ETH Oberon projects

Completed project
Projects in progress
Project suggestions

Most of the ETH Oberon projects are spare-time efforts and therefore do not proceed at full speed. Some of the projects are PC Native Oberon-specific, but the developers endeavour to produce portable components.

Completed projects

The fall-out of some projects is available by ftp and the authors will be glad to receive feedback and suggestions for corrections and amendments. The fall-out of some other projects has been integrated in the standard Oberon system.

• André Fischer extended the V24 to support COM3 and COM4. It is in the alpha release.
• Jörg Kreienbühl has developed a VNC viewer for Oberon. It allows controlling X Windows and MS Windows applications from Oberon. It is in the 20.03.00 beta release.
• Fabian Kuhn has developed an accelerated Permedia 2 Display
  driver, as well as an accelerated 3D graphics library, including
  TrueColor support. It is in the 20.03.00 beta release.
• Willem Myburgh has developed a Test Coverage Analyser for software testing (classified as software contribution).
• Peter Ryser has developed a NE2000 ethernet driver.
• Patrik Reali has developed a SCSI driver for the Adaptec PCI
  Cards AHA-294X, AHA-394X and AHA-398X, equipped with a 7xxx chipset.
  The updated driver is in the release 2.3.5b.
• Patrik Reali included an Oberon portability checker, i.e. a parser that accepts only plain Oberon, in the compiler.
• Peter Matthias has implemented a Native Oberon for Linux. It
  is binary compatible with Native Oberon. The beta release (2.3.4b state
  of Native Oberon) is now available at:
  ftp://ftp.inf.ethz.ch/pub/ETHOberon/Native/Update/beta990406/LinuxBased/
  It will be released after the next public release of Native Oberon.
• Ben Smith-Mannschott got Native Oberon running on a Mac using VirtualPC. On a G3/300 it runs about twice as fast as a 486/66.
• Erich Oswald made the graphics library Gfx. Although the
  library currently runs on ETH Oberon only, its concepts are independent
  of the underlying operating system and graphics engine. The documents
  GfxOverview.html and GfxHowto.html are included in the distribution. An
  older version is still available as package by anonymous ftp: Gfx.
• Necati Ecevit made a driver for a PCI DT3155 Monochrome Frame Grabber.
• Andreas Signer has ported Native Oberon to the DEC Shark (DNARD) NC machines.
• Jaco Geldenhuys updated the SPARC Solaris port to release 2.3 state. Now maintained by Günther Feldmann. Download.
• Jacques Eloff and Frank van Riet at the University of Stellenbosch ported Native Oberon to the Gneiss microkernel.
• Reto Strobl made a 3COM905B Fast Ethernet driver (in N. O. release 2.3.0).
• Christian Plattner made an EIDE (ATA/Atapi) disk driver.
• Patrik Reali made a 3Dlabs Permedia 2 (e.g. Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro) display driver (in Native Oberon release 2.3.0).
• Edgar Schwarz ported the XOberon implementation of PPP by Martin Aeschlimann and Claude Knaus (in N. O. release 2.3.0).
• Pieter Muller made a generic SVGA display driver (in N. O. release 2.3.0).
• Erich Oswald made a Metafont to Type 1 font convertor. This is included in the Gfx library.
• Günter Feldmann ported the ETH Oberon system to PPC Solaris and PPC Linux.
• Günter Liszewski adapted the serial port modules to support
  COM3 and COM4. His changes are somewhat specific to his system, and
  have not been included in the release yet.
• Edgar Schwarz made a provisional port of the ETH Oberon system release 2.2 to HPUX.
• Andreas Signer made an Oberon-2 to Active Oberon converter.
• Patrik Reali is responsible for the Native Oberon compiler.
• Wolfgang Ibl made a SCSI disk driver. It is based on the
  AHA152x driver from Linux. The driver works on a AIC 6260 chip. He is
  using a AVA-2825 card, and it should work on a AVA-2822 and AVA-2820
  too. It is in the release since version 2.07.
• Peter Ryser made a SCSI disk driver for a NCR card. It is in the release since version 2.2.
• De Villiers de Wet made a FAT file system for Stellenbosch
  University's Gneiss system. This was ported to Native Oberon and
  released with version 2.2.
• Wolfgang Pircher made an ET4000 display driver for DOS
  Oberon. This was ported to Native Oberon and released with version
  2.04.
• Jörg Derungs made a driver for a 5430 (Cirrus Logic) card.
  It should work with any 54xx card. It is in the release since version
  2.07.
• Martin Pirker made a Vesa 2.0 driver based on Peter Matthias' code. It was released with version 2.2.
• Martin Gitsels integrated SLIP into the NetSystem. It is included in release 2.2.
• Ivan Kellenberger made a programmable IP packet monitor.
• G. Meunier made a French keyboard table. It was released with version 2.3.6.
• Paul Floyd made a Canadian keyboard table. It was released with version 2.1.
• Wolfgang Ibl made a UK keyboard table. It was released with version 2.07.
• Francis Bogsanyi wrote an Audio driver for ATAPI CD-ROM drives. It was released with version 2.06.
• Thomas Burri made a Soundblaster Audio driver. It was released with version 2.07.
• Bruno Essmann made a DOS-based bootstrap loader. It was released with version 2.06.

