[Oberon] Re: Booters for ETH-Oberon ?

[Chris Glur]

peasthope at shaw.ca wrote:
> cg> ... OLPC ...
> 
> Why not get an early model Pentium laptop or 
> recent model desktop?  Consumers discard them.

Yes, I've got several P6-type scrap boxes, but I want a 
minimum power portable for when I'm 'out of the office' 
and also I don't just restrict myself to what I personally 
need. 

> cg> How long does your CF take to boot ETH-Oberon ?
> 
> Seconds.  Will try to remember to time it this 
> weekend and answer on the Web page.

That's what I'd expect, so I'm surprised that the OLPC
which as you would know, as a MIT project hopes to sell 
millions to 3rd world governments for educating their kids,
in places where there's no mains electricity supply; needs
2 minutes to boot it's minimum version of linux.

> The computer engineering for CF is thanks to 
> J. Sedlacek, by the way.

Good, that's how it's supposed to work: collaborative
sharing of knowledge, by shared documentation.

sven.stauber at inf.ethz.ch wrote:
> The assembler source code of the Oberon boot loader, MBR 
> and Boot Manager are contained in the AosBuild.zip package 
> (http://www.bluebottle.ethz.ch/downloads/crazy/AosBuild.zip). 
> If you run AOS (or Oberon in AOS), you can use the stand-alone 
> assembler PCAAMD64.Mod to assemble the code.

Thanks.

 Aubrey.McIntosh wrote:
> I have an ongoing interest in boot sectors and booting Oberon (V4
> mostly).  This interest spans all of the process beginning when
> execution is transferred to 7C0:0000 until the user has control with a
> mouse click with an application on the screen.  It includes PXE.  
> I have done some reading related to this interest.
> 
> I ran AOS from CF on the CV860A
> <http://www.lex.com.tw:8080/product/CV860A.htm> for more 
> than a year, with reboots.  This machine did not have any moving parts.
> 
> I am currently engaged in a project to put an Oberon application on a
> FLASH based SoC, the PIC32, although I don't know whether this will be
> V4 based, or Component Pascal based.  In support of this process, I am
> studying the BootLoader and the power on starting sequence in this
> processor.  As an aside, I am really enthusiastic about the MIPS
> processor since I learned about the PIC32.  MIPS turns out to be in
> the WiFi router next to my desk, and a host of other places.

If that's from the PIC family of Microchip I've got bad experience.
I hate it when they take a good wheelbarrow and extend it 
into a cadilac.  They started out with minimum 14pin devices,
when the  PICforth compiler was appropriate for a device 
which I was considering.  Then they kept on upgrading, so
the whole initial idea became absurdly inappropriate.

> What do you hope to do?

I believe in part of the ideas of OLPC: that low power computing
can revolutionise 3rd world education and hence development 
the same way as the cell phone *HAS* helped development.

How do you generate the non-86x object code from oberon source ?

> I do note, as an aside, that the state of an Oberon system seems to 
> be reflected in the linkages available off of Modules.module.  If you
> store this to disk on a native machine, and re-read it at boot time,
> you should be back where you were.

OK, does that 'state' include the tree of displayed viewers or 
just which modules were loaded at the time ? If I wanted to 
'do' something that required a module that wasn't currently 
loaded, it would just auto-load.  What matters to continue
at my pre-power-down state is my 'data': equivalent to 
which-files-were-open in other OSs ? 

soren.renner wrote:
> This discussion reminds me of how nice NO was. 
> I develop in Bluebottle now -- but I really miss the mouse chords. 
> Maybe they could be added back -- the modeless UI , might be 
> difficult but chording for cut/paste with  a  buffer ?  
> Also greatly missed is  TextPopups.

Thanks for mentioning that.
I half suspected that BB/AOS had lost the main benefit of 
S3 [for me].  You've saved me the waisted effort of trying BB.

== Chris Glur.