[Oberon] Bluebottle documentation

[Douglas G. Danforth]

Andre, Patrik, Pieter, Folks,

Issue: Bluebottle documentation and the "background of obviousness".

I look at the process of moving now to installing Bluebottle and
blanch (turn white).  Why?  Many of the terms are unfamiliar to
me.  I would not expect this (some but not so much) after nearly
40 years of programming.

In hopes of improving the Bluebottle installation process I will
go through the online documentation with annotated
comments which are meant to be helpful and suggestive of change.

The phrase "What is not said is purposefully left unsaid" (paraphrase of
Dr. Wirth) is fine, but only up to a point.  For introduction to
new areas verboseness is better than tersness.  However, it takes
a great deal of work to make writing simple and concise.  It is easy
just to through in the kitchen sink.

Let's start with "http://bluebottle.ethz.ch/index.html"
o "SMP-compatible" I deduce from context but is undefined.
The rest of the page is fairly clear.

Jump to "http://bluebottle.ethz.ch/instreq.html" (Requirements)
I have a great deal of difficulty with this page, not so much in
the specifics but "what is left unsaid".  Namely, where is the
overview saying "you need a great deal of hardware knowledge
to install Bluebottle".  Where is the statement that you can
severly damage or destroy your current system if you are not 
very careful? 

I believe that Bluebottle attracts users to the website first and
that Native Oberon is a secondary interest to the newcomer so that
assuming they know about Native is not a good idea.  

"Partition" needs to be extensively defined with examples given
so that the user knows what they are getting into.

"If you have a boot manager, logical drives in extended partions may also
work (e.g., with LILO, BootMagic, NT BootLoader)"

What's a "logical drive"?  What's an "extended partition".  What is
a boot manager? Why is it that the "may" work?

"LILO" needs to have Linux associated with it.
"BootMagic" needs to be removed and replaced with "PartitionMagic"
since BootMagic is no longer supported.

"The latest version of the ZipTool is also required to unpack the zip files. "
But now that I have a Native partition that has no access to the internet
how do I get "any" file from the web into the Native file space?
Copy to floppy and then execute ...??... what command from Native?

"Disk space: In addition to an existing Native Oberon installation, one free partition of about 100MB for Bluebottle. If you
want to boot Bluebottle, the partition has to be a primary partition on the first 8GB of the hard disk."

When I did Partitions.Show I was shown what partions already existed on
my drives.  Nowhere in the installation process was I given the option
of "repartioning" my drives.  If this is possible in one of the steps
then *here* in the Bluebottle documentation it should say "If you don't
have a boot manager then from within the Native installation you can 
repartion at step ... of the installation process"

More later.

-Doug