Projects in progress

• Günter Feldmann has started to give B. Eberhard's WebNavigator (HTML4.0 renderer package) a network connection.
• Christian Plattner is implementing the support of USB.
• Michael A. McGaw is porting a Modula-2 device driver for a high performance PCI-based data acquisition board to Oberon.
• Cobus Combrink at the Stellenbosch University is porting the
  Scope debugger to Native. The plan is to build a motorized robot around
  a 386 chip and a reactive system, for which a debugger is needed. The
  system will use Native Oberon.
• Peter Easthope will work on a driver for the old Hercules monochrome video card.
• A programming language project with Microsoft Research, USA:
  development of novel technologies for software component
  interoperability.
• Michael Griebling is working on a Native Oberon port to run on top of BeOS (similar to Linux-based Native Oberon).
• Josef Sedlacek is implementing multiple disk and file system support.
• Pieter Muller is working on a S3 ViRGE driver. Project suspended 20 Apr 2000.
• Patrik Reali is adding ATAPI support to the ATADisk driver.
• Patrik Reali is writing a MathH 64-bit arithmetic module.
• Ben Smith-Mannschott is extending the Native Oberon file system with on-the-fly garbage collection.
• Jörg Derungs is working on an extensive test program for the Display module. A first version is working.
• Sander van der Wal is porting Native Oberon (SharkOberon) to the Acorn RISC PC and the Psion Series 5.
• Thomas Kistler is working on a version of the ETH Oberon system that performs continuous background optimization.
• Christian Plattner wrote a Steinberg PC-Midi-3 driver and is working on a MIDI sequencer.
• Edgar Schwarz is making a version control system for ETH
  Oberon, based on VCS. He is working on a simple WebDAV (RFC2518)
  client.
• Eric Rehwald is making an ATI Mach64 driver.
• Markus Dätwyler is updating the Linux port to release 2.3 state.
• Edgar Schwarz is updating the HPUX port to release 2.3 state.
  Stalled, because no feedback from anybody using the beta. Priorities
  shifted to other projects.
• Alan Freed and Wolfgang Ibl are working on getting the
  AHA1520 SCSI driver working with zip drives. Project aborted in Mar.
  1999.
• Jaco Geldenhuys is making a 3c59x EtherNet driver. It should
  also work on the 3c595 and the 3c597 (100Mb PCI/EISA cards). Project on
  backburner.

Project suggestions

• Construct a 1.44MB Oberon demo floppy disk with the compiler and networking included.
• Implement the Ethernet interface in Linux-based Native Oberon (NetSystem module).
• Translate the SPEC benchmarks to Oberon.
• Implement more functionality in FATFiles.Mod: MakeDir, FAT32 and VFAT support in Native Oberon.
• Investigate supporting the Uniform Driver Interface in Native Oberon.
• Continue the work of Edward Muller and Eben Esterhuyse at the University of Stellenbosch, who ported TeX to Native Oberon and wrote a DVI viewer. It was stopped in Aug. 99 due to work pressure.
• Implement a firewall using Oberon.
• A loader for Windows NT .DLLs in Native Oberon. As specific application, a Display module based on a Windows NT video driver DLL.
• Implement Secure Shell - SSH and/or Secure Sockets Layer - SSL for ETH Oberon.
• A Matlab client module for Oberon, based on TCP/IP
• Additional Display, Disk, EtherNet, Audio and Printer drivers.
• PGP for Oberon.
• Program comparison tool.
• 64-bit PC Oberon.
• Oberon file system for Linux.
• Native Oberon CD driver and file system.
• Multiprocessing using Tasks for Native Oberon.
• Harry Lewis made a SCSI driver for the Adaptec 1542CP controller. This driver is for Stellenbosch University's Gneiss kernel, but is written in Oberon and could possibly be ported to Native Oberon.
• Layla decoder. Convert a Gadget into a LayLa description.

Also consult the proposed group projects - Projektvorschläge.

5 Nov 2002 - Copyright © 2002 ETH Zürich. All rights reserved.
E-Mail: oberon@inf.ethz.ch
Homepage: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/