FIRTH-UP! WELCOME TO THE GROUND-PLATFORM FOR RUNNING THE PRIMARY MULTIVERSE NOETICS, THE PMN, AND ALL ITS GAMES AND EDUCATIONAL AND WORK POSSIBILITIES :::This is firth-up.txt:::How to start the world's best operating system on the world's great variety of PC's. Firth234 or Firth is a word which in Scotland is associated with streams or sources of rivers, it is also the FIRST platform of ours and it is having acknowledgements to the first stack-oriented interactive robot controlling language from the 1960s, Forth. It was finalised in 2005 and with Lisamenu extension April 10, 2006, and that's its affirmed date, and the date the PC will get when it starts the full platform which is always able to run the G15 Yoga6dorg PMN programming language and graphics suite on top of it. :::CONSIDER HOW FIRTH IS MADE::: <> -- Athina, at Fleet, in an unrecorded moment during the Manhattan Transformation scifi writings {which are around in .txt form in the platform if you search it through the Fast File Search option at the menu which comes up when you type U}. For LISAMENU you can type LISAMENU at the command line later on, even if you begin following this firth-up.txt in typing 'XO' to exit it and install G15 over it. Are you about to install Firth to a beautiful expensive laptop -- expensive, that is, in the sense that it costs maybe thirty percent more than those which are so bundled with commercial platforms that they might have been subsidised to become less open to alternatives (a dirty trick much used with the cheapest laptops off the shelves, but usually not as noticable with somewhat more expensive laptops) -- and expensive also in the sense that it is fast enough so that the Curveart drawing program works smoothly with a plugged-in mouse, allowing to let your zest as an artist be unhinged? Then this text can give you all the skills to get you going to do it in a variety of ways, and a greater variety of ways than are here explained. We have yet to come across a laptop that CANNOT have Firth running directly on it, but it is true that a great deal of inventiveness is sometimes required to figure out how. When we say 'running Firth' we mean not run all of it, but to run at least a solid portion of it, where one is forgiving about widescreen stretching of the native graphics, but one uses Firth with G15 Yoga6dorg as free and NEW at www.norskesites.org/fic3 when one wants the widescreen clipped into the NOISY approach to graphics, where it in fact gives an extra stimulation and extra rough texture which is artistically JUST as it should be. We assume that soundsource while you work, play, and have fun with Firth, can be something else than the machine. We also assume that it can be good to work with more than one machine at a time, which is a preferred approach to any so-called "multitasking". :::FIRTH IS ART::: A NOTE FOR THE PERSON WHO HAS NO IDEA OF WHAT NSFW IS {OR WHO HAS A NEGATIVE IDEA OF IT}: go into www.allherlips.com/Unbent and if you don't like what's implied by what's there just wait until another reincarnation (or week) before trying Firth More explicitly, it is Henry Miller inspired elements in here. If you think it is possible to divide the expertise, the geniality of the technicalities of the development from such freewheeling esthetics of the erotic kind think again. Art is art. :::ART IS CONSCIOUSNESS STREAM::: :::CONSCIOUSNESS STREAM IS EROTIC, WILD, NAMELESS, PLURALNAMED::: The Firth234 FIRTH Operating Approach for Computer, OAC, made in OSLOve by mixing quantum insights with the eminence of the world of DOS-compatible freeware, shareware and the kernel-elements suitably modified and all sources included everywhere of the early 2004 version of FreeDOS, as a stable totality that has hidden forces. {Try type FIRTH234 then SC several times} WHAT MONITOR FORMAT TO WORK PROFESSIONALLY? {This paragraph, as many of the following, have been modified to accomodate new insights in how to do these things; we have incorporated a new love for widescreen in the G15 g15sp_f.zip package which is Firth234 compatible in a total and native way -- "supernative" -- by its NOISY approach to graphics, which, cfr screen image from an Anaiis Blondin G15 PMN game at norskesites.org/fic3 is even better than the non-noisy startup with a 3"4 monitor using command G15 instead of NOISY; when you know about this editing of the text, you will be more forgiving about elements of self-contradiction we hope! ;-) } Let's first state that the monitor format that's slightly wider than tall is enormously pleasant and fitting with the notion of not looking up and down on the monitor, but keeping attention fairly straight, allowing some length of sentences when need be and such. One scrolls by easing touching on the keyboard or a mouse rather than having to divide attention strongly between the upper and the lower. So it is