Booters for ETH-Oberon ?
Sven Stauber wrote:
The boot loader is located in the partition where the file system is located (not in the MBR!). The assembler source code of the Oberon Bootloader is contained in the release (BBL.Asm). Also, the sources of MBR (OBEMBR4.ASM) and the boot manager (BootManager.Asm) are available.
Have you seen these ? Where can I get them ? ------------- Peter E. wrote:-
The Toshiba T2100 laptop boots from the CF card. The modifications are described in detail. Open my shop page. http://carnot.yi.org/ At the bottom of the page open Example computer systems. Scroll down to T2100.
Yes I had read your CF installation, but I was so overwhelmed by the amount of mechanical-engineering that you had to do to fit it that I didn't realise that you actually booted from the CF. Bootloaders are complex/problematic: * you often need to work at asm-level. N-O's Decoder.Mod is not perfect & was removed from the packages ? * there are possiblilities of inconsistencies at several stages: the IDE's C,H,S, the BIOS, lilo/Grub..etc. M$loth wants to kill any co-resident foreigners ...etc. I've only ever had one ETH-Oberon that didn't need a fd0 to boot. I'm also interested in soid-state-disks in connection with the OLPC [one laptop per child] project, which I've been following. My initial criticism seems flawed since even if the x86 CPU uses much more power than an ARM, the 0.8Watts used is a small part of the power needed by *any* significant LCD-display. And the OLPC has got a specially power-economic display. The OLPC takes 2 minutes to boot linux. How long does your CF take to boot ETH-Oberon ? I guess ETH-Oberon would not shine on the OLPC because OLPC is not conveniently mouse-chordable -- AFIAK ? I'm including the extract below from OLPC, because it's the first confirmation of a principle which is central to me, that I've seen: identifying entities by their 'recentcy' is more usefull than eg. alphabetically by name [and is handled nicely by mc, which I mentioned]. That's why stacks are usefull. Perhaps different users have different thinking methods ? Evidently many people prefer to search alphabetically for ThatFunnyNamed873File than 'the one I used yesterday' ? http://www.olpctalks.com/walter_bender/ walter_bender_olpc_meeting.html
then another thing that we're doing, is we have this concept of a journal. Now when you had asked about GTK and the file menu, hierarchical file systems are great-- nothing wrong with it-- but it's not the only way to do things, and we think that for young children, there's a lot of cognitive studies about this [...] used to be a work with Seymour Papert and Piaget. They studied this in great detail.
We decided that the primary mechanism by which the children will interact with their work, will interact with their computer, is through a temporal interface rather than a hierarchical interface.
So what we do is we maintain a journal or a diary of all the interactions with a laptop. And so the laptop automatically accumulates a portfolio of their work. And they use that diary to go back to return to something they were doing, so in this case this is an entry. These are the people they were drawing with. Here's some comments in the diary. You can go to the previous entries. You can use this diary entry to re-engage, to re-launch the activity. It sort of adds a sense of persistence from day to day. If you've got to recall a project, you don't have to reassemble everything. You click it on the diary and all the pieces come back together.
== Chris Glur.
I'm including the extract below from OLPC, because it's the first confirmation of a principle which is central to me, that I've seen: identifying entities by their 'recentcy' is more usefull than eg. alphabetically by name [and is handled nicely by mc, which I mentioned].
This is much the same as the principles that Jeff Raskin discussed in The Humane Interface. In short, whenever you restart whatever you were doing, the system should return you to where you left off. For example, when you restart the machine it should resume with what you were doing when you switched it off. When you open a document (or in some other way select an object for use) it should open at exactly the same position and state it was in when you stopped working on it. And so on. If I remember correctly, Squeak works somewhat like that, and is quite quick.
That's why stacks are usefull. Perhaps different users have different thinking methods ? Evidently many people prefer to search alphabetically for ThatFunnyNamed873File than 'the one I used yesterday' ?
The ideas that Raskin describes deal with this in quite an interesting way by eliminating the notion of a file name altogether and using whole-text search to locate what you want. The idea is 'the context of a text file is its own best name'. It's an interesting idea and eliminates in one fell swoop a lot of the consequential clutter and nonsense such as restrictive rules for file names, directory structures etc, as well as the mental burden that goes with them. If you're thinking the way you describe, and like Oberon, I recommend Raskin's book. You'll find a lot of interesting things in it which strike a chord with the spirit of Oberon, in my opinion. Bob
I have an ongoing interest in boot sectors and booting Oberon (V4 mostly). This interest spans all of the process beginning when execution is transferred to 7C0:0000 until the user has control with a mouse click with an application on the screen. It includes PXE. I have done some reading related to this interest. I ran AOS from CF on the CV860A <http://www.lex.com.tw:8080/product/CV860A.htm> for more than a year, with reboots. This machine did not have any moving parts. I am currently engaged in a project to put an Oberon application on a FLASH based SoC, the PIC32, although I don't know whether this will be V4 based, or Component Pascal based. In support of this process, I am studying the BootLoader and the power on starting sequence in this processor. As an aside, I am really enthusiastic about the MIPS processor since I learned about the PIC32. MIPS turns out to be in the WiFi router next to my desk, and a host of other places. What do you hope to do? I do note, as an aside, that the state of an Oberon system seems to be reflected in the linkages available off of Modules.module. If you store this to disk on a native machine, and re-read it at boot time, you should be back where you were. On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 6:22 AM, Bob Walkden <bob@web-options.com> wrote:
I'm including the extract below from OLPC, because it's the first confirmation of a principle which is central to me, that I've seen: identifying entities by their 'recentcy' is more usefull than eg. alphabetically by name [and is handled nicely by mc, which I mentioned].
