April 2005 - Oberon - mailman3.inf.ethz.ch

Re: Oberon Digest, Vol 19, Issue 10
by Soren Renner 21 Apr '05

21 Apr '05

"n-o's cording goes even beyond replacing recalling with recognition, by moving the hi-frequency operations to instinctive cording." I love it too, Mr. Glur, but I spell it correctly: CHORDING. You know, like chords on a piano keyboard. Hasn't this come up before?

1 0

Installing Native Oberon, ... continued.
by shark＠gulfnet.sd64.bc.ca 21 Apr '05

21 Apr '05

Marius, > The dummy partition type trick seem to have worked. If the partition type is already 76 it does not need to change. Otherwise the type can be set with Partitions.ChangeType. Why is a dummy partition type needed? > Gave up on booting from disk. How many disks are in the system? If more than one disk is installed, which disk has Oberon? ... Peter http://carnot.pathology.ubc.ca/ http://carnot.pathology.ubc.ca/

4 4

Re (2): [Oberon] Installing Native Oberon, ... continued.
by shark＠gulfnet.sd64.bc.ca 21 Apr '05

21 Apr '05

Marius, > I deleted all partitions. Then when I got to Partitions.ChangeType I > was at a lost because it required a "from" type and I had none to give. Oouuch! "Partitions.Show ~" gives the type number of each partition. Here is another example. Disk: IDE0, 402MB, QUANTUM LPS420A IDE0#00 402MB --- (Whole disk) IDE0#01 39MB 6 DOS FAT16 >= 32M IDE0#02 39MB 76 * Native Oberon, Aos IDE0#03 100MB 76 Native Oberon, Aos IDE0#04 221MB 76 Native Oberon, Aos Note the one "6 DOS FAT16" partition and three "76 Native"s. > I gathered from other posts here that Oberon > simply won't boot from disk. Booting from the first disk is easy! Booting from another disk is a little tricky. For instructions open "http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/betadocu.html". Scan down to "Troubleshooting a boot problem with this command". Read "Another thing to check ...". Regards, ... Peter http://carnot.pathology.ubc.ca/

2 2

RE: [Oberon] Oberon-2 .Cod files
by Treutwein Bernhard 20 Apr '05

20 Apr '05

Hi Jacques, I am not absolutely sure about it, but I remember vaguely that there is a program called WTS, which can import V4 files correctly into System 3/ETH-Oberon. I checked, under ETH PlugIn Oberon for WindowsTM / Win32 2.4 (15.12.2000) on Windows 2000 Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 1 (oops, this is XP, but apparently mis-identified as W2K), it was able to convert: WTS.Convert Balloon.Text BalloonIdx.hlp Beautifier.Text CrazyFiller.Tool Directories.Text~ Draw.Text~ without any complaints. Balloon.Text can be opened and looks good. regards -- Bernhard Treutwein Bernhard Treutwein(at)verwaltung uni-muenchen de > -----Original Message----- > From: Jacques Eloff [mailto:eloff@cs.sun.ac.za] > Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2005 2:47 AM > To: oberon(a)lists.inf.ethz.ch > Subject: [Oberon] Oberon-2 .Cod files > > > Hi > > I've decoded a bunch of Oberon-2 .Cod files (from Linz) using > AsciiCoder under > Native in Linux - decoding seems okay, but does not display > properly. Does > anyone know how to view them properly under Native? > > Regards > -- > Jacques Eloff > Department of Computer Science > University of Stellenbosch > South Africa > http://www.cs.sun.ac.za/~eloff > >

1 0

Oberon-2 .Cod files
by Jacques Eloff 20 Apr '05

20 Apr '05

Hi I've decoded a bunch of Oberon-2 .Cod files (from Linz) using AsciiCoder under Native in Linux - decoding seems okay, but does not display properly. Does anyone know how to view them properly under Native? Regards -- Jacques Eloff Department of Computer Science University of Stellenbosch South Africa http://www.cs.sun.ac.za/~eloff

1 0

Installing Native Oberon
by shark 17 Apr '05

17 Apr '05

Marius, maa> All failed. Back to fdisk to set a dummy partition type... So what progress have you made? Regards, ... P.

2 1

Re: Re (2): [Oberon] Installing Native Oberon
by easlab＠absamail.co.za 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

