December 2011 - Oberon - mailman3.inf.ethz.ch

Re (2): SSH protocol
by peasthope＠shaw.ca 21 Dec '11

21 Dec '11

From: Guenter Feldmann <fld(a)math.uni-bremen.de> Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:40:38 +0100 > ... give the newer A2 SSH of UnixAos a try and check if > the bug still exists? I can tackle it next week. You suggest the test in UnixAos rather than A2 running natively on a PC? In either case I'll have to install the system before testing. Haven't tried A2 since 2 or 3 years ago. Thanks, ... Peter E. -- Telephone 1 360 639 0202. Former telephone 1 360 450 2132. bcc: peasthope ... shaw.ca "http://carnot.yi.org/" "http://members.shaw.ca/peasthope/index.html#Itinerary"

1 0

SSH protocol
by peasthope＠shaw.ca 21 Dec '11

21 Dec '11

Folk, The interactive shell from ETHNO to Debian Linux has worked for years and continues to work. In the past, file transfers also worked. Currently "SSH.Connect user(a)Squeeze.Debian.Linux" appears to work OK; but any Send or Receive fails. This is what appears in System.Log. connecting to 142.103.107.137 ... connected exchanging keys checking server hostkey key exchange done password authentication succeeded SSH connection to '142.103.107.137' established file => 142.103.107.137:~/file SSH.Channel.read: unexpected response packet type: 94 connection closed: protocol error The system is left frozen and <Ctrl>+<Break> <Ctrl>+<Break> is necessary. Something new in the SSH protocol in Linux? Any insights? Thanks, ... Peter E. -- Telephone 1 360 639 0202. Former telephone 1 360 450 2132. bcc: peasthope ... shaw.ca "http://carnot.yi.org/" "http://members.shaw.ca/peasthope/index.html#Itinerary"

1 0

Re (2): Raspberry Pi; was Re (2): Oberon Day 2011 Recordings (Jack Johnson)
by peasthope＠shaw.ca 07 Dec '11

07 Dec '11

From: Jan Verhoeven <jan(a)verhoeven272.nl> Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:16:22 +0100 > Just get yourself an old Pentium I or II board and install Oberon on it. I have two desktop machines and two old laptops running only ETHNO for about a decade now. All use CF as you suggested years ago. Good for many of my purposes. OLPC offers project longevity compared to the ephemeral nature of most contemporary hardware. > On Wednesday 07 December 2011 01:08:53 peasthope(a)shaw.ca wrote: > > > ... Raspberry Pi is (sensibly) aimed at Linux, it is Paul Reed I believe. Regards, ... Peter E. -- New telephone 1 360 639 0202. Old telephone 1 360 450 2132. bcc: peasthope at shaw.ca Work "http://carnot.yi.org/". "http://members.shaw.ca/peasthope/index.html#Itinerary".

1 0

Raspberry Pi; was Re (2): Oberon Day 2011 Recordings (Jack Johnson)
by peasthope＠shaw.ca 07 Dec '11

07 Dec '11

From: Paul Reed <paulreed(a)paddedcell.com> Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:46:30 +0000 > ... Raspberry Pi is (sensibly) aimed at Linux, it is > far more powerful (and as you say, complicated) than is needed for Oberon. > And it's actually worse than that, because Mr. Upton works for Broadcom so > he has access to more details of the SoC used in the system than we'll > ever know. The OLPC-XOs are complete working machines. They sell used for under $150, including postage. Specifications appear to be available without difficulty and the project has ongoing plans. Don't those factors make it a good target hardware? Regards, ... Peter E. -- New telephone 1 360 639 0202. Old telephone 1 360 450 2132. bcc: peasthope at shaw.ca Work "http://carnot.yi.org/". "http://members.shaw.ca/peasthope/index.html#Itinerary".

2 1

Re: [Oberon] Hardware
by peasthope＠shaw.ca 06 Dec '11

06 Dec '11

Pieter, Some of the parts would probably sell on eBay but probably you have already decided against that. For individual small parts it is more a recycling service than a profitable endeavour. If you are still in Europe, someone there should get them. If nobody closer is interested I might be able to "rescue" them. I'd guess that postage to North Am. will be about $20-25. Have you a PayPal account? Thanks, ... Peter E. -- New telephone 1 360 639 0202. Old telephone 1 360 450 2132. bcc: peasthope at shaw.ca Work "http://carnot.yi.org/". "http://members.shaw.ca/peasthope/index.html#Itinerary".

1 0

Re (2): Oberon Day 2011 Recordings (Jack Johnson)
by peasthope＠shaw.ca 06 Dec '11

06 Dec '11

From: Paul Reed <paulreed(a)paddedcell.com> Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:59:30 +0000 > not only the recordings of the talks for Oberon Day > this year, but also the slides, are available via > http://www.oberonday2011.ethz.ch. Thanks. At the multimedia link http://www.multimedia.ethz.ch/conferences/2011/oberon ? I get audio from the mp3 files and slides from the chronological index. Should the QuickTime files give video also or just higher quality audio? I see nothing indicating what should be expected from the various files. ... Peter E. -- New telephone 1 360 639 0202. Old telephone 1 360 450 2132. bcc: peasthope at shaw.ca Work "http://carnot.yi.org/". "http://members.shaw.ca/peasthope/index.html#Itinerary".

