No subject

1.  The CD boot code.
2.  A common network card driver.
3.  A basic VGA driver, and advanced installer support.
4.  Some type of file storage ability, whether RAMdisk, floppy, or
    perhaps FAT support.  Diskless would probably be advantageous.
5.  Attention to the sections of ECMA-119 and related documents that
speak to multi-hardware boot environment support in CD-ROMs.  

All of these additional components other than 5 seem to be available
in the Oberon community today, principally in the
S3/ETH/Native/Bluebottle setting.


Why V4 and not Bluebottle?

1.  I have produced an entire doctoral dissertation using V4 for the
entire production environment:  data analysis, and document processing. 
I can speak with confidence and authority that it is stable and
suitable.  I have not heard a similar application claim from the S3
side (listening ...)

2.  Bluebottle, on the face of it, it is not "bulletproof."  
        Interesting, yes.  
        Important, yes.  
        Receiving much of my time, yes.  
        Attractive because of color and motion, yes.
        Bootable from CD-ROM as is, yes.
        Suitable for mass distribution?
        
        
What else is nice, given that a bootable system is demonstrated?

1.  I am convinced that a 50 Mb download is a very large "activation
barrier" that prevents more experimental use of Oberon

I would make the boot core of the system contain a "net files"
module.  This 80-100 Kb core could be downloaded in a very short
time, and pull in additional modules to local storage on an as needed
basis.

Subsequent boots would find an increasing inventory of relevant files
on local storage.  Individual files instead of a single image would
be on well known distribution servers.

With clever design, version updates would be painless using this
incremental, intelligent transfer.

2.  Micro-notary of files using PGP and the web of trust would mitigate against viruses.

3.  CD-ROM archival is nice.  I would like to explore an architecture that allows a first or new track to be written to the CD-ROM from the local storage at any moment in time.  Mark the files on local storage for deletion on demand.