This is much the same as the principles that Jeff Raskin discussed in The Humane Interface. In short, whenever you restart whatever you were doing, the system should return you to where you left off. For example, when you restart the machine it should resume with what you were doing when you switched it off. When you open a document (or in some other way select an object for use) it should open at exactly the same position and state it was in when you stopped working on it. And so on.
If I remember correctly, Squeak works somewhat like that, and is quite quick.
That's why stacks are usefull. Perhaps different users have different thinking methods ? Evidently many people prefer to search alphabetically for ThatFunnyNamed873File than 'the one I used yesterday' ?
The ideas that Raskin describes deal with this in quite an interesting way by eliminating the notion of a file name altogether and using whole-text search to locate what you want. The idea is 'the context of a text file is its own best name'. It's an interesting idea and eliminates in one fell swoop a lot of the consequential clutter and nonsense such as restrictive rules for file names, directory structures etc, as well as the mental burden that goes with them.
If you're thinking the way you describe, and like Oberon, I recommend Raskin's book. You'll find a lot of interesting things in it which strike a chord with the spirit of Oberon, in my opinion.
Bob
-- Oberon@lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon
-- -- Aubrey McIntosh, Ph.D. 1502 Devon Circle Austin TX 78723-1814 http://home.grandecom.net/~amcintosh/aubrey/Search/
The assembler source code of the Oberon boot loader, MBR and Boot Manager are contained in the AosBuild.zip package (http://www.bluebottle.ethz.ch/downloads/crazy/AosBuild.zip). If you run AOS (or Oberon in AOS), you can use the stand-alone assembler PCAAMD64.Mod to assemble the code. Best regards, Sven Stauber ________________________________ Von: oberon-bounces@lists.inf.ethz.ch im Auftrag von Chris Glur Gesendet: An: oberon@lists.inf.ethz.ch Cc: crglur@gmail.com Betreff: [Oberon] Booters for ETH-Oberon ? Sven Stauber wrote:
The boot loader is located in the partition where the file system is located (not in the MBR!). The assembler source code of the Oberon Bootloader is contained in the release (BBL.Asm). Also, the sources of MBR (OBEMBR4.ASM) and the boot manager (BootManager.Asm) are available.
Have you seen these ? Where can I get them ? ------------- Peter E. wrote:-
The Toshiba T2100 laptop boots from the CF card. The modifications are described in detail. Open my shop page. http://carnot.yi.org/ At the bottom of the page open Example computer systems. Scroll down to T2100.
Yes I had read your CF installation, but I was so overwhelmed by the amount of mechanical-engineering that you had to do to fit it that I didn't realise that you actually booted from the CF. Bootloaders are complex/problematic: * you often need to work at asm-level. N-O's Decoder.Mod is not perfect & was removed from the packages ? * there are possiblilities of inconsistencies at several stages: the IDE's C,H,S, the BIOS, lilo/Grub..etc. M$loth wants to kill any co-resident foreigners ...etc. I've only ever had one ETH-Oberon that didn't need a fd0 to boot. I'm also interested in soid-state-disks in connection with the OLPC [one laptop per child] project, which I've been following. My initial criticism seems flawed since even if the x86 CPU uses much more power than an ARM, the 0.8Watts used is a small part of the power needed by *any* significant LCD-display. And the OLPC has got a specially power-economic display. The OLPC takes 2 minutes to boot linux. How long does your CF take to boot ETH-Oberon ? I guess ETH-Oberon would not shine on the OLPC because OLPC is not conveniently mouse-chordable -- AFIAK ? I'm including the extract below from OLPC, because it's the first confirmation of a principle which is central to me, that I've seen: identifying entities by their 'recentcy' is more usefull than eg. alphabetically by name [and is handled nicely by mc, which I mentioned]. That's why stacks are usefull. Perhaps different users have different thinking methods ? Evidently many people prefer to search alphabetically for ThatFunnyNamed873File than 'the one I used yesterday' ? http://www.olpctalks.com/walter_bender/ walter_bender_olpc_meeting.html
then another thing that we're doing, is we have this concept of a journal. Now when you had asked about GTK and the file menu, hierarchical file systems are great-- nothing wrong with it-- but it's not the only way to do things, and we think that for young children, there's a lot of cognitive studies about this [...] used to be a work with Seymour Papert and Piaget. They studied this in great detail.
We decided that the primary mechanism by which the children will interact with their work, will interact with their computer, is through a temporal interface rather than a hierarchical interface.
So what we do is we maintain a journal or a diary of all the interactions with a laptop. And so the laptop automatically accumulates a portfolio of their work. And they use that diary to go back to return to something they were doing, so in this case this is an entry. These are the people they were drawing with. Here's some comments in the diary. You can go to the previous entries. You can use this diary entry to re-engage, to re-launch the activity. It sort of adds a sense of persistence from day to day. If you've got to recall a project, you don't have to reassemble everything. You click it on the diary and all the pieces come back together.
== Chris Glur. -- Oberon@lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon
participants (4)
-
Aubrey.McIntoshļ¼ Alumni.UTexas.Net -
Bob Walkden -
Chris Glur -
Stauber Sven Philipp