January 2003 - Oberon - mailman3.inf.ethz.ch

Initial feedback on 31-Dec-2002 Bluebottle release
by Ronald D Smith 21 Jan '03

21 Jan '03

Hi, Good Job. I like it! I downloaded the AOS.ISO.zip file and burned a cd image. The CD booted without problems. But during the operation of loading Bluebottle onto a partition on my laptop, I discovered the following problems: AosInst.Tool Step 3: OFSTools.Mount gives error OFSTools.Obx not found Remedy: Build Aos.OSFTools.Mod. Step 3: ZipTool.ExtractAll gives error ZipTool.Obx not Found. Remedy: Build ZipTool.Mod. Step 4. Aos.Par Editing: up-arrow and down-arrow keys did not work. Left-arrow and right-arrow did. Once Bluebottle was booted. 1. Arrow keys in both TestEditor viewer and Oberon for Bluebottle viewer appeared to work as expected. This is different behavior from the problem above in AosInst.Tool. 2. As in Bluebottle released in May and August, the RTL8139 driver does not work for me. In the previous releases, the driver printed a 'MegaError' line in the Kernel log. This time nothing is printed in the Kernel log. I traced this to the send method, where the completed OK bit is never set. I have not yet determined why this doesn't occur. 3. Actually, nothing appears in the Kernel Log, ever. 4. Need Menu entries for Log and Reboot in the main menu. I was able to find the commands in the old menus. 5. Tried to change Main.XML to include the log and reboot entry. Store this with TestEditor, but when I rebooted, no menu appeared. I was able to recover using the boot disk. 6. As in the May and August releases, the ATI Rage Display driver did work, although when the system first booted, a top section of the of the screen was full of random colors and probably was not initialized. 7. When I resized the TestEditor viewer, making the viewer smaller, the test shrank in size and became unreadable. Closing the viewer and relaunching the TestEditor gave me good viewer. 8. I launched a TestEditor. Since I wanted to have two text's open at once, I tried to launch a second TestEditor, but the second viewer did not appear. Immediate Wish List: 1. Need more menus, specifically Log, Reboot and Shutdown. 2. Need a Kernel Log viewer that displays the Kernel Log. I need this to debug the RTL8139 driver. 3. Need a description of the new mouse behavior. It appears to be different from previous Oberon and Bluebottle releases. Specifically, how do you move, copy and delete text, etc. 4. Need a description of the new scrolling behavior. It appears to be different from previous Oberon and Bluebottle releases. Personal note: I like Oberon scrolling. Long term Wish List: RTL8139 Support USB support for Wacom Tablet and Mouse. PC Card support 803.11 ethernet PC Card support. I have an Apple Airport base station running here for my Mac's. SmartMedia PC Card support. Power Management support so the laptop can run on the batteries. FireWire Support FireWire Support for Disks and CD-RW. Very long term wish list: Bluebottle running native on Power PC and Power4 systems from Apple or Pegasus. OK IBM too. Configuration: Sony Vaio PCG-FA53 w/Athlon 4 1.3 ghz, Firewire, Floppy and PC Cards Ethernet RealTek RTL8139C Family PCI NIC DVD/CD-RW Matshita UJDA720 HDD Hitachi_DK23DA-30 Display ATI Rage Mobility-M1-HGP Sound VIA AC'97 (WDM) Mouse AMP PS2 Configuration: Clone tower w/ 2 P III 733 mhz, Firewire, Floppy Ethernet 3Com 90x DVD/CD-RW Pioneer HDD Fuji and Western Digital IDE drives Display ????? Sound Soundblaster PCI128 (ensoniq chipset ???) Mouse PS2 (3 Button) Note: The May and August releases of Bluebottle ran fine on the tower. I've not written any device drivers in my 30 years of programming computers, but I'm willing to try. I'll start on the RTL8139. I am fluent in most computer languages: Basic, VB, C, C++, Pascal, Java, and several scripting languages. I've been self-employed for over 20 years developing many applications for Accounting and Business. I create and maintain Relational and OLAP databases. I'm a former BeOS developer. I've always been an early-adopter of new computers. Thanks for Bluebottle. Ronald D. Smith R.D.S. Computer Service, Inc. rdssoftware(a)voyager.net

