March 2016 - Oberon - mailman3.inf.ethz.ch

Oberon Paint.Mod
by Tomas Kral 24 Mar '16

24 Mar '16

Hi, I am curious about drawing programs for Oberon system as I am reading PO.Applications chapter, describing Draw.Tool implementation. I have also seen a Clown picture at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_%28operating_system%29 It shows Paint.Tool commands apparently coming from a Paint.Mod Paint.Mod does not seem part of Oberon System, I am just curious where it originates? Cheers Tom -- Tomas Kral <thomas.kral(a)email.cz>

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Re (2): X11 vs. /dev/fb0 for OLR.
by peter＠easthope.ca 23 Mar '16

23 Mar '16

> ? why do you call it 'fall back' ? Most graphical interfaces on Linux systems use X11. In absence of X11, I imagined the system falling back to /dev/fb/? According to Peter's reply, it's even simpler. The invoking environment determines. X11 vs. command line console. Regards, ... Lyall E. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 12 Tel +1 360 639 0202 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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X11 vs. /dev/fb0 for OLR.
by peter＠easthope.ca 23 Mar '16

23 Mar '16

Peter's document for OLR mentions /dev/fb0 as alternative to X11. What determines which is used? fb is the automatic fallback? Is a configuration involved? Thanks, ... Lyall E. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 12 Tel +1 360 639 0202 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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Re (2): X11 vs. /dev/fb0 for OLR.
by peter＠easthope.ca 22 Mar '16

22 Mar '16

From: Peter Matthias <PeterMatthias(a)web.de> > olr detects where it's started from. On a real terminal it uses > frambuffer, ... Thanks Peter, ... Lyall E. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 12 Tel +1 360 639 0202 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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Re (2): Re (2): RISC.img format
by peter＠easthope.ca 22 Mar '16

22 Mar '16

> Does that include a free bottle of snake oil? :) Two purchased over two years ago continue to work for my data volume. The adapter on my office workstation will have accepted thousands of writes. Amazing or preposterous depending upon outlook. Tmings at https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2013/12/msg00388.html . Regards, ... Peter E. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 12 Tel +1 360 639 0202 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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Re: [Oberon] RISC.img format
by Tomas Kral 21 Mar '16

