[Oberon] Booters for ETH-Oberon ?

[Chris Glur]

Sven Stauber wrote:
> The boot loader is located in the partition where the file 
> system is located (not in the MBR!). The assembler source 
> code of the Oberon Bootloader is contained in the release 
> (BBL.Asm). Also, the sources of MBR (OBEMBR4.ASM) and the 
> boot manager (BootManager.Asm) are available.

Have you seen these ?
Where can I get them ?
-------------
Peter E. wrote:-
> The Toshiba T2100 laptop boots from the CF card.
> The modifications are described in detail.
> Open my shop page.  http://carnot.yi.org/
> At the bottom of the page open Example computer 
> systems.  Scroll down to T2100.

Yes I had read your CF installation, but I was so overwhelmed by the 
amount of mechanical-engineering that you had to do to fit it that I
didn't realise that you actually booted from the CF.

Bootloaders are complex/problematic:
*  you often need to work at asm-level.
   N-O's Decoder.Mod is not perfect & was removed from the packages ?
* there are possiblilities of inconsistencies at several stages:
     the IDE's C,H,S,  the BIOS, lilo/Grub..etc. M$loth wants to kill any
     co-resident foreigners ...etc.

I've only ever had one ETH-Oberon that didn't need a fd0 to boot.
 
I'm also interested in soid-state-disks in connection with the OLPC
[one laptop per child] project, which I've been following.
My initial criticism seems flawed since even if the x86 CPU uses much
more power than an ARM, the 0.8Watts used is a small part of the 
power needed by *any* significant LCD-display. And the OLPC has
got a specially power-economic display.

The OLPC takes 2 minutes to boot linux.
How long does your CF take to boot ETH-Oberon ?
I guess ETH-Oberon would not shine on the OLPC because OLPC is
not conveniently mouse-chordable -- AFIAK ?

I'm including the extract below from OLPC, because it's the first
confirmation of a principle which is central to me, that I've seen:
identifying entities by their 'recentcy' is more usefull than eg.
alphabetically by name [and is handled nicely by mc, which I 
mentioned].
That's why stacks are usefull.
Perhaps different users have different thinking methods ?
Evidently many people prefer to search alphabetically for 
ThatFunnyNamed873File than 'the one I used yesterday' ?

http://www.olpctalks.com/walter_bender/
        walter_bender_olpc_meeting.html
>  then another thing that we're doing, is we have this concept of a
>  journal. Now when you had asked about GTK and the file menu,
>  hierarchical file systems are great-- nothing wrong with it-- but it's
>  not the only way to do things, and we think that for young children,
>  there's a lot of cognitive studies about this [...] used to be a work
>  with Seymour Papert and Piaget. They studied this in great detail.
> 
>  We decided that the primary mechanism by which the children will
>  interact with their work, will interact with their computer, is
>  through a temporal interface rather than a hierarchical interface.
> 
>  So what we do is we maintain a journal or a diary of all the
>  interactions with a laptop. And so the laptop automatically
>  accumulates a portfolio of their work. And they use that diary to go
>  back to return to something they were doing, so in this case this is
>  an entry. These are the people they were drawing with. Here's some
>  comments in the diary. You can go to the previous entries. You can use
>  this diary entry to re-engage, to re-launch the activity. It sort of
>  adds a sense of persistence from day to day. If you've got to recall a
>  project, you don't have to reassemble everything. You click it on the
>  diary and all the pieces come back together.

== Chris Glur.