[Oberon] Re: A query about Oberon and PICs

[Aubrey McIntosh]

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Hi Les

I'd be glad to help you try to get Bluebottle going in your environment.  I 
think it would be better overall to do it on the Bluebottle list, so that 
it is archived, it will help others, and if I say something stupid someone 
else can speak up before you lose too much time.

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Bluebottle machines seem to fall into two categories:  They boot 
immediately with no need for help, or they are truly difficult.  I have 
both kinds of machines in my home lab.  There also seem to be some troubles 
with people who try to boot from a Linux system, but have some or other 
detail on their MBR not quite compatible.  As I know next to nothing about 
Linux, I didn't remember much about these situations.  Also, it seems that 
everyone has their favorite Boot Manager and they don't like to receive 
advice recommending another one.

I recommend trying these situations in this order:

1.  Boot from the Crazy-Fresh CD image.  This almost always goes ok, and 
doesn't modify your hard disk at all.  Some of the applications are zipped 
up and not available for use.  From power up to operational is only about 
45 seconds.  This environment lets you do some diagnostics and install to a 
more permanent environment.  If you have DHCP support on your network, you 
will also be network-alive as soon as you are booted.  You can use the RAM: 
volume as scratch, mount a diskette, or mount a USB device (I have mounted 
a Fuji Finepix 2800 camera )

I don't remember if you can send and receive email (via Oberon) directly 
from the CD boot, or if there is another small amount of installation to be 
done.  But you are very close to being able to capture diagnostics and 
communicate from the CD environment, and if you have it working on Native 
Oberon, you can set it up easily.

2.  If your firmware supports boot from a USB flash disk, install the 
system there next.  With a lot of effort, I have produced an image that 
boots and is useable from a 4 MB USB/CF image.  However, it is inexpensive 
to get a 128 MB or larger CF today.  Bluebottle installs comfortably in a 
128 Mb partition, and additional partitions can be mounted (Bluebottle has 
moved back to a lot of Unix like concepts that Oberon abandoned 15 years ago.)

So far, I have not destroyed an installed system using Bluebottle, and I 
have used it to recover a destroyed NT disk.  However, I have to say that 
is prudent to disconnect your Linux HD until you are sure that you have 
mastery on the partition scheme in both Bluebottle and Linux.  (My Windows 
2000 system has a large and valuable windows partition that Bluebottle 
shows an "available to allocate" space.)

You can also use a boot floppy to boot from a USB partition, if your 
firmware will not support the USB boot.

3.  When this is tuned as you like it, then deal with the HD installation 
itself.


At 04:19 PM 6/24/2005, you wrote:
>Hi Aubrey,
>
>Searching for how to get hold of a copy of the book 'Project Oberon' I 
>came across your posting on using Oberon (Bluebottle) to cross compile for 
>PICs.
>
>I have Native Oberon System 3 running on one of my machines and am a big 
>fan of Oberon. We seem to be quite rare! An e-mail friend who like me is 
>interested in Oberon is at:
>
>http://www.verhoeven272.nl
>
>There are a couple of Oberon pages. I have contributed a bit about some 
>Oberon books and we have helped each other with getting our systems up and 
>running.
>
>If you can tell me anything about setting up Bluebottle I would be very 
>grateful. I would probably want to put it on the second hard drive of my 
>Linux machine, i.e. hdc or D: as Windows would call it, and would like to 
>boot it via a floppy.
>
>Have you managed to write an Oberon compiler for PIC? If you have I am 
>sure Jan who runs the above web site would be very interested in giving it 
>some publicity on the web site.

I don't have anything of merit on the PIC compiler.  I'm at that stage 
where I think the implementation path I chose (modifying Oberon0) is all 
wrong, and I should have used a different approach (working on Franz's 
translating loader, or using OFront and a PIC C compiler.)


>Best wishes
>
>Les May
>

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