SPARC-Oberon (TM) V4 Release 2.9.2  (Solaris 2.x version)
================================

Copyright 1990-1995 ETH Zuerich

SPARC-Oberon is an implementation of Oberon for SPARC based machines.
It covers both the programming language Oberon and the Oberon system
closely resembling the original implementation by N. Wirth and J. Gutknecht.
SPARC-Oberon implements the Oberon-2 language extensions.



DOCUMENTATION
-------------

SPARC-Oberon contains some basic online documentation to enable
first-time users to get started with Oberon. However, for serious work
we recommend the following books published by Addison-Wesley.
Note that "Project Oberon" contains the full source code of the Oberon 
system and compiler. The source code is also available via ftp from
neptune.inf.ethz.ch:~ftp/Oberon/Sources/ProjectOberon.tar.Z.

N. Wirth and M. Reiser:
Programming in Oberon. Steps beyond Pascal and Modula-2.
Addison Wesley, 1992, ISBN 0-201-56543-9.
Tutorial for the Oberon programming language and concise language
reference (german edition available at Sept. '94).

M. Reiser: The Oberon System. User Guide and Programmer's Manual.
Addison Wesley, 1991, ISBN 0-201-54422-9.
User manual for the programming environment and reference for the standard
module library.

N. Wirth and J. Gutknecht: Project Oberon. The Design of an Operating
System and Compiler.
Addison Wesley, 1992, ISBN 0-201-54428-8.
Program listings with explanations for the whole Oberon system,
including the compiler for NS32000.

The manual pages for SPARC-Oberon are contained in the distribution
as file oberon.1.


REQUIREMENTS
------------

Cpu: SPARC
Operating system: SunOS 5.x
Mouse: three buttons
Terminal server: X11



INSTALLATION
------------

#csh
#   get the compressed archive sparcv4.tar.gz
#   uncompress archive
gunzip sparcv4.tar.gz
#   extract all files
tar xf sparcv4.tar
#   move the resulting SparcV4 directory
#   to the desired location (preferably /usr/local/Oberon)
mv SparcV4 /usr/local/Oberon
#   eventually remove archive
rm sparcv4.tar



SYNOPSIS
  oberon [-h bytes] [-f fontmapfile] [-x module proc]
         [-g geometry] [-c]

DESCRIPTION
  oberon starts the SPARC-Oberon process which may be terminated by executing
  the Oberon command System.Quit (after removing the leading !).
  The oberon command is usually located in /usr/local/Oberon/bin

  Special characters:

    key         meaning
    ----------------------------------
    F1        * mark viewer
    F2          alias to Escape
    F3          Break character
    F4          init colors
    F6..F10 (+Shift, +Ctrl, +Ctrl-Shift)
                characters beyond 127.
    Ctrl-L      redraw all viewers

  Keyboard interrupts may be generated by sending the oberon process a
  SIGINT signal (e.g. kill -2 pid).


OPTIONS
  -h bytes
      set heap size to specified number of bytes.
      If not specified, 2 MB are used for the Oberon heap.

  -f fontmapfile
      defines that font names should be mapped according to fontmapfile.
      If option -f is not specified, no font mapping is performed.
      The main purpose of this option is to map fonts to bigger ones on 
      displays with very small or unsharp pixels such as color monitors or
      for video projection.
      The file Big.Map is provided as an example for enlarging fonts.
      If a font mapping is performed, the result of printing documents will 
      not be exact. Therefore, if you want to get high quality printing 
      results, don't use this option. 
      Note that the meaning of this option has been changed over
      previous versions of SPARC-Oberon.

  -x module proc
      execute command module.proc.
      If not specified, Oberon.Loop is executed.

  -g geometry
      specify the size of the Oberon window.
      Note that the geometry option is taken as a hint, not
      as a command, by the window manager.

  -c
     use reverse video (recommended)


ENVIRONMENT
  OBERON
    A colon-separated list of directories in which to search for files.
    If OBERON is not defined, .:/usr/local/Oberon is taken as default.
    Note that shell specific characters like "~" are not supported by Oberon.
    The environment variable OBERON may be set e.g. under the C-shell by
    % setenv OBERON .:Mylib:Oberon.

  LD_LIBRARY_PATH
    A colon-separated list of directories in which to search for shared
    object libraries. Oberon links libc.1 (libc.so.1) and
    libX11.4 (libX11.so.4?) at execution time (via calls to dlopen).


UPDATE NOTES
  For a chronological list of changes and update notes see file 
  UpdateNotes.Text

------------

We propose to discuss Oberon related questions in comp.lang.oberon on usenet.