holistic. And the established 1024*768 launched the computer industry and put it on firm footing in humanity in the last decades of the twentieth century. That's 4*3 format. Sixteen divided on twelve is the same proportion as four divided on three, if you calculate on it. (Multiply both factors in the latter by four, and you get the former.) Now this is the squarish upright display that forged the first flourishing of the computer culture in humanity and lead to a professional boom and boost of good work, as well as to much interesting in the area of entertainment. Then came the fat, spread-out sixteen divided on nine format, which divided attention. But the luxurious approach is to have several monitors, each which belong to separate computers of course, and each of which is incitement to upright attention and a professional attitude. Let's hate that widescreen and nurture that hatred until widescreen dissolves. And, fortunately, we have an antiwide command in G15: It's called NOISY. (It's a standard part of g15sp_f.zip and works also with Firth when G15 is run; the word 'Firth' is a play upon the language 'Forth' which played a key role in instigating fresh thinking on programming language with a more anarchistic feel and also suitable for robotic control, and PMN is the part of G15 where the connections to this original work by Chuck Moore from the 1960s is vaguely more obvious than in the rest of G15. Also thanks to conversations over a long time with the co-maker of class-hierarchic languages namely Kristen Nygaard, a friend of family in Oslo). NOISY does what rough paper can do to a drawing: it lends a texture to it. Texture becomes suggestive of possibilities. NOISY is a way to capitalise on widescreen. It crunches the pixels twenty-five percent back, packs them, killing the added wideness. And as it turns out, just as music with a background noise can be more creative, NOISY is just the format we want under some circumstances, such as when doing quick work and want a rough cut and sense and look and feel of the PC while e.g. in a cafe or library or surrounded by people, where a too glossy comfy high-res would be out of touch with the flux. Let's get into good flux. The first section which explains how to install Firth.iso as a USB-enabled operating system for off-the-shelves inexpensive standard PCs also small ones {laptops etc} -- quite a few as it turns out -- EITHER when you have a suitable extra monitor with the correct size you can plug in -- OR that it has the correct size already -- OR that you use the alternative startup for G15 which is called NOISY and which gives that texture we talked about in the intro to screens of 16:9 format, which is sometimes called 'widescreen'. It is an anti-widescreen version of G15. A USB mouse which is plugged into the machine is in most cases necessary as a tiny touchpad may not be recognised by a classical platform. Get an as standard PC as possible and don't buy one for certain without getting a chance to check out this unless you can use it for some other purpose if it doesn't work. But most tested do work with what follows, in one way or another, if you're at least a little bit of an experimentative fellow. A great variety of PCs have been found to support USB in the way that we describe here, with all sorts of USB pendisks, whatever version. There are some PCs where the only way to get pendisks to work fully is by means of a second partition. There are variations over the years of pendisks, too. And the PC should support a variety of settings during startup. For instance, the harddisk should be set to type IDE. The recommendation is to get firth in as firth partition, and a linux in as second partition. On some machines, firth will do the job of handling properly prepared USB disks. On others, one must go to linux to do this. And possibly even to get the content of firth.iso into the firth harddisk. We explain how it will work for a great variety of hardware here, and there are variations in how large parts of the Firth we get to work on each. FIRST though, we repeat an explanation of classical install {also in INSTALL.TXT in the 2006 part of yoga4d.org, namely its /download, where the install of RH8 or Red Hat 8.0 free CD's, which are there also and which became Fedora with next version, is described in some detail}. That is, an explanation of how to get firth up on a classical PC of the near year-2000 kind. After this section there is an asterix ****** box which indicates the beginning of (mostly) an earlier text, that focusses on running Firth within Virtualbox, which is good, too, because it has full SoundBlaster16 emulation, even if a number of other things are better experienced directly. To use G15 Yoga6dorg within something like Dosbox within Linux is also possible, but Firth is obviously something altogether different, though both Firth