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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

So every time I see these threads about classic computing systems that did something interesting or novel (Oberon, Plan 9 Symbolics OpenGenera, BeOS, Amiga, etc), I want to be able to try them out on my own machine.

After discovering that OpenGenera was available, I tried a bunch to find a way to run it in a VM in OS X and had no luck finding an Alpha virtual machine host on which to install it.

Is Oberon one of those systems that I can get up and running in a virtual machine on OS X in an afternoon?

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Yes, you should be able to get Oberon running in VirtualBox through Blue Bottle OS [1].

Some tweaks do need to be made though [2]

[1] http://www.a2.ethz.ch/download.html [2] https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2008/005536.html

Thanks. This is most appreciated. I started looking for details on getting it running after posting this. That second link should prove useful.

And if you feel like to research how Oberon was implemented, the language, the kernel level GC and all the rest, there are lots of information available here,

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/

The book "Project Oberon" describes the system.

For the Native Oberon's sucessors, EthOS and Blue Bottle, you can additionally read

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cszypers/books...

and

http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:26082/eth-2608...

I went to look for "Project Oberon" to buy, but 170USD for a used copy is a bit much for me.

Why buy when the university makes the PDF of the book available?

Just installed it in 5 minutes from this location on OS X: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~fld/UnixAos/rev.4929/

Found the link at: http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads#toc4

Seems to run just fine, though it is only running in a window and not as the OS ofcourse.

Oberon had an abstraction layer that made it quite easy to target real hardware or an existing OS.

This was introduced as the system started to spread into other universities outside ETHZ, where the Cedar machines were being used.

The VLM's been ported, but manually setting it up Sid by far and large the same amount of pain simply amortized over time: the guides extant say you'll have to set up NTP, allow for a TUN from a hard coded IP to be granted an NFS export to the entirety of your disk, and - well, that's where I've ended up and I've still got an inscrutable "No protocol specified" to bang my head against. Perhaps serendipity'll be better to you.

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