[Oberon] Report on compiling all Linz V4 Sources on Windows

[Aubrey.McIntosh at Alumni.UTexas.Net]

I have responded to the recent discussion about the various Oberon versions
by revisiting the Linz distribution.  This is the one that I used as my
daily workhorse for many years.  The current status of the archive is not
newbie friendly in a few respects, as I report below.

I downloaded ftp://ftp.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at/pub/Oberon/Windows/win95-NT/System
.EXE and unpacked it in a Ubuntu Precise Pangolin (12.04) environment with
the Wine emulator.

This environment is running on the Oracle VirtualBox, which in turn is
hosted on a Dell Optiplex 620 running Windows XP.  All patches for all
systems were in place yesterday.  The system boots and operates normally in
all respects and is very responsive, other than some occasional delay in
loading Wine.  This delay may be explained by the system load in the XP
environment outside the VirtualBox.  (I finally remembered that the F1 key
produces the star-marker in a viewer; I had to execute the ctrlC.exe
program a time or two.)

I attempted to compile all the sources.  I produced the seed list by the
command

System.Directory *.Mod \a


1.  The sources use version elements.  The setting of the elements was a
mixture of Linux, PowerMac, and Window environments.  I do not know of a
standard way to inspect the settings other than opening each file and
checking each element.  I wrote a program that dumps the version names for
each Beg VersionElems and marks the current name, ran this on the entire
list of about 251 files, and set all the files to a setting that is
compatible with Windows (NT 5.1) as reported in the System.Log

   1. VersionElems.Set goodversion is my friend


2.  I sorted the files into a correct compiling order using my program
AlmGather.  AlmGather announced that it cannot find the following sources:

   1. Dialogs.Mod
   2. DialogFrames.Mod
   3. DialogStaticTexts.Mod
   4. DialogCheckBoxes.Mod


3.  At present, there are 2 modules with compile time errors.

   1. There is an unresolved compile time error in ContainerElems.Mod that
   I did not examine extensively.
   2. PopupEditor relies on Dialogs


4.  I made a local change to VersionElems.Mod in order to export the
current version name and maxversions.  I compiled the entire suite of
sources after that change.  Unexpectedly, there are a few new .Sym files in
the $User directory after the compilation finished.


   1. MathL.Sym
   2. MultiButtonElems.Sym
   3. PFBasic.Sym
   4. PanelFrames.Sym


5.  I started the system using ./oberon.exe at the Ubuntu command prompt,
using the Oberon.Hex and Oberon.Ini files as distributed.  The system
started and performed a few tests correctly.  In particular, the Track &
Viewer system appeared normal, the mouse editing and popup buttons worked
ok, and I compiled all the sources a second time.  With the changes made to
the VersionElems, much of the source appears to be there.

6.  The program oberon.c is not in the System.EXE archive.  It is a deeper
problem to produce oberon.exe and Oberon.Hex, and I did not make any
attempt to do so this weekend.

7.  I used the FTP.Tool and logged into ftp.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at from within
the Oberon environment.  Woo Hoo !!  It appears that there is a top level
directory named Dialogs.  This may fix item 2 above.

8.  I can't unload modules.  I thought there was either System.Unload or
Modules.Unload.  I can use MM+ML when executing a command, but that only
unloads the one module.  I would appreciate a memory jog for the correct
command name.

I still think the system is very powerful.  Despite the fact that it is
nearly 25 years old, it gives the impression of being new and advanced.
 All the mouse interclicks that were so very pesky to learn, with many a
misadventure of deleting text when I was trying to copy looks, appear to be
completely fluent after some years of disuse.  I find this impressive.
 While I did copy and paste a lot, and the result is not pretty, I did
knock out a module to list all the VersionElement names in just a few
hours.  Most of that time was spent remembering how important
Texts.OpenWriter(writer) is.



-- 
Aubrey McIntosh, Ph.D.
211 E. 5th St.
Morris MN 56267
(512)-348-7401
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