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SMTP Receiver (RFC 821) (Bluebottle 2002.5.22)
by mcintosh＠vima.austin.tx.us 20 Jan '03

20 Jan '03

I have placed the file "http://cda.mrs.umn.edu/~mcintosa/BlueBottle/AosSMTPReceiver.Cod" online. This is a quick implementation of the receive only function of RFC 821. It gives a trivial implementation of HELO MAIL RCPT DATA RSET NOOP QUIT The resulting files are named according to a pattern, such as C0000000024.Msg C0000000024.Rcp and are located on the "current directory." These files are the message and the envelope, respectively. The formats are approximately the same as that used by the EMWAC SMTP programs. I started the effort on the project with a new review of the RFCs at 15:30 CST yesterday, so I am pleased and suprised to have an intial code this soon. Take that as a warning. This is the practice draft where you learn the documentation and strange items in the library, and variances from the RFCs, then discard it. It is limited and not robust. This program works as I desire when I type raw SMTP in a telnet session. It has also received email sent from Eudora to the school's Sendmail server, thence to my machine. On one occasion it seemed very slow, and I thought there may be some handshake and timeout issues. Another time it delivered 5 messages too fast for me to notice on the Netwatch window. As time permits, I will also send mail from the EMWAC service running under NT and see if those two programs interoperate. Feel free to send email to it at sci1355d1-am.mrs.umn.edu. However, anything you send may be lost, ignored, or disclosed worldwide. It may only be operational on an infrequent and irregular basis. Please feel encouraged to comment on any aspect of the code or project. Aubrey McIntosh <mcintosh(a)vima.austin.tx.us> Assistant Professor of Chemistry University of Minnesota, Morris 600 E. 4th St. Morris, MN 56267-2134

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Sources??
by Pedro F. Giffuni 20 Jan '03

20 Jan '03

Hi; I read (and liked) the license, but I can't find the sources anywhere. What are the requirements to port Oberon to a new platform? On a side note: the project is just gaining speed again but it would be really nice to have an Oberon producer for TenDRA http://www.TenDRA.org/ . TenDRA produces Architecture Neutral Distribution intermediate files (somewhat like pcode or bytecode). There is support for C and C++ and FORTRAN might come soon. best regards, Pedro. ===== --- Pedro F. Giffuni M.SC. Industrial Eng. University of Pittsburgh Mech. Eng. Universidad Nacional de Colombia --- Yahoo is powered by FreeBSD http://www.FreeBSD.org/ ______________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Cellulari: loghi, suonerie, picture message per il tuo telefonino http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/?http://it.mobile.yahoo.com/index2002.html

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Code check
by mcintosh＠vima.austin.tx.us 20 Jan '03

20 Jan '03

Perhaps I'm tired, but this code doesn't work as I expect it to. Can someone look it over for a sanity check? I am running on the May 22, 2002 Bluebottle system: ETH Oberon / Aos 22.5.2002 Oberon Portable Compiler / nw, rc, nm, tk, prk Oberon Parser (Active & X Extensions) / prk The problem exists when the ":" character is passed to the routine. It passes through the IF statement. When the source is changed so that the "#" character is in the 5th call to the procedure, the command runs to completion, and the system state becomes the one shown at the end of the listing. MODULE AlmBug; VAR t : ARRAY 8 OF CHAR; ix : LONGINT; PROCEDURE ReadToken (ch : CHAR; VAR token: ARRAY OF CHAR); VAR trash : CHAR; BEGIN IF (("A"<=ch) & (ch<="Z")) OR (("a"<=ch) & (ch<="z")) OR (("0"<=ch) & ("9"<=ch)) THEN trash := "A"; ASSERT ((("A"<=ch) & (ch<="Z")) OR (("a"<=ch) & (ch<="z")) OR (("0"<=ch) & ("9"<=ch))); trash := "B"; ASSERT ((ch#":") & (ch#"$")); t [ix] := ch; INC (ix) END; END ReadToken; PROCEDURE Doit*; BEGIN ix := 0; ReadToken ("A", t); ReadToken ("b", t); ReadToken ("$", t); ReadToken ("C", t); ReadToken (":", t); ReadToken ("D", t) END Doit; END AlmBug.Doit Compiler.Compile @ System.Free AlmBug ~ System.State AlmBug ~ AlmBug SB = 02B39F58H @SELF = 02B39DB0H SELF = 02B39DB0H ix = 4 t = "AbCD" Aubrey McIntosh <mcintosh(a)vima.austin.tx.us> Assistant Professor of Chemistry University of Minnesota, Morris 600 E. 4th St. Morris, MN 56267-2134