and Dosbox, and FreeDOS, DrDOS, etc has commands like DIR C: in order to see what files are on disk C:. So, SECOND, we give the explanation which is suitable for a range of newer PC's. That's a little bit more involved but not much. The funny thing is that the unchanged platform Firth from 2006 can run USB and to some extent fix Widescreen while not having been planned for that in the slighest. If the PC doesn't have a bootable CDROM as part of it, there's a way to get it up even so, cfr the hints part just before the asterix**** line which marks the beginning of the Virtualbox comments. *Have spare time and spare creative energy and a smile when you do this stuff. Watch out for variations in how the machines work and see if you cannot push it through even so. E.g., on some machines, when USB is enabled so that you fetch or store things on USB, one will with Firth experience that the meaning of the lettering C:, D:, and maybe also E:, are somehow rotated. So you check which is which with DIR, before doing a COPY either way. It is so really really fast to reboot when you run Firth directly so it doesn't matter that one has to do many reboots in any current working session. *Another example of a variation that you may have to peek or poke into: settings in Bios -- legacy this and legacy that support, and various language for this. *Another example is that a so-called driver of the .SYS type or the type listed in the grand startup files CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT has to be swapped with another in order to get some more of Firth to work and then you search in places like drdos.org and at Sourceforge for Freedos and Dos and look around in links to alternatives and try some. The Yoga6d.org search engine will regularly be updated to allow easy searching on various helpful files about this. You may have to sift through what keywords do work with Yoga6d.org and be patient. Try Russian and German language discussion forums and download sites also, if you can handle looking through any language issue straight to the core. Firth is itself. It is not updated, it is not merely a distribution. It took as starting-point a by now very early form of FreeDOS and a variety of parallel developments and it was moulded together to a resonant whole, which has its own stamp, its own personality. Of course, it is abundantly full of options, alternatives, variations, and these have all the prerequisite licenses -- freeware, shareware and open source with them. Whenever a super open source ware has been found, it was selected; but when the best performing pieces was a little element of freeware without source, but listed at respectable freeware sites some time in the early days, by now, of Internet, then this piece was used instead. Then we entered with a fresh, humorous, sensual spirit and did our bout of programming, fixing, patching, and cohering. This Firth cannot be properly experienced through any amount of screenshots, words, or sample programs run in other contexts. There it goes, you can check for yourself, or just take our word for it. How to run Firth on a classical Y2000 PC with Soundblaster16 compatible soundcard, a normal Vesa S3 videocard (some 4MB videoram or more) with a normal squarish format -- slightly wider than taller -- of the display 4"3 format, which has 1024 pixels in width and 768 pixels in height, a mouse, a harddisk, a CD-ROM, a PcSpeaker, and stuff -- this is explained here. In this Firth you can run the G15SP_F.ZIP from www.norskesites.org/fic3 that has the full G15 Yoga6dorg platform and programming language and suite of programs. But let's say you have an inexpensive laptop, it has several USB ports, it has something like a mousepad and a laptop-typical keyboard, and it has a CD and DVD player. It is of the type where you can press something like ESC or a function key at the moment you start it up, get an options menu ("Bios options"), and turn off UEFI (misnamed "Secure boot"), or turn on legacy boot; you also can get up a boot menu and in this you can boot from both USB if a suitable formatted pendisk is plugged in, and you can boot from CD if a suitable formatted CD already is in when it is turned on. Let's be clear that not every laptop has CD/DVD-player, that must be checked; and not every laptop has such a flexible Bios as this. Simply don't buy one that doesn't have it, for most have it, and it is a mark of universal respect for the differentiation between hardware and software: you buy a piece of hardware, and you buy possibly also some OS software, but the hardware ought to be capable of running more than one OS or it isn't hardware in the full, proper, free sense. So with this laptop, we're going to enable USB with Firth DOS fully without any fuss, we're going to enable the Firth graphics including the G15 fully, and this without even changing our original