1 0

Re: [Oberon] Oberon Day 2011 Recordings (Jack Johnson)
by Paul Reed 06 Dec '11

06 Dec '11

> 1. Re: Oberon Day 2011 Recordings (Jack Johnson) > I have a few questions about your part of the keynote. ... > Did you do your UTF-8 integration from scratch or did you look at > other code for inspiration? Did it require extensive modification, or > mainly just to Texts? What is your end goal for UTF-8 integration, and > how do you see that ultimately affecting the simplicity of the system? I added UTF string handling as an experiment (with a view to using it in other projects), and tried various schemes, including UTF-16/UCS-2 and even UTF-32 before finally settling on UTF-8. I didn't find much code for inspiration, since most of what's available is in C ;-) but I was very definitely inspired by the story of the invention of UTF-8 and its integration into the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system. UTF-32 is the only implementation where there is a linear mapping between character length and byte length (UTF-16 has surrogate pairs, which breaks that), but it is impractical on small systems because of the memory footprint. UTF-8 performs well in practice, except for some Asian locales, in which case an alternative encoding would be sensible (and indeed advised by the Unicode documents). Re-implementing Texts using UTF-8 is a really nice exercise (Luca?) :), since the details of the Text system are so well explained in the book. Certainly you would have to decide whether Files.Read would read a byte or a UTF-8 char, and be careful about lengths and byte offsets. I had an attempt, but ran out of time and will have to return to it [insert apology to Fermat here]. For the Oberon System demo, it wasn't strictly necessary so it didn't get in (along with a lot of other things I need to go back and do properly). > Are you using or have you considered using Oberon-07? How might that > affect the rest of the original Oberon System code? Yes it's all Oberon-07, I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. The main changes were obvious: removal of SHORTINT, LOOP, and WITH, for example; and this doesn't really change the text of the book that much, which is the aim. > Have you had chats with Wirth or others about what they might have > done differently if they could do it all over again? :) I'm reminded that they asked Ken Thompson what he would change about Unix, if he had the chance to go back and do it again. His answer was that he would add an 'e' on the end of the 'creat' system call. I once asked Prof. Wirth, after a retrospective lecture on Pascal, Modula and Oberon, what he would do differently. He simply said he would have called them Pascal, Pascal-2, etc. > I noted the > discussion of Objects in Appendix A of Project Oberon and aside from > the Gadgets implementation it alludes to the idea that if the Objects > module had existed at the outset it might have further simplified the > original system. This is Prof. Gutknecht's view, yes. Especially since the changes would have been small, for the power it gives. But with power comes responsibility, something we're not much good at in software IMNSHO. As well as simplicity, and elegance, there should also be a clarity test. That's why the book stands out. > Did you consider resurrecting slim binaries, or does that add more > complexity than it removes? No, and yes. The slim binaries approach relies on the more complex OP2 compiler, with its high-level intermediate representation. I have no IR, I basically just translate RISC instructions into x86 opcodes (if it's not a RISC module, eg if it's a device driver). This adds a few hundred lines at most to the compiler (for x86 and for ARM32 put together). > Are the FPGA-based systems available? Working on it. The compiler generates code which runs on the FPGA (as does the Oberon-0 compiler, more-or-less unchanged, from Compiler Construction). But more hardware needs to be implemented for the system to be self-hosting, which is the aim. Cheers, Paul

2 3

Hardware
by Pieter Muller 03 Dec '11

03 Dec '11

Hi I was cleaning up today and found some old graphics and ethernet cards. I thought I'd ask here if anyone would like to have these before throwing them away. They are most likely compatible with Native Oberon and Aos. Ethernet Cards: * 3Com 3C905C-TX-M Etherlink 10/100 PCI * 3Com 3C905B-TX-NM Fast Etherlink XL PCI * 3Com 3C905B-TX Fast Etherlink XL PCI Graphics Cards: * ELSA Diamond GLoria Synergy-8 PCI (3Dlabs Permedia2) * Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro PCI (3Dlabs Permedia2) * ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP * Nvidia P73 AGP Terms: You pay the shipping costs and get the cards for free. I'd prefer if someone takes the whole lot. Offer valid until next Saturday, first come first serve. cheers -- Pieter

1 0

New crazy fresh A2 build from SVN Rev. 4415
by Treutwein Bernhard 02 Dec '11

02 Dec '11

finally I was able to create a new crazy fresh release from SVN and I've put it up there: ftp://ftp.lrz.de/transfer/BlueBottle-A2/A2_Rev-4415_serial-trace.iso It boots nicely on an orphaned P4 ... (just a quick try). You can also find the change log and some other stuff in the same directory. -- Bernhard

1 0