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Configuring mail under Bluebottle
by mcintosh＠vima.austin.tx.us 20 Jan '03

20 Jan '03

I am sending this from the Mail.Panel running on the May 22, 2002 (latest stable) Bluebottle release. (hopefully to the mailing list) I notice from a test message that the Received line identifies my machine as Received: from x.oberon.ethz.ch (sci1355d1-am.mrs.umn.edu [146.57.32.8]) I looked in Oberon.Text and AosConfig.XML to see where to initialize this information, but right now I don't know. System.State AosDNS ~ shows that domain = "mrs.umn.edu" So my questions are: 1. How do I configure Mail.Panel? 2. Where should I read machine name and domain for new software. Aubrey McIntosh <mcintosh(a)vima.austin.tx.us> Assistant Professor of Chemistry University of Minnesota, Morris 600 E. 4th St. Morris, MN 56267-2134

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Re: Dual head support in BlueBottle/Native Oberon ?
by Bernhard Treutwein 15 Jan '03

15 Jan '03

Thomas Frey wrote: > In Bb it is in theory possible to have many graphics cards. The > monitor arrangement can be as you like. > The practical problem is to initialize more than one graphics > card. Since VESA 2/3 modes can only be initialized at boot time > only the first card may be a VESA card > --> A "real" video driver is needed for all the other cards (which > practically limits the additional cards to Permedia2) that is really good news, esp. since my second graphics card is a Permedia2 based card (Elsa Winner 2000/office ViVo) and this second card has some real bios problems (it traps from the bios during System.Quit/System.Reboot). I wanted to contacted Elsa directly, but they went out of service and the New Elsa has moved the support for old products to a 0190 telefone number, which is blocked by my private telefone provider and my employer :-( > Additional "graphics devices" can also be VNC network > connections --> a spare windows/linux machine can be (ab)used > as a "screen" ;-) do I unerstand you correctly: 1. There is now also a VNC server, even more good news :-) 2. Knoppix (www.knoppix.de) a CD based debian woody linux would be usable as yet another screen for BlueBottle ? regards and thanks for the really quick answer -- Bernhard Treutwein BdT(a)wildwein.de (home) Bernhard.Treutwein(a)verwaltung.uni-muenchen.de (work)

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Dual head support in BlueBottle/Native Oberon ?
by Bernhard Treutwein 15 Jan '03

15 Jan '03

The original Ceres Oberon supported - to my spare knowledge - dual headed displays (at least one color and one black & white). Is there any support in Native Oberon or BlueBottle for two graphics cards ? If not are there any hooks/plugins for such a support ? regards -- Bernhard Treutwein BdT(a)wildwein.de (home) Bernhard.Treutwein(a)verwaltung.uni-muenchen.de (work)

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New Release
by Gérard Meunier 15 Jan '03

15 Jan '03

Hello Thomas, Thanks for the new release. No problem for installing it. And it's indeed faster. I tried the examples. In TestEditor, is it possible to erase a selected piece of text by a single keystroke? Regards. Gérard

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2nd Call for Papers, JMLC-2003 and EuroPar-2003
by muller＠inf.ethz.ch 13 Jan '03

13 Jan '03

Please note the JMLC 2003 conference taking place August 25-27, 2003 in Klagenfurt/Austria. Details and online submission at: http://jmlc-itec.uni-klu.ac.at/ Key Dates: February 9, 2003 Submission deadline April 30, 2003 Author notification May 31, 2003 Camera ready papers -- Pieter

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Re: [Oberon] 2nd Call for Papers, JMLC-2003 and EuroPar-2003
by fischer＠inf.ethz.ch 13 Jan '03

13 Jan '03

I had written this info in the news of the home page, but omitted to post it again as a reminder. I changed the key dates in the news of 28 Oct 2002 according the latest msg of Prof. Böszörmenyi Thanks, regards and good night. André

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