Firth .iso mostly made years before all the apparently new standards. It takes a little bit extra work, but it isn't much if you're used to going in between various distributions of linux such as the Debian branch and the Fedora branch and using a suitable pendisk-formatter to do so. If you have the classical type of PC, you should install a Linux such as CentOS on top of Firth, ie, after Firth, and this Linux will enable the USB ports if they are enough up to date to match the pendisks you have available. There are many forms of USB pendisks, technically speaking. A PC near year 2000 can read from but not write correctly to a pendisk of the typical kind made a decade and a half later, even if the linux that does the writing is entirely new. There may be patches for this, but that's how it usually is. This is something you must be aware so that you protect your pendisks from these machines until you have tried it. If you have a classical PC you can normally have an ethernet card plugged into it. You can then wire it into a modem that you also have a newer PC connected to, and either fairly directly or at least through a website with FTP you can then do a usually quick enough transfer of files between the two types of machines. The check you must do with a blank pendisk is this: write a big file of the .zip type to it from the classical machine. Then get that .zip back, and try to unzip it. If it unzips fine, then the pendisk is compatible with the machine. That's the rule of thumb. By 'big' it is sufficient that it is some dozens of megabytes big. So now comes an explanation for the classical PC, and next for the new e.g. laptop type of PC (which is spelled out in more detail in our very early text INSTALL.TXT available at yoga4d.org/download or yoga4d.org/downloads, one of these two, with Red Hat 8.0, which existed as open source and free, and which in version 9.0 became Fedora, when Red Hat went commercial; CentOS is very like the original Red Hat and is a reworking of open source Red Hat and Fedora programs on a community enterprise foundation that is suitable for programmers). CLASSICAL PC: Burn firth.iso to a CD. This can be done in an Ubuntu linux by right-clicking on the firth.iso file and selecting write to CD, and it will recognise that it is .iso and burn it as an image. Sometimes this requires trying it a couple of times and being sure other programs don't mount the blank CD first and so on. Don't insert the CD before the program asks for it. There are other CD-writing programs as well. Boot the classical PC with the CD. Type FDISK. Answer affirmative to large disk support. Select on menu View partion layout. If you are absolutely totally confident that you have backup of all that's important on the PC and that you can erase it all, do so, by selecting Deleting partition repeatedly until it is empty. Then you select Create a partition -- Create a Primary Dos partition. You will want to have a harddisk that has at least 20 preferably 30 GB to Firth and then another 30 GB or more to Linux. So you will not confirm that all available free space will be given to Firth. You should install Firth first, because Linux can be tweaked to start up Firth but not vice versa. You type in 30000 or 20000 or so as the size, this is the quantity of MB, so it means 30 or 20 GB. You then select Set Partition Active inside this same FDISK program. You select the parition you just made. If you now view it in the option to view partitions, it will have the big letter A for Active associated with it. This is a key to get it to boot from it and have it to be C:. You then exit Fdisk, press ESC and such, and turn off the machine, and wait the normal half a minute to be sure. With some machines, the startup of Firth will only work without an issue when the PC is given even as much as one minute wait after Firth has been started. On the positive side, Firth allows you to power off without any issue at all, just like that, as long as you have stored files and waited a sec. For some PCs, the waiting takes longer before RAM is really cleansed of loaded drivers. You boot again with the CD. This time write FORMAT C: and confirm with typing YES. Then type SYS C: Then type C: COPY A:*.* and be sure you don't type COPY A:*.* . because there's a workaround associated with this implementation of COPY, and that workaround is that it must never be given a dot for then it freezes. It is one of the sweeties of Firth, to know such stuff. At this point, you might as well again switch off, wait -- for some PCs, a wait of up to a full minute is important to have an as errorfree bootup as possible with Firth, and boot again with the CD. Then you will access the CD. If the machine is indeed classical, this should work fine as follows (though it may be E: or even F: or so on some complex machines): DIR D: You may have to repeat that action. If you get absolutely nothing, try to type AUTOEXEC and press ENTER to reload the drivers, and try again. If not, it isn't that type of classical CDROM after all, and you must rather do it as for a newer machine, if it has a new enough USB set of ports (next section). So DIR D: works and you also write this: DIR D:DISKETTE\*.