Oberon, a delightfully insane system • Hacker News Board

Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system

#21

Post by caerwyn » Tue, May 05, 2009, 12:47 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #4

The text-based interface there is probably most immediately accessible in terms of Wily ( http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/ ), a Unix port of Acme ( http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html ) from Plan9, which was in turn inspired by Oberon. (I spent a couple days trying wily out. Interesting system. I never really acclimated to its mouse-centric UI, but I think it integrates even better without other progra…

There is a Unix port of Acme as part of Plan 9 from User Space (http://swtch.com/plan9port/).

Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system

#22

Post by caerwyn » Tue, May 05, 2009, 12:57 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #4

The text-based interface there is probably most immediately accessible in terms of Wily ( http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/ ), a Unix port of Acme ( http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html ) from Plan9, which was in turn inspired by Oberon. (I spent a couple days trying wily out. Interesting system. I never really acclimated to its mouse-centric UI, but I think it integrates even better without other progra…

Here's the relevant quote from the acme paper by Rob Pike, "Cedar was, however, the major inspiration for Oberon [Wirt89], a system of similar scope but much smaller scale. Through careful selection of Cedar’s ideas, Oberon shows that its lessons can be applied to a small, coherent system that can run efficiently on modest hardware. In fact, Oberon probably errs too far towards simplicity: a single-process system with weak networking, it seems an architectural throwback.

"Acme is a new program, a combined window system, editor, and shell, that applies some of the ideas distilled by Oberon. Where Oberon uses objects and modules within a programming language (also called Oberon), Acme uses files and commands within an existing operating system (Plan 9). Unlike Oberon, Acme does not yet have support for graphical output, just text. At least for now, the work on Acme has concentrated on producing the smoothest user interface possible for a programmer at work. "

Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system

#23

Post by silentbicycle » Tue, May 05, 2009, 1:07 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #4

The text-based interface there is probably most immediately accessible in terms of Wily ( http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/ ), a Unix port of Acme ( http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html ) from Plan9, which was in turn inspired by Oberon. (I spent a couple days trying wily out. Interesting system. I never really acclimated to its mouse-centric UI, but I think it integrates even better without other progra…

oops:

Integrates even better with other programs...

Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system

#24

Post by sp332 » Tue, May 05, 2009, 2:03 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #11

I wonder if this helped to inspire/would dovetail with Ubiquity. I use Chrome rather than Firefox but I hope Ubuity will get ported for this browser when Google opens up the plugin interface.

The Ubiquity team at Mozilla is lead by Aza Raskin, son of Jef Raskin. (Jef wrote the book "Humane Interfaces" and developed THE (The Humane Environment), which never progressed beyond the tech demo you can read about at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy and download the last version from https://users-www.wineme.fb5.uni-siegen.de/home/Sebastian%20... ). Aza started Humanized, to develop Enso, a direct predecessor of Ubiquity, but which I find even more useful since it runs outside the browser,and is therefore useable from any program, and is written in Python, and it totally hackable. You can get Enso from http://humanized.com/ .

Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system

#25

Post by LukasMathis » Tue, May 05, 2009, 2:29 PM UTC

bulanga wrote: post #16

shame it doesn't work in VMWare. I tried both isos, the 7MB and 77MB one and tweaked a little bit with the settings but I just get a black screen, it doesn't seem to boot at all. If anyone does manage to get it going could you please post some instructions? Thanks.

I think there are Oberon applications for Linux and Windows, one of the article's links goes to an ETH page with downloads for these. Other than that, you can try running it in Parallels. It didn't work in VMWare on my system, either, but the trial version of Parallels ran it just fine.

Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system

#26

Post by speek » Tue, May 05, 2009, 5:24 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #11

I wonder if this helped to inspire/would dovetail with Ubiquity. I use Chrome rather than Firefox but I hope Ubuity will get ported for this browser when Google opens up the plugin interface.

Honestly, I have no idea why they're limiting it to be firefox only. They're using the wrong level of abstraction, it should be available to all applications. (IMO)

Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system

#27

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 05, 2009, 5:42 PM UTC

caerwyn wrote: post #21

silentbicycle wrote: post #4

The text-based interface there is probably most immediately accessible in terms of Wily ( http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/ ), a Unix port of Acme ( http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html ) from Plan9, which was in turn inspired by Oberon. (I spent a couple days trying wily out. Interesting system. I never really acclimated to its mouse-centric UI, but I think it integrates even better without other progra…

There is a Unix port of Acme as part of Plan 9 from User Space ( http://swtch.com/plan9port/ ).

[deleted]

Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system

#28

Post by asimone » Tue, May 05, 2009, 6:14 PM UTC

bulanga wrote: post #16

shame it doesn't work in VMWare. I tried both isos, the 7MB and 77MB one and tweaked a little bit with the settings but I just get a black screen, it doesn't seem to boot at all. If anyone does manage to get it going could you please post some instructions? Thanks.

I got it to run in VMWare. Well, boot anyway, right out of the "box." There wasn't sound or any peripherals support, but there was enough working to play.

Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system

#29

Post by bulanga » Tue, May 05, 2009, 6:23 PM UTC

asimone wrote: post #28

bulanga wrote: post #16

shame it doesn't work in VMWare. I tried both isos, the 7MB and 77MB one and tweaked a little bit with the settings but I just get a black screen, it doesn't seem to boot at all. If anyone does manage to get it going could you please post some instructions? Thanks.

I got it to run in VMWare. Well, boot anyway, right out of the "box." There wasn't sound or any peripherals support, but there was enough working to play.

ok good to know. I'm going to take another look.

Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system

#30

Post by bulanga » Tue, May 05, 2009, 6:32 PM UTC

LukasMathis wrote: post #25

bulanga wrote: post #16

shame it doesn't work in VMWare. I tried both isos, the 7MB and 77MB one and tweaked a little bit with the settings but I just get a black screen, it doesn't seem to boot at all. If anyone does manage to get it going could you please post some instructions? Thanks.

I think there are Oberon applications for Linux and Windows, one of the article's links goes to an ETH page with downloads for these. Other than that, you can try running it in Parallels. It didn't work in VMWare on my system, either, but the trial version of Parallels ran it just fine.

Unfortunately I can't try Parallels (again). I already tried their demo version a while ago when I was trying to decide whether to purchase VMWare or Parallels.

It seems possible though to get it running with VMWare so I'll do some further investigation.