[Oberon] re. ALO query

eas lab lab.eas at gmail.com
Sat Jan 24 11:59:34 CET 2015


Michael McGaw wrote:-

...

>To launch alo in the future:
>
>1) log in as pi, and execute startx, bringing up the GUI.
>2) open LXTerminal
>3) type xhost + at the command line
>4) cd over to the folder where your alo release resides
>5) execute ./alo

Good!
--You wrote that <oberon.log showed relevant info>.
So I wrote "Paste the part of the *.log which shows the transition between
'seems ok' and when the problem starts. Perhaps it shows the problem cause."
But using the current amerikan-infinite-frontier/use-specailist=isolated-tools
mentality, you mailed an atatchment. Which also lost your previously stated,
opinion of <what the log revealed>.

With my cursed web-based-gmail, I'm then forced to:
1. go on-line to fetch and read the atatchment;
2. go on-line to request getting the <forms to use Send-mode>;
3. Unlike with ETHO, I can't answer your email and ADD <ethz> to the
  "To:" list, because gmail is designed per amerikan-WaltDisney-PrePackaged.

Before I was forced to use gmail [for socio/politico reasons] ETHO's mailer
allowed me to have all of the:
* received email/s;
* To-be sent email/s;
* Relevant text-files. eg. logs, manuals ...;
  open together on one-single screen, so that you don't lose short-term
memory about how the various documents are related, in a COMPLEX way.

==> THIS is what ETHO is about; but nobody ever tries to describe it.
Computing is NOT about computers. It's about how to help humans handle
complexity.

And related: wily [a killer-app] is also available for rPi.
wily is the public-domain version of <acme> in the plan9 OS.
Plan9 was designed by the boys who designed unix.
After they'd done unix, they said "we've learned a lot from that, so now let's
make a proper one". That they acknowledge the superiority of ETHO, in copying
its main features, says a lot.  Unfortunately wily has reversed the left/right
mouse-button scrolling direction of TextFrames; which is very uncomfortable for
an old ETH-user. I patched the C-source [on my x86:PC's wily] to reverse the
scroll-direction, but didn't succeed in fixing the rPi version yet.

Typically I have 50% more wily processes than LEO [ETHO for linux] running;
which tells how I value wily. OTOH, for the most complex problems, you need
ETHO's better fonts and the ability to color-code sections to text on the
various TextFrames to show the relationships.
  Color gives you an extra dimension, to represent relationships.

Since you got ALO running, why don't you take it out-on-the-road now for an
adventuristic/non-trivial task? Like probing-down into ARM's absolute memory.
rPi is amazingly robust [unlike my PC, which lost-a-newish-SATA].
I use rPi to hear TextToSpeech, with only a power-On/Off button [time
modulation]
to control the play-sequence. Ie. crashing it without unmounting the 'disks'.

Together with other ETHO versions, ALO has got an amazing <Decoder> which
enables examining down at the machine-code-level. Let's eg. find where/how
a frame-buffer is. The FrameBuffer version of LNO, and indeed the good old N-O,
enable one to avoid the monsterous X-system.

== Chris Glur.



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