...... > > You're done and you haven't touched a CD. Marius Amado Alves wrote:- > I'm not sure I understand. Why should I not touch CDs? Because you should use 'successive refinement'. Start with essentials first to lessen you mental load. Learn to walk before you fly. Apparently you're installing from inet initially; therefore you are starting with a small sized runnable-system. This you can expand/refine later by adding unzipped extras. > I have the files on CD, previously downloaded and burned > on another machine, and was planning to install the extras from there, > once the core system was in place and booting from the hard disk. > > Last thing I tried was creating a DOS partition (with Linux fdisk), > because I see so many references to DOS in connection to Oberon. > OK, DOS/FAT is the 'bridge' to get Windows and linux files into n-o [native oberon]. I guess you're using a pc [86x box] ? > Should I give up on booting from the hard disk altogether? > I've used n-o aprox. 50*25*8=10'000 hours, and I still don't/can't boot except from fd0. But then I sometimes don't re-boot until a power outage after weeks. Depends if you want to *USE* it, or just show someone how many OS's your HD can boot. For serious work, you want to have projects open for days or weeks. When they build an aircraft etc. that takes weeks to complete, they don't pack all the parts away every night ? > /* I'm getting nowhere fast. Later I'll give more detailed descriptions > of my attempts to install Bluebottle and Native Oberon, just in case. > But I'm this close to give up on Oberon, as I have before on many more > or less experimental systems, which seem promising, but fail on this > starting process of boot from somewhere, install core on HD, boot from > HD. I'm a programmer. Programming is no black art. Why installing > systems seems to be one? How hard can it be to make an install program > that boots, partitions the disk (and formats or whatever), copies the > files, writes a loader on the boot sector or whatever, and be done with > it? Sorry, couldn't help it letting some steam off, no reply expected > of course. */ You shouldn't [and don't need to] commit you hardware setup to n-o. I would suggest: 1st partition for DOS/FAT/Micro$loth because it wants to be in "front" ! followed by several linux partitions - since you seem to use linux. and a dozen partitions for n-o - but start with one - at the end/back. Then when/if you abort your n-o effort, you've lost nothing. I've got 30 - 40 partitions on some IDEs. I've always used linux to make the partitions, but I guess n-o will do it. n-o has a damned good Partitions.Tool which has better functionality than various linux: fdisk, sfdisk, cfdisk. And I'm still using n-o ver. 2001 n-o doesn't have a directory structure, so to eg. reduce your search space, you would want to have eg. all you 'medical files' separated from your 'agriculture files', when you are searching for that article which you saved last week about potatoe cultivation. Initially I had one partition for 'Technology' [computer hardware mostly] then I split 'Telecommunications' off. Allow yourself flexibility to evolve. If you start a new project, you can/should put it in its own partition. Then you'll want a spare set[s] of partitons to cycle-backups into. For textFiles a 10Mb partiton is BIG. Just think how long it takes to read 1Mb. I see no good reason to imitate the linux structure of URS:, SRC: although I have partitions: NoDocm: = for n-o documentation SrcModls: = for *.Mod, which you only want occasionally. And I even have an n-o partition for linux-notes, because n-o is the best [in the world IMO] system to anotate/learn any textual information. ---------- But this is all irrelevant until you can do the basics: read/write/edit files, fetch and use some of the *.Tools move files to/from other machines via Backup.Tool -- perhaps fd0 will be soon obsolete/unavailable ? Try to do the following: open the textFile Install.Tool open your own suitably named log file and cutNpaste the relevant instuctions from Install.Tool into <yourLogFile> as you do/test them. And pay attention to the reference to Introduction.Text . Store <yourLogFile> with your notes as you are learning. NB. "select" has a special meaning for n-o. ---------- > > An hour or two reading the documentation will > > save you many hours of grief. > > It seems I did the impossible: I've read the introduction to the > interface, the Oberon papers by Wirth, the Bluebottle papers on Active > Objects, the install.txt documents--and was able to miss this > information. Because you're unfocused. Think: 'less is more' - reduce to the minimum essentials. == Chris Glur. PS. you apparently are making good progress if you are emailing by n-o ?

2 1

Focus management in WMEditors
by Dan Parnete 14 Apr '05

14 Apr '05

Hi Thomas, I will became mad with this focus. I have created a Field object as an extension of WMEditors.Editor, and I'm using it for building forms. The initialization is: multiLine.Set(FALSE); takesFocus.Set(TRUE); tv.needsTab.Set(FALSE); Let suppose we have field1 and field2 in a form (Panel), in this exact order. I put the focus on field1 by pointing with the mouse. The red cursor indicates the focus, and the editor works fine. When I push the TAB key, the field1 should lose the focus, and the field2 should catch it, as the next component that accepts focus. But this didn't happens. The cursor rests on field1. I have trace the focus chain (enabled TraceFocusChain) and write more tracing code to see what happens. It looks normal. The FocusNext finds the field2 and calls his SetFocus method. The old chain form..field1 is deleted and the new form..field2 is created. The FocusLose of the field1 and FocusReceived of the field2 are called, but the cursor rest on filed1. It must be something I don't understand here, even if I looked WMComponents, WMTextViews and WMEditors a 100 times. Thank you, Dan Parnete

1 0

Re: Re (4): [Oberon] Installing Native Oberon
by Jack Johnson 14 Apr '05

14 Apr '05

On 4/13/05, shark(a)gulfnet.sd64.bc.ca <shark(a)gulfnet.sd64.bc.ca> wrote: > In Oberon, the little arrow refers to the argument > of the command. You should mark, select or highlight > the target, eg. IDE0#01, with the right mouse > button and then execute the command with the > middle mouse button. Don't forget the "~" at > end of the command. If you let a command go > on taking arguments, eventually it might wreck > something you value. > > An hour or two reading the documentation will > save you many hours of grief. You know, it occurs to me that we could do an installation tutorial without text. The whole mark/sweep/interclick concept can be hard for any newbie without seeing it first. Bluebottle has a VNC server. We could use something like vnc2swf ( http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/ ) to record an installation so someone (even a non-English speaker) could grasp the steps in a slightly more concrete fashion. Is there someone willing to host it if one of us in the Oberon community made the Macromedia Flash file? -Jack

2 2

Re (5): [Oberon] Installing Native Oberon
by shark＠gulfnet.sd64.bc.ca 13 Apr '05

13 Apr '05

Marius, > IDE0#01 1035MB 76 Native Oberon, Aos 1035MB is a lot. Maybe you should save it for root and swap partitions for Linux. Just use what's needed for Oberon & Aos. Regards, P. http://carnot.pathology.ubc.ca/

1 0