* COPY D:DISKETTE\*.* Yes, by the way, if there is any question ever here about Overwrite Y/N just confirm Y consistently, throughout, and at any question overwrite Yes/All/No/None confirm by A for All. You see that we go careful in accessing CD by typing DIR first, this is in some cases quite a key to getting the startup right. Finally we're going to get the 600-700 MB .zip over: DIR D: COPY D:*.ZIP This gets you the LISA_OAC.ZIP. Now after the minutes it takes, let it rest for an additional minute, and you switch off, wait, and switch on. The next command, after you have booted with CD, is UNZIP LISA_OAC and it will take an hour, a day, or twice that, depending on the nature of the PC, its Ram, and its harddisk, and such. Be sure to confirm overwrite All. So you get a cup of coffee and when you return and it's done, you emit a silent blessing and get the CD out of the drive, -- oops, only you don't. Because the disk needs an extra bit to start up unless it hasn't had any much on it before. You type this: MRBOOTER and here you get an option to create a boot for whatever partitions you have on the disk. At this point, it is only Firth (unless you have something non-linux-like already on the disk, which is compatible with this shareware program). There are some simple menu instructions there -- to press ENTER to type in a name -- type Firth -- and to press F10 to continue to next screen and such. Just follow it. Don't change any settings, just do what's most obvious and let it store it. THEN you take the CD out, and switch off, and wait, and next time you start it, it is supposed to boot from the harddisk. It will then show off itself much. Let it. Do wait patiently. We'll make it faster. Type XO to leave the standard startup inside the Firth AUTOEXEC. Then type e.g. U to see the U menu. Type ANEW to reboot and on a classical PC the command OFF will switch it off. Rebooting / switching off should happen after a DIR if you have written much to the disk just recently, so it refreshes disk cache first. Turn the PC physically off at the reboot moment when you type ANEW for most PC's don't clean their RAM properly otherwise. Next, you install CentOS 5.5, which is like Red Hat 8.0, only that it handles some more videocards and has a little more Javascript in its Mozilla Firefox and a little more auto-checking on Flashdisks. This is a valuable version of CentOS and to be sure this open source GNU GPL ware is consistently available, you'll find it also on our sites. The location of the several CDs you need for this is found in the readme.txt inside the g15sp_f.zip which is listed at norskesites.org/fic3. The installation should not be over-expanded, but entirely straightforward, or else it will require more CDs than what's there. For a newer machine than a classical machine, newer CentOS or, if a complicated machine, Ubuntu will usually work. However, the CentOS may not, unlike the forerunner Red Hat 8.0, properly recognise how to start up Firth. If it doesn't, then I hope you are able to decode what we wrote in the just-mentioned readme.txt inside the g15sp_f.zip about how to use an editor like gedit to go into some subfolders of CentOS, where it says GRUB, and type in the right type of line -- chainloader and some such gandalfian spells. You understand that this CentOS will replace the MRBOOTER and we're fine with that. But we had to install the MRBOOTER to be sure Firth would start in the first place; however in a virtual PC the harddisk may in fact be so blank that the MRBOOTER or something similar isn't necessary. When the Linux partition -- whatever it is, Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Xubuntu or another Debian such as made by the gnu.org folks, or one of the other many hundreds of more or less active Linuxes -- is in place, you plug in a pendisk or load from internet the g15sp_f.zip and open a terminal and do some workings to get it into the Firth partition. If you have CentOS you usually have root password and you may find it convenient, especially if you use this particular PC little on the net and mostly to as a creative workstation online with you, but offline with regard to the buzzing net, to log in as user root. If you do, opening a terminal allows you to at once do such as mkdir /a mkdir /backup1 cd /backup1 fdisk -l and when you do the -l (lowercase L) for list, you'll see how it names the parts of the harddisk. In early CentOS it is /dev/hda1 which is Firth, but in newer versions and/or if you run it as LiveCD, and in Debian versions like