Haiku Tips

Haiku has native support for NFS (Network File System) which provides the ability to mount remote network locations on your local desktop. NFS support is native to UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS X systems and can generally be found on most network attached storage devices.

To mount an NFS share on Haiku:

1. Create the mountpointmkdir /Media
2. Mount the remote sharemount_nfs 192.168.1.10:/volume1/media /Media 0 0

In the example above, we take the share /volume1/media on my network attached storage server 192.168.1.10 and mount it on my Haiku system at /Media. After the steps above complete successfully, Haiku will display an icon for the NFS mount on the desktop.

If you’re dealing with lots of smaller windows on your screen, sometimes you want to cycle between them. Alt+Tab is too tedious in this case, and using Deskbar takes too much time. Instead, you can right-click on the window’s titlebar to send it to the back.

Due to the lack of proper VirtualBox Guest Additions, using Haiku in VirtualBox can often be difficult. One of the most-used VirtualBox features that Haiku doesn’t work with out-of-the-box is mouse integration (the seamless transfer of mouse input from the host OS to the guest OS).

Haiku’s new package manager has some interesting, useful, but little-known features. One of these is the ability to install command-line tools, applications, and libraries without knowing the name of the package that contains them. For example, if you wanted to install the “most” tool this way, you could run:
pkgman install cmd:most
But this syntax isn’t limited to command line tools. Applications, libraries, and “devel” packages for libraries can all be installed this way too:
pkgman install app:CapitalBe
pkgman install lib:libcurl
pkgman install devel:libcurl

BeOS and Haiku offer an interesting message-based approach to internal and external process communications. You can tap into this powerful interface by using the hey command. The hey command is too complex to fully cover here, but we’ll go over some basic and common usage.

General Syntax
The syntax of the hey command is designed to be very plain English in nature.

hey application verb [ specifier [ of specifier ... ] ] [ to value ]

Any recent Haiku nightly can be upgraded to the latest bleeding edge OS and port packages. The process simply involves changing your update repositories to the latest current package set.

All you have to do is add the current repositories:

pkgman add http://packages.haiku-os.org/haiku/master/$(getarch)/current/
pkgman add http://packages.haiku-os.org/haikuports/master/repo/$(getarch)/current/

After your system has been configured to point to the current repositories, you now can begin the upgrade process:

pkgman update

Once the update is complete, you’ll need to immediately reboot to activate any updates to the base OS packages such haiku, haiku_devel, etc.

Haiku includes a simple way to terminate misbehaving applications.
Dubbed “The Vulcan Death Grip“, the following process will kill any running application:

While holding the right Cmd+Opt+Ctrl+Shift, click the offending application’s icon in the DeskBar.

Welcome to the new Haiku Tips website! Here, we’ll post tips for Haiku users to get the most out of their installation.