21 Mar '16

Dear Paul, I bought Pepino LX9 board recently. I am studying Project Oberon 2013, making my firsts steps. My earlier experience comes from Pascal and Modula on ATARI-ST. I asked a similar question about RISC.img format here, http://saanlima.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1280&sid=6771605d7bfdce198fa… fdisk reports vfat and OBS partitons on my uSD card imaged with RISC.img, size 256MB. Having read chapters on file system - Files.Mod, FileDir.Mod, I wish to know, if OBS partition grows somehow, so I can get more sectors allocated on my 2GB uSD? I also missed the point of media formating, as FileDir.Mod does not seem to provide Format command in its ToolBox. Many thanks. -- Tomas Kral <thomas.kral(a)email.cz> > > > Dear Oberoners, > > I've been asked a couple of questions about the RISC.img SD-Card image > downloadable from http://projectoberon.com for the FPGA RISC5 Oberon > systems. (If you can, please post questions publically rather than > emailing me privately - otherwise I have to assume it's a private matter > which is more time-consuming to deal with - if I can ever get to it - and > doesn't benefit others.) > > The RISC Oberon system boots from an SD-Card and uses it as its file > system. This filesystem is much simpler than common contemporary > filesystems such as FAT, FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, EXT4 etc. and is not in any > way compatible. (On the original Ceres, the backup floppy disk format was > very close to the FAT12 format, but with an altered directory to cope with > long filenames, which were not in those days supported on FAT). > > It would have been easy to make the RISC5 Oberon filesystem (including its > reserved area for the bootfile) begin at offset 0 from the beginning of > the SD-Card. This would have dedicated the SD-Card to Oberon use, but > simplified the bootloader. > > Or alternatively, the Oberon filesystem could have perhaps been stored as > a file in the FAT filesystem on the SD-Card, making it much more > accessible to utilities running on other computers. But this convenience > would have come at a high cost: it would have made the bootloader much > more complicated, and given many more possibilities for distracting > problems in development. > > In the end, it was decided to place the Oberon filesystem at a fixed > offset from the beginning of the disk. This was a trivial change to the > bootloader, keeping it easily-understandable and within one block ram > (BRAM) of the FPGA. > > This meant that FAT-compatible data structures, and a reasonable-size and > perhaps useful (256MB) FAT partition could still exist at the beginning of > the disk. If this FAT partition has nothing in it, it compresses very > well and therefore does not significantly increase the RISC.img download > time. > > The MBR partition id for the Oberon filesystem was chosen as 0FFh, because > the ids are historically rather a free-for-all and the filesystem is not > exactly the same format as any that have gone before, even the ETH > PC-based Oberon filesystems. 0FFh is clearly an arbitrary value, and also > was only used by others for private data structures rather than for > filesystems which were interoperable amongst systems. > > Note that a lot of the motivation for this was defensive. For example it > makes it more difficult for the Oberon filesystem to be destroyed when the > SD-Card is inserted in a Windows system. > > When submitting some early additions to Peter de Wachter's RISC emulator > > https://github.com/pdewacht/oberon-risc-emu > > for emulated RS232 file transfer which he kindly incorporated, I also > included a quick check on startup which allows the use of a disk image > which only contains the Oberon file system (called .OBERON.FS in the > Windows binary distribution of the emulator which I put on > http://projectoberon.com) > > This check is for the magic number 9B1EA38DH (FileDir.DirMark) which is at > the beginning of the root directory sector. Oberon uses a "parity" scheme > for sector numbers, making all of them divisible by 29, so the first > usable Oberon sector, number 29, begins at SD-Card sector offset 80002H. > This slightly odd value comes from the fact that SD-Cards have 512-byte > sectors, but Oberon uses two of these (1K) for each Oberon sector, and > that sector 0 is not used. > > So if you are using a nice operating system and you know what you are > doing (because it allows dangerous commands such as dd) you can extract > the Oberon file system from the image with a command like (262145 = 40001H > = 80002H * 512 DIV 1024) > > dd if=RISC.img of=.OBERON.FS obs=1024 ibs=1024 skip=262145 > > and you can even (sudo) write it directly back to a real SD-Card with > something like > > dd if=.OBERON.FS of=/dev/disk1 obs=1024 ibs=1024 seek=262145 > > The name .OBERON.FS was chosen to make it look like a system file, which > would be totally destroyed if someone opened it and saved it with a text > editor, for example. > > Hope that's useful! > Cheers, > Paul > > > -- > Oberon(a)lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems > https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon > > > >

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Re (2): ETH Oberon links not working.
by peter＠easthope.ca 20 Mar '16

20 Mar '16

Srinivas, From: Srinivas Nayak, > Links present on page http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/downloads/index is not working. Fixing those links is for the ETH Webmaster. Volunteers can fix links in http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads and, more generally, in http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/OCP . If you find a bad link or deficiency in that area, please mention it. Thanks, . . . P. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 12 Tel +1 360 639 0202 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

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System.Trap ?
by eas lab 20 Mar '16

20 Mar '16

Our 'System.Trap' facility seems brilliant. I don't know of other systems which have similar? If the machine crashes [for LEO it just give a white Frame], then. the cause-of-trap info is not available to fix the cause-of-trap. Is it viable to have a facility to save the trap-info to a file? Or has the crash/white-Frame happened before the trap-handler is activated? == Chris Glur.

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Maths: LaTeX translation?
by eas lab 20 Mar '16

20 Mar '16

I remember seeing somewhere in the ETH-Oberon-family, some <Latex utility>. Or even just a translation table, without the ability to position chars up and down, would make the various http://*.html understandable. Have we got something like that? == TIA.

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Calling a command from within a normal procedure
by Srinivas Nayak 08 Mar '16

08 Mar '16

Dear All, Can we call a procedure from within a program which we can call as a command? Ex. Edit.Open This is a pure procedure and we can use this as a command. Can we call this procedure from within another procedure? With thanks and best regards, Yours sincerely, Srinivas Nayak Home: http://www.mathmeth.com/sn/ Blog: http://srinivas-nayak.blogspot.in/

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