[Coco] Open Letter to those who will be attending the The 24thAnnual "Last Chicago CoCoFEST April 25-26, 2015

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 06 April 2015 03:57:11 Tormod Volden wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 2:18 AM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> >> If you are using Debian, you can pick lwtools packages from my PPA
> >> at https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive/ubuntu/m6809 and
> >> you are done. One thing less to struggle with.
> >
> > The instructions to add the ppa, when performed, prevent the
> > package-manager from running.
>
> Some of the instructions on that page are autogenerated and add to the
> confusion. The key is, as I have tried to make clear on that page,
> that you can perfectly install the "lucid" packages even if you have
> another or newer version of Ubuntu or Debian.
>
> > Can you just paste that line in /etc/sources.list into the email?
> >
> > However, when I had excised the line it added the first time, and
> > repeated the operation, it worked and synaptic is running. And
> > although it is checked as active according to synaptic, and the
> > package list has been refreshed, no package named lwtools is
> > available.
> >
> > Here is the trace when that command was exec'd the 2nd time;
> > gene at coyote:/opt/nitros9$ sudo add-apt-repository
> > ppa:tormodvolden/m6809 You are about to add the following PPA to
> > your system:
> >  Note: Packages are only built on Lucid, but will work fine in any
> > newer release as well. See "Technical details" below for how to
> > configure your software sources.
>
> add-apt-repository it at least handy for adding the gpg keys. But the
> sources.list entry it generates will have your distro name and not
> "lucid".
>
> > Found the added ppa, in sources.list.d, and it contains:
> > deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tormodvolden/m6809/ubuntu wheezy main
> > deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/tormodvolden/m6809/ubuntu wheezy
> > main
>
> Almost there, just replace "wheezy" by "lucid" and everything should
> work.

Ahh, and indeed it does. Thank you. But since I built and installed it 
from the hg repo last night, I won't put this on top of it just yet.
>
> Alternatively one can also just pick the .debs from that page and
> install manually one by one.
>
> Tormod

Now, ISTR my tc^3 controller was originally set so the nv clock did not 
clash with the clock in my scII controller, but now the 4n1 board has 
been removed, leaving the no-halt floppy which I am using.  However, its 
been years since I have been able to format a floppy without the whole 
thing "going away", aka crashing, from 1 to sometimes 15 or more tracks 
into the format operation. So what mt "mb" scripts have been doing is 
deleting everything so there is a clean disk to os9gen and that works, 
but what a kludge!

My "format" command in /dd/cmds is the same length & crc as this mornings 
build, as I tried to fix the crashing by copying the latest version into 
my cmds dir a year or so back, to no avail.  Apparently nothing has 
changed in format in the meantime.

And my default boot(s) apparently contain a crashomatic version of 
rb1773. Its longer then the present default, and shorter than either of 
the scii versions by quite a good number of bytes. But I need to 
actually do some formatting of the virtual floppies that the /sh 
descriptor can be set to access via the "dmode /sh stp=hexvalue" 
command, as I don't want to overwrite the 2 working vdisks I have until 
such time as I have fixed a wrong displayed value error I found just 
recently in bootlink.  As I've destroyed the working version of that in 
my fix attempts, to fix it needs some reorganization I am not done with 
yet, I'll have to ezgen /sh, then reboot to DECB and run "link.bas" in 
its place to bring in the bootfile I just edited with ezgen. The next 
bootlnk release will be the improved version AND will have grown the 
ability to show how I/we are presently linked if the argument is a ? 
mark.  Something I left out of the original.  Its srcs are so big now, 
that vim (the old tsedit with patches, and set for a 56k buffer by 
default) is the only editor that can handle it in one load. Minted it 
turns out, is out of memory and crashed long before it has loaded that 
source file.

So, if I ezgen one of those and swap out the crashing rb1773.dr in it, 
with one from this mornings build, I might be able to fix the crashing 
format.  smap says I should have enough sysram to be able to do it, 46 
pages free, 11K available with at least 10k contiguous.  With the 
present boot.

I see an rb1773_scii_ff58.dr, and an rb1773_scii_ff74.dr as the 
selections available.  The FF58 version is in use. Or does it make any 
diff if the 4n1 has been removed, leaving only the no-halt?

Or, and I hate to give up the no-halt, should I use the plain one for 
this test to see if I can fix my inability to format problem?

Thanks Tormod.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>