[Oberon] Re. Install your own OS

[John Drake]

--- easlab at absamail.co.za wrote:

> Related to this, I'm amazed at MIT [perhaps the most
> prestigious
> (?sp=help Soren) tech-institute in the world]
> anouncing its $100 
> laptop for all the school-kids in China and the rest
> of the 3rd world.
> 
> Absurdly they write about a 500Mb AMD & 1GB !
> IMO the Indian simputer is more on target, being
> ARM-based
> [linux of course] the "user's " lack of mains power
> is acknowledged.

I'd heard of the simputer, but not MITs plans
before this.  Thanks for the info.

http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html
http://www.simputer.org/simputer/spec/simpspec/

Curious as to what you dislike about the MIT
specs.  Too much?  (I'm curious if 1 Gb is
supposed to be RAM, flash, HD?)
 
Oh, that reminds me.  Some years ago Chuck
Moore (inventor of the Forth programming
language) worked with a company that devoped
an inexpensive "information appliance"
based on his chips.  One idea was to put
the computer in the battery bay of cheap
portable computers.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990125100356/http://www.itvc.com/

The price point was to be $100.00. 
Unfortunately due to some bad management
decisions the company went under.  But the
technology was quite promising.

> I hope Oberon-S3's knowhow for ARM is not lost.
> --------------------

Considering that there's an ARM backend for the
BlueBottle Active Oberon compiler it seems ARM
support is continuing.


> Of course ethz's aim must be research: moving ahead
> &
> screw maintenace of the existing.  So we
> collaborators 
> who have joined the mutually beneficial ethz
> initiated
> open forum must realise that WE must do our own
> maintenace.
> 
> Unfortunately maintenace is very uninspiring.
> 
> Here's a sample triviality:
>   SmartDir.Directory SYS:*pop*  \r2
> doesn't find that important file which I was working
> with,
> before I had to re-boot [not bad after 10 days]
> because of
> the dialer-ppp bug.  [ I guess an accumalation of
> 'unsafe
> traps' (perhaps messes the heap ?) ].

That reminds me.  Where exactly are you now on your
PPP bug?  I recall you saying that you had it fixed
on one machine (through a NetSystem patch) but 
didn't want to risk messing up your other machine
with a patch?  (Correct me if I'm wrong).  Anyway
I think the "permanent" solution would be to change
the PPP package to have an alternative to relying
on NetSystem for the user ID and password.  Then
you could just install the new version of PPP
on whatever machine you were using and not have
to worry about patching NetSystem.  I think that
would be a more stable solution.
 
>   SmartDir.Directory SYS:pop*  \r2
> finds:
> pop.absamail.co.za 
> pop.absamail.co.za.Bak 
> 
> as does: System.Directory SYS:*pop*
> 
> So SmartDir.Mod needs some attention ?

Well, as I'm not an NO user I'm not familair
with SmartDir.  What exactly does it do,
and how is it different from System.Directory?

Regards,

John M. Drake


		
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