Xubuntu, we're talking of the harddisk partitions being such as /dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdc1. Let's imagine it is /dev/hda1. Then you can do such as mount /dev/hda1 /a or, mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /a But if you don't log in as user root, which isn't necessary, you should at least have a password that gives you administrator access. The normal setup in Ubuntu and Xubuntu and such is that you can type sudo -i and you can give your normal password and, voila, you are the root user, until you type exit. In Fedora, you get a rapping over the fingers if you type it before typing su so do type su first. That will, if a liveCD CentOS, perhaps work without a root password even, just like that. After su, type sudo -i so that you have the full set of commands available, rather than just a selection of them. When you then do fdisk -l you'll get a sense of what's what. FAT32 or VFAT or such is written near the Firth partition. If you have USB plugged in these too will be listed when you do this so maybe don't have too much plugged in so you get a smaller list. If you run a LiveCD of a new CentOS maybe Firth is /dev/sdc1 or so. Classically, it is /dev/hda1. Whatever you find, try (where you write hda1 or sdc1 or so for xxxx): mount /dev/xxxx /a and if it complains that it is already mounted to such and such, write then umount such and such (replace 'such and such' with the folder name!) and try again. In a LiveCD, this is typically the case, you see -- the existing harddisk is mapped and mounted but in a read-only format. We want read AND write. Then we can write ll /a or dir /a or ls /a or ls /a -l or so to see what's there. We can take any .zip we have got from net or a pendisk and push into it, or extract from it. Be sure very simple and very short filenames and don't overdo this -- a simple transfer from harddisk partition to harddisk partition, and not directly to or from a pendisk. So get the g15sp_f.zip into /a. E.g., if you put it to /backup1, then do this: cp g15sp_f.zip /a Having done what you want, then umount /a is enough to make sure connection is safely closed for now. You can then shut it off by shutdown -h now or reboot by reboot or use a graphical menu if this too much typing. But if you choose reboot, press the on-off switch when it is at the startup-point and give it the normal pause before and after Firth. The g15sp_f.zip is now at the TOP directory. So when you have booted firth, typed XO you can type TOP and then DIR G15*.* and watch it. Then type HM to get to the HoMe directory c:\boehm\boehmian which we use for all sorts of stuff. Then type COPY \G15*.* unzip g15sp_f and confirm overwrite. Type then HENNI G15STUFF.ZIP PART 1 and confirm by Y, and then it wants a confirmation that it is complete, and you type X when it asks for an X. Then type UNZIP G15STUFF and again confirm overwrite. You can then throw the original AUTOEXEC.BAT of the Firth to the flames, or backup it first. COPY AUTOEXEC.BAT \ will get the short and crude new autoexec in place. You start this by negating a negation, N N, which is to say, no we don't want Virtualbox-like FTP and no we don't want Virtualbox-like FTP (two FTP drivers are negated). Double N means Yes to life, no? The next time you reboot, then, you type N N and then G15 should start the lovely shebang. Congratulations! MANY NEWER TYPES OF PC {INCL LAPTOPS}: These may have a fairly fast USB option to boot from if they are of the proper kind. This USB must be formatted in a particular way in case. Once it is formatted, a portion of that USB has a partition that speaks to the PC when it starts up. Use e.g. www.pendrivelinux.com to put the newest CentOS LiveCD (the version number is rarely significant in the great program which is free there, and which Ubuntu and Xubuntu lists in the Software Center as UNETBOOTIN. Get this beautiful program). There may be some references to DOS in the Unetbootin program, but this is typically to a DOS that in fact uses more a Linux-like startup and so it doesn't apply and in fact we don't need it at all. What we do here is to use CentOS LiveCD-at-USB as a bridge to get USB to work with Firth two-way, instead of using CD other than at the installation moment. Explanation follows. What you must have: * you must also have mouse ready to be plugged into USB * optionally a keyboard plugged into USB, but don't plug in both at once, explanation follows how to get them going * and the laptop must have a Bios that's treating these things fairly standard, watch out for brands that make products that look like standard products but which is wedded to one O.S. by funny things -- check in discussion forums for which laptops and PCs you find that people actually get going with a variety of platforms * the laptop should also have a CD it can boot from, but we don't assume in the following that the CD behaves very as a classical CD. However, if the PC doesn't have such a natural finesse as a bootable cd/dvd player, then there's a way to get Firth into it even so. The notes that immediately follows will then be compliment by that which is stated in the HINTS section, a little bit onwards in this text. * and you must have the leisure not to be certain that it works, because hardware can be much STEP 1. Burn Firth.iso to a CD. This can be used by right-clicking on Firth.iso, after you have downloaded it from the link also indicated at yoga6d.org/economy.htm as well as in the archive section pointed to by norskesites.org/fic3. Right-click in something like Ubuntu and it will give you the option to burn to a CD. STEP 2. Boot with this CD. It will probably protest a little, but you get some kind of startup message (perhaps the early one about yoga4d.com, which until 2010 was the name of the site which became yoga4d.org, we no longer use yoga4d.com or yoga6d.com, but yoga4d.org and yoga6d.org). STEP 3. Supposing you have backup of all that matters on the laptop and it is free to be experiemented with, harddisk reformatted relentlessly, type FDISK. STEP 4. View partitions. Delete each partition. Create a Primary Dos partition of 20000 to 30000 MB, don't go higher than this. Set this partition to Active by a separate action on the menus. View partitions, and see that there is the letter A associated with this sole partition. Exit FDISK and switch off the machine and wait. STEP 5. Type FORMAT C: and confirm by typing YES. STEP 6. Type SYS C: and type COPY *.* C: and confirm overwrite. STEP 7. Type MRBOOTER (after a new boot with CD if you like) and use such as ENTER and F10 to assert that the menu shall consist of the option you name as Firth and all standard settings there are good. You let it write this to harddisk. Try it by taking CD out, switching off, waiting, and booting. It will give messages but we'll fix on that. REMEMBER TO WAIT UP TO A FULL MINUTE BEFORE STARTING FIRTH AGAIN. On some PCs, it takes more time before RAM is cleansed, and without that, there will be needless error messages during startup. At this point you could determine whether the CD-DRIVE is viewable in full (ie, beyond the few files in its floppy-emulated A: bootup) from within the platform. We're simply going to not rely on that at all! Just watch: STEP 8. Switch off and start with the LiveCD USB with eg CentOS, new enough to handle the videocard of the PC. Find the program Terminal in Tools or whereever. Type su if it is CentOS, Fedora or the like, and if it is a meaningfully made liveCD it will not protest and you can type sudo -i whereas in Ubuntu you type sudo -i straight away. Now if you don't find a liveCD where you get into administrator access of a terminal you'll have to install it and THEN use the administrator password to do what we need to do. If you have to install it, you will have to be sure you get to boot Firth again. If you use MRBOOTER again, you'll not get connection to that Linux partition. So unless it offers it itself, somehow, you must follow instructions in g15sp_f.zip in norskesites.org/fic3, the readme.txt there, at the latter half of the document, tells how to tell the Grub bootloader of such as CentOS to recognise Firth as an option if you use such as CentOS up to version 5. For a newer version, consult the 'ADDITIONAL HINTS' just below in this text. I assume you now finally have got administrator access of the sudo -i type in a terminal. Then you type fdisk -l where the -l is dash and lowercase L for List. On top of the list, if it is long (scroll, or type instead fdisk -l | more and spacebar to see more and q to quit listing more.) You'll see /dev/hda1 and such, or you'll see /dev/sda1 and such. Look for FAT32 or VFAT or such, and this is likely the Firth. Notice the exact lettering and numbering. Try (where you write hda1 or sda1 or so for xxxx): mkdir /a mount /dev/xxxx /a and if it protests it's already mounted, then notice what it is mounted to -- some folder path -- and write umount this-folder-path and simply do the mount above again, and it will work fine, usually. Type dir /a and you should see a few files associated with the little boot we have prepared for the Firth partition. You now probably have full write-access as well as read-access to Firth. We're now going to do some magic to get full USB in our Firth DOS by means of the LiveUSB pendisk you have. But first we must clean up two files. So do this: cd /a gedit AUTOEXEC.BAT you write it uppercase if it shows in uppercase, otherwise lowercase. Every A: in that little file you change to C: and then you press CTR-S and it should save without a protest about write-access. Press CTR-Q. Then gedit CONFIG.SYS and also here replace every A: with C: and press CTR-S and CTR-Q. dir will now speak of the existence also