[Oberon] New release of April 3, 07

[Ulrike Glavitsch]

Dear BB users,

a new crazy-fresh release is available under 
http://www.bluebottle.ethz.ch/dlcrazy.html for download.
It contains a number of new features contributed by Sven Stauber 
(Performance Monitor, System Event Logging), Florian Negele (Diff Tool) 
and the students Ingmar Nebel (Diff Tool), Reto Meier (Mail Client) and 
Mathias Ottiger (USB HID Driver). Thanks to them all!

Performance Monitor 2.0
The performance monitor is now able to display monitored values using 
grids and can therefore handle much more such values. A lot of plugins 
have been added, in particular almost any AOS kernel / network related 
statistics variables can now be monitored. There's a new section in 
AosConfig.XML where you can specify which plugins should be loaded at 
application start. Since it's somewhat impractical to monitor such a 
large number of values by looking at it, Performance Monitor Alerts have 
been introduced. Using alerts you can specifiy a trigger condition that 
causes an user-specified action when triggered, for example, if a 
certain monitored value becomes greater than a user-specified constant, 
notify the user.

System Event Logging
A system event logging framework has been introduced to reduce the 
amount of information displayed in the event log that is used by many 
applications. In comparision to outputs using AosOut, events provide the 
following advantages:
- event classification enables efficient filtering
- events are time-stamped when entered into the event queue
- events can be logged to kernel log, files or memory

Mail Client
The release now contains a mail client for IMAP/SMTP. The application 
provides powerful search facilities for both
online and offline mail browsing. The mail client does, however, not 
(yet) support authentification.

USB HID Driver
Up to now, the Bluebottle HID drivers only supported HID boot protocols. 
These are simplified protocols that are
supported by HID mice and keyboards to enabled simple implementations of 
BIOS mouse/keyboard support.
The new HID driver is a real adaptive device driver that makes use of 
the HID report descriptors that are provided
by all HID devices. For practice, this means:
- mouse: no hack required for mouse wheel support, up to 32 buttons 
supported
- keyboard: support for special keys
- joystick: support for 8 axis, 32 buttons and 1 coolie hat

Diff Tool
A tool that visualizes the differences of two files has been 
contributed. Both a command line front-end (DiffLib.Mod) and
a graphical user interface (WMDiff.Mod) are available.

I wish everyone good luck with the new release.

Ulla Glavitsch

-- 
ETH Zürich
Ulrike Glavitsch Eggler
Institut für Computersysteme
Clausiusstrasse 59
CH-8092 Zürich
Tel.: +41 44 632 70 49
Fax : +41 44 632 13 07