paces and found some interesting results. It looks like there are some signigicant improvements in the Zeta media_kit, when compared to R5; in particular, audio inputs can now be accessed simultaneously by by multiple programs without freezing/crashing the media_kit. It’s unclear if these changes were made by yellowTab’s programmers, or if they simply polished up the new media_kit that Be was working on before going under. Either way though, the improvements are definitely welcome for those of us who use BeOS/Zeta for audio recording and editing.
BeZilla-related updates have been coming fast and furious lately. Just over a week after the previous updates, new builds of Firefox (for BONE, net_server, and Zeta) were posted to BeBits last week. In addition to the usual incremental improvements we’ve come to expect from BeZilla releases, this build also defaults to 72 dpi which should fix some font size issues with Firefox on BeOS. A new version of the QuickFox modification (version 2.3) was also posted last week.
I’ve been working off-and-on writing a review/overview of the Zeta LiveCD, but one topic in particular kept distracting me: the question of whether or not the demo CD can be installed and run from a hard drive partition. My experimentation ended up growing into an article of its own and the short answer is “no.” For all the gory details, read on.
The story is a bit different with the Zeta LiveCD. First of all, the installer is nowhere to be seen – not terribly surprising. It also appears that YellowTAB has limited the Zeta LiveCD’s ability to mount other BFS partitions. I tested by attempting to mount a partition on a local drive, and then attempting to mount a BeOS Max CD by putting it in my second CDROM drive. Neither mounted automatically, and every time I attempted to use Tracker’s “Mount” menu, Tracker froze and a trip to Kernel Debugging Land followed shortly afterward. No combination of “mountvolume” options in the Terminal worked either. In contrast, the hardrive partition mounted without a problem while booted from the BeOS Max CD, and the Zeta LiveCD had no problem mounting my NTFS volumes on the same machine. Next, I looked for good ‘ol DriveSetup. It isn’t present in the LiveCD’s Preferences menu or application, but it’s still there in /boot/zeta/preferences. So I tried to use it to mount the BFS partition on my hard drive, but I received an interesting error telling me that the file “ On a hunch, I mounted the LiveCD image on my R5 machine and queried both it and then my hard drive for Be Applications containing “bfs” in the name. Comparing the results, I noticed another file that isn’t present on the Zeta LiveCD – mkbfs. So it appears that the LiveCD is unable to read existing BFS volumes or create new ones. Combined with the absence of the Installer application, this pretty effectively prevents users from installing the Zeta LiveCD to their hard drives from within the live CD. Next, I tried a slightly more convoluted method – since the test machine has two optical drives, I booted from one drive with the BeOS Max CD and stuck the Zeta LiveCD in the second drive. I mounted the LiveCD and told the BeOS Max Installer to copy from it to my empty BFS partition. This appeared to work, but when I attempted to boot the partition (by boothing from the LiveCD, pressing space at the splash screen, and choosing the boot volume), I get kicked out to kernel debugging land with an error saying that the boot device could not be found. One thing I could not figure out was how the Zeta LiveCD is able to mount the LiveCD partition itself, but not other BFS partitions. When browsing the filesystem while booted from the LiveCD, I noticed quite a few (what appeared to be) mounted BFS images. Perhaps the BFS driver is in an image which is unmounted once the Zeta LiveCD has booted. From my hour or two of experimentation, it looks like yellowTab has been able to short-circuit at least the “easy” methods for installing the contents of their LiveCD to a hard drive. My reaction is mixed: I’m both pleased and disappointed. Pleased, because I can post about it without any fear of cease-and-desist letters. Disappointed, because it means I don’t get Zeta for free. Oh well. While some might be tempted to take the limitations on the Zeta LiveCD as evidence of YellowTAB’s “evilness,” I can’t really find any rational basis on which to fault them for it. While the LiveCD has less utility than the R5 Personal Edition, it’s obviously intended to be more of a try-before-you-buy demo. And the limitations make sense for a company wishing to be profitable and remain in business (debates on Open Source aside). As a demo, the LiveCD is certainly enough to give the curious a chance to play with Zeta hands-on. As the image file is only 540MB or so, it’s fairly easy for enterprising BeOS users to mount it and add extra software and files. I’ve done this with a few applications I use frequently in R5, in order to see how well they run under Zeta. And I say that not as a YellowTAB apologist (or customer, yet), but in an attempt to pre-empt tiresome, repetitive flamefests. Now that I have that out of the way, I hope to post a more general review of the Zeta demo CD (and Zeta itself) in the next few weeks. Keep an eye out!
The eldest (and grooviest) BeOS news site, BeGroovy, recently celebrated it’s 7th birthday. Wow, in Internet years, that makes them senior citizens – soon enough BeGroovy will be moving to Florida, taking up golf, and regaling its relatives with stories of the great CodeRed storm of aught one. In all seriousness, happy birthday, BeGroovy!
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