Oberon/ETH Oberon/hcl

 

Page index: &#91; Motherboard | Processor | RAM | Device drivers | Disk | Display | Communication | Modem | PCMCIA | Mouse | Sound | USB | Example machines &#93; &#160; PC Native Oberon Hardware Compatibility List This page is under construction and will be used for installation information and user installation reports. Please send your installation reports for inclusion on this page. The information contained herein applies to the most recent Alpha / Beta versions.

Subjects treated in linked documents:
 * BIOS support
 * Diskette support
 * Keyboard support
 * Printer support
 * Sound support
 * Speaker support
 * Frequently Asked Questions on the Native Oberon OS (beta version)

You will find a good support for hardware and software considerations not directly related to Native Oberon in the Operating System resource centre documents maintained by Chris Lattner.

Motherboard and expansion slots Native Oberon runs on single processor motherboards of all brands, even on older ones, with ISA, PCI and AGP expansion slots in any combination. AGP expansion cards are similar to PCI cards from the software point-of-view. USB too is supported, but to a lesser extent. IrDA is not supported.

Oberon's PCI analyser tool

The PCI analyser command PCITools.Scan is designed to obtain all the required information on the installed PCI and AGP devices. The PCI bus is scanned and all the devices found are listed, along with a textual description extracted from an ancillary file. Some of the most valuable informations displayed are: bus number, device number, device class and subclass, vendor name and code, device name and code, IRQ assigned to the device. Keep in mind that non-PCI devices may also use IRQs and that IRQ conflicts may be at the origin of installation problems (e.g. black screen when the display device IRQ is in conflict) or other malfunctioning (e.g. network card IRQ conflict).

A full-fledged Oberon system is not required to use the tool. Booting from an Oberon-0 diskette is enough and can be of great help even to non-Oberon users. Alternatively, use the Oberon Utility Disk.

Installed hardware inspection

The needed information about the installed hardware can ideally be collected in advance of an Oberon installation with the facilities of an installed operating system. This can be useful when the manufacturer's documentation is not available or for a noname computer.


 * Windows 2000/NT: follow "Start -> Programs -> Administrative Tools -> Diagnostics"
 * Windows 95/98: follow "Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System"
 * Linux: view or print /var/log/boot.msg

Besides that, there exists a profusion of published and downloadable software for analyzing, diagnosing and performance testing of hardware components. E.g.

Processor Native Oberon runs on these 32-bit architecture processors
 * PC Analyser [expired] - DOS
 * Dr. Hardware - "2002" for Win9x/ME/NT/2000/XP or Sysinfo for DOS
 * Intel processors, starting from the i386, and equivalent processors offered by other manufacturers such as AMD and Cyrix. Native Oberon has been reported to work on AMD K5 and K6 series chips, Cyrix MII-333. If no coprocessor is found, the emulator module FPA.Mod will take its function over.
 * Transmeta processor TM5400 as reported by Thomas Kistler.
 * StrongARM processors based on the ARM Architecture Version 4: SA 110, SA 1110. Theoretically, it should run on Intel PCS Application Processors, but that was not tested.

For more information, see ETH Oberon Compilers. RAM Native Oberon supports maximally 128MB, because of the way page tables are allocated in low memory. This could be improved in procedure Kernel.InitMemory. If more than 128 MB are installed, only the first 128MB are used. Device drivers Device drivers must be installed for the various device categories reviewed in this document. Depending on the device's importance, a driver installation may have to take place immediately at system start or may be delayed to a later time:
 * A disk driver (ATA/EIDE or SCSI), located on the boot device, is installed straight from the start by the boot loader.
 * At system start, a VGA driver is installed which is soon replaced by a display driver specified in the Display= and associated configuration strings. Other strings may command the installation of further drivers.
 * At a later time, a driver module is dynamically loaded when needed, just like any other Oberon module, by executing an appropriate Oberon command. The installation command depends on the controller. A driver is immediately operational: no reboot is needed. To automate the installation, it suffices to edit a line containing the appropriate installation command in the System.InitCommands group of Oberon.Text. Commenting out the line is enough to bar the installation.

Drivers dynamically loaded on demand remain in memory during the entire session. Consequently, a driver must not be uninstalled, in principle. Exceptionally, say for test purposes, a driver may have to be unloaded (the modules importing it must be unloaded first). Disk Cfr. Disk support

(1): one problem reported, card hangs while booting (as soon as interrupts are switched on, scsi selection time-out interrupts are raised, and the interrupt cannot be cleared or is set again by the card)

The documentation for programming the 53C8xx chip is found at &#104;ttp://www.lsilogic.com/techlib/ [expired].

Example: The add-on ASUS PCI-SC200 SCSI controller is based on the NCR/Symbios 53C810 chip. Display Cfr. Display support

VESA and PCITools.Scan information contains detailed information on the video modes of some of the video subsystems listed below.

Communication The drivers are listed with the name they are given in Oberon.Text, which is edited from the [Configure] button in System3.Tool.

Modem Only modems with a serial (V24/RS232) port interface are supported. Modems of the type "WinModem" have a proprietary interface to the operating system driver. Normally, they work only with Windows.

The safest is to buy an external modem with a serial interface, that understands the "AT" command set. Spending a bit more for a good modem (e.g. a 3COM US Robotics) is also worth it, because you will get better connections. PCMCIA No support yet. Mouse Cfr. Mouse support

Examples of mice known to work (Mouse type is described in "Mouse support"): Sound Cfr. Sound support USB Cfr. USB support

Chip sets compatible with the Universal Host Controller Interface (UHCI) 1.1 are supported, e.g. VIA's T83C572. OHCI is being investigated. Examples of machines known to work with Oberon The alpha version is working on:

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''4 Aug 2002 - Copyright &#169; 2002 ETH Z&#252;rich. All rights reserved.''

E-Mail: oberon-web at inf.ethz.ch

Homepage: http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch