OSUser: BeOS Journal #5 - RAM, LANs, and more on filetypes

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BeOS Journal #5: RAM, LANs, and More on Filetypes Scot Hacker, ZDNet 03/10/97 A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I intended to do something about the 16MB of RAM that shipped stock with my BeBox. Just for the record, 16MB really isn't a bad amount to work in for general purposes -- the system is relatively responsive, and I never got any disk grinding until I started trying to peg the processors with a bunch of simultaneous multimedia. The only thing that consistently caused disk thrashing was the Metrowerks compiler, even when crunching very small apps. But with all these graphics apps starting roll out, I thought it was time to install a more respectable amount of memory. The fact that my local computer superstore was having a yellow-tag sale on used SIMMs was a good incentive, and I found two 60ns (required speed for BeBox) 8MB sticks for 50 percent off, meaning I got 16MB for just over $50. Wow. Getting memory to work in the BeBox is a pretty technical process that breaks down into the following steps: 1. Open the box. 2. Stick the SIMMs in the slots. 3. Close the box and restart. That's pretty much what I expected, but it was still gratifying to have it all work the first time. I fired up BInfo (a utility that reports just about every technical detail of your hardware and software that you could possibly want to know) just to make sure -- yup, all set. I should note that it wasn't until I got home with the SIMMs that I noticed they weren't identical -- each came was from a different manufacturer and in a different configuration. Happily enough, the BeOS doesn't seem to care at all. BInfo now reports that about 16MB are being used and 16MB are free, with no applications open. Does that mean the operating system requires 16MB to run? That sounds like a lot for a lean, clean, OS. But the important thing to remember is that it's good to see as much RAM as possible being used -- after all, that's why it's there. Having the entire OS loaded in RAM means that response from the system is instantaneous no matter what you're doing. I suspect you could boot and run the system in far less memory, but you'd lose a lot of the responsiveness. I'll have to test that. From RAM to LAN Unfortunately, setting up a home LAN wasn't quite as easy as installing RAM. In fact, I still haven't got it working quite right. I had already gotten the box to connect over the LAN at work to other Macs and Win 95 machines via TCP/IP, and I thought it would be easy to set up a two-machine network at home with my 95 box, which already had a working NE2000-compatible card in it. Not so. I set up FTP and HTTP servers on both machines, and made sure the 95 box was serving to itself properly with its assigned IP address. I restarted the Networking applet a million times. I tried every accepted IRQ and base address on the BeBox. I tried both RJ-45 and thin-coax cable. But nothing I did would get either machine to respond to the other's IP address via FTP, HTTP, or telnet. Then Be's developer-support network came to the rescue. It turned out that I was using the "loopback" IP address on the Win 95 machine -- a special address set aside on all machines for communicating only with itself. Once I bound my Ethernet card to an IP address one digit off from the BeBox's, bingo! I had a network... or at least half of one. Now I can retrieve files via FTP and HTTP from the Win 95 machine to the BeBox, but I can't connect in the other direction, even though FTP and HTTP servers are running on both machines. It's like a one-way railroad I've got running here, which is sort of baffling. I've got a support call in, and I'll let you know what happened when I get it all working. The goal is to copy all 35MB of my Web site to the BeBox so I can start maintaining it with BeOS tools. In preparation for that, I also spent some time learning ve, the cryptic but powerful command-line editor ported from UNIX. And I started learning to use Chris Herborth's port of netpbm, a huge set of command-line graphics manipulation utilities that I was able to use to convert raw screen shot files into useable GIFs and JPEGs. It won't be long before I can do all the graphics conversion and manipulation I want with GUI apps, but I see this early gestational period as a good time to figure out how these things work at street-level. While I was busy buying cheap RAM, I also found an inexpensive internal 28.8 modem that I thought I'd experiment with (I've been using an external 14.4). I had read that internal modems weren't yet supported, but that a few people had gotten them humming with a hack. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to track down reports of those people's experiences, so I decided to go it alone... and got nowhere. DR8 is lacking any kind of centralized device manager or plug-and-play subsystem so far, and the Networking preferences dialog has only serial-port options available. So after I tried my three available ports, there weren't really any more options. Any suggestions? Let me know. Otherwise, I'll have to wait until March for DR9, which should support internal modems. Back on the software side, my continued shareware explorations led me eventually to a package called Geb's Goodies. The most exciting component of Geb's toolkit was a set of plug-ins called ChooseType and AutoType. I was ranting recently about filetype handling in DR8, and wish I had seen Geb's contributions to the situation earlier. These utilities run either as drag-and-drop applets or as Browser add-ons (add-ons are a great feature of the BeOS that allow developers to extend the functionality of apps or the operating system from a centralized location -- Browser add-ons show up under the File menu in folder views, or as right-mouse-click options). When you invoke ChooseType on a file that has no default association, it'll scan the file header and try to determine from available database entries what type of file it is. Drop-down lists let you choose the filetype and creating app from a lengthy list, then associate that file with the appropriate resources. The AutoType utility works similarly, except that instead of giving you the choice, it just looks at the file extension and tries to make its best guess (for instance, a file called foo.txt would end up with an icon for the default system editor after running AutoType over it). So I'm scanning through my system for the hundreds of files that have no association and setting them up properly. Now I can finally double-click a foo.proj file and have it come up in the Metrowerks IDE, rather than the OS asking if I want to open it in Edit. Hallelujah! It's not the perfect solution -- that'll have to be built into the OS itself. But it's a great stop-gap. Thanks, Geb. |
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