[Oberon] Minimal hardware requirements

[muller at inf.ethz.ch]

"Ghost in the Machine" <cangelich at famvid.com> wrote:
> On my Compaq Presario with Cirrus Logic video I can do 1024x768 but the text
> is so small on my little 15" monitor I can barely see it.  At 800x600 some of the
> toolbar(?) header buttons are offscreen.  I'm guessing Oberon developers
> have larger monitors and have no problems with 1024x768?

This has been addressed in later beta and alpha versions by Paul Reed's 
modification of TextFrames (see ftp://ftp.inf.ethz.ch/pub/ETHOberon/Contrib/PaddedCell/)
and the addition of a TextDocs.Lib configuration for smaller screens.  It is 
still not optimal, and is one of the many issues to address for the next release.

> I've noticed that further development has moved to "BlueBottle" (whatever
> that is all about) which requires a minimum of hardware I do not presently
> have available for Oberon.

More information on Bluebottle is at: http://bluebottle.ethz.ch.  It is 
indeed aimed at more modern hardware (I would say at least: 200MHz Pentium, 
32MB, 1024x768x16).

For future Native Oberon releases I'd like to continue supporting older
hardware.  The oldest machine available to me is a 486dx33.  Oberon-0
uses 640x480x4, but I don't think anyone would like to work in that mode.
800x600x8 is probably the absolute minimum for Oberon.

Is anyone here using Oberon on less than 800x600x8?  Or less than a 486dx?
(Or would like to?)

> When I execute the installed Oberon System 3 native and try to configure the
> CD drive I see a note that I cannot use the ATA IDE driver for the CD drive if
> I am using ATA IDE for the hard drive.  AFAIK the CD is not going to be accessed
> in this version of Oberon which means the CD-audio player is kaput.

The 2.3.6 release used separate IDE driver modules for hard disk and audio CD
(a bad design for historical reasons).  The IDE driver was rewritten after 
that for more modern IDE (ATA) drives, but the audio part of the CD driver 
has not been done yet.  So the beta and alpha versions don't currently 
support the CDAudio panel.

> I was told by Pieter Muller that Alpha supported COM's 1,2,3,4.

Support for 4 COM ports in Native Oberon is relatively recent.  
According to http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/native/WebAlpha.html
André Fischer added this on 04.09.01.  His changes also allow
the port addresses to be configured arbitrarily.

You could try fetching V24.Mod and ConfigV24.Mod from:
  ftp://ftp.inf.ethz.ch/pub/ETHOberon/Native/Update/Alpha/Source1.zip
and compiling them, but there might be complications due to new 
interfaces that would be non-trivial to address.

In that case, waiting for the next alpha version to cleanly support 
FAT-based installation may be the only option.

> I was prepared for this contingency until I discoverd that Alpha
> will not install into a FAT file on my hard drive as the earlier
> Native will.  That was where I stopped.  It was begining to feel
> all uphill at that point.

It is probably possible with the current alpha version, but may be
tricky for a newcomer.  This will be fixed before the next release.

> The `trick' is to not force writing of files in order to operate Oberon and
> you could execute it from a CD.  If it must open/close configuration files
> at any point the CD would fail.

We have made bootable CD versions of Native Oberon and Bluebottle.
In fact, for Bluebottle this is the primary installation method.

-- Pieter

--
Pieter Muller, Computer Systems Institute, ETH Zurich / MCT Lab, Zurich
Native Oberon OS: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/native/