Category Archives: Beos

Back in the early-mid 90s, I ran The BeOS Tip Server from a BeOS server in my home, using the Be Filesystem (BFS) as the database, since BFS provided completely customizable attributes for custom filetypes.

The code was written in Perl (what was I thinking?) and is an embarrassment by today’s standards, but the whole project was a bit of a miracle at the time, and I’m happy to have done it. You can read more about the TrackerBase project here.

I stopped using BeOS when the project was killed, and never went down the Haiku path. I recently discovered the original TrackerBase.pkg installer file, and found that I couldn’t open it on the Mac. Fortunately, a current Haiku user came to my rescue (thanks @humdinger!) and unpacked it for me. I’m posting it on github just to keep the code alive and accessible to anyone wants it.

Download/Source

In the BeOS glory days, the RipEnc shell script was the premiere MP3 ripping/encoding solution, and made full use of the database-like BeOS filesystem to store MP3 metadata. After I left the BeOS world, others took over the script. The current version is available at BeBits. The version here is the last one created and maintained solely by me.

Two downloads are available – a .pkg installer for people still running BeOS/Haiku, and a text version for people without access to BeOS but curious about the command line tools BeOS provided to manipulate the filesystem database.

Download ripenc_26a.pkg in BeOS pkg format

Original source code (github)