of the backup files AUTOEXEC.BAT~ and CONFIG.SYS~ so carefully write this to get these too-long filenames away: rm *~ -i and confirm the removal of these two ~ files. Whenever you do rm with * do it slowly and take a pause before pressing lineshift. (There must be no space after * in this phrase, and the -i means it wants you to confirm each. The opposite is -f and sometimes you can write such as mv /xxx1/* /xxx2/ -f in order to avoid getting the questions when you move files from one folder over on top of files named same in another. This you might already know, but I try generally to write for all!) Alright. Let check it. We have an alternative route if you don't get the particular pendisk you have accessed. What you do next is to turn the Linux off -- by typing shutdown -h now or by typing reboot and then switching it off at startup moment. Note that you leave the USB pendisk in. This is the key for bootable pendisks to be accessed from Firth. You will however not select to boot from it. You rather click on ESC or whatever, perhaps then an additional key, to get a boot menu, and allow the boot to Firth harddisk, with the pendisk plugged in. It may work. We have another way if it doesn't. It will then be something such as D:. So try DIR D: or possibly DIR E: or even a higher letter in some machines. It can also be switched around, then pendisk can be C: and the normal harddisk D:. Work out what's what. If the content of the USB disk shows, you most likely have two-way fast USB with your Firth and congratulations. Next step is that you use either this pendisk or another, if you have more, and take out the biggest .img file in it, if need be, in order to get space to put the LISA_OAC.ZIP into it. Turn the PC off, take out the pendisk, wait for a full minute, and then switch on and do the check that it's alright to boot from the harddisk as it is -- try to type DIR or something -- without the pendisk plugged in. Having ascertained how the PC you have in front of you collaborates with the pendisk you intend to use, we proceed. IF THE PENDISK WORKS: So next you go into a machine such as Ubuntu or Xubuntu, where you have firth.iso stored. You click on this .iso and it opens like an archive is opened, more or less like a folder, and you retrieve the file LISA_OAC.ZIP, some 600-700 MB. This goes to the pendisk if you got access to pendisks this way. The bootable pendisk with the LiveCD CentOS perhaps have a file like squashfs.img which is itself some 600-700 MB. You can copy it into the harddisk of a PC so as to restore it later if you want that LiveCD again. Then remove it. You then for sure have space for LISA_OAC.ZIP on that pendisk. Put it in on top. Put also g15sp_f.zip in on it, now or soon. (Avoid spaces in filenames, max 8 chars then dot then max three chars, hyphen, dash, digits, a..z letters ok). Put the pendisk into the PC with Firth, plug in the monitor also, and the USB mouse, and switch it on. The monitor in most cases is autoactivated when it is in at the beginning, and so also with the mouse (when there is a mouse-sensitive program). Wait with any USB keyboard. Or use only it rather than the USB mouse if you must use it, until we're into G15 -- I'll explain. Type DIR D: or what you found out as working to access the USB pendisk. The current folder (shown when you type just DIR) is the top folder, C:\, if not, type CD \ and then type COPY D:*.ZIP to get all the .ZIPs on top level there, including the LISA_OAC.ZIP and the G15SP_F.ZIP. They will look like uppercase here no matter what they were called, so watch out for putting files of equal names apart from case on such pendisks. Now go to the UNZIP LISA_OAC line written in the paragraph after next: IF THE PENDISK DOESN'T WORK: Then you put the file LISA_OAC.ZIP which is within firth.iso to the firth harddisk by means of a second partition. The simplest, although most time-consuming, is to install -- let's say Ubuntu -- and let it set up its own boot menu. Or, use a LiveCD, and use also the notes in the previous paragraph to get access to the disk. Note that linux is more or less date-sensitive. Start with Firth and type date and give the date e.g. of the day before this in the format it asks. Then switch off, and next you can install a linux without bothering about whether it can handle big date variations. So, to summarise this, you get up a Terminal, in Ubuntu type sudo -i whereas in CentOS type su first, then sudo -i. Answer with normal password in Ubuntu and with root password in CentOS, if it asks. The Terminal then allows you to find out what the name of the harddisk is, e.g. /dev/sda1. You can type fdisk -l or if it is a too long list, type fdisk -l | more or you use the scrollbar in the Terminal. The VFAT or FAT32 or what it is called is the Firth and it will say maybe /dev/sda1 and so you can type mkdir /a mount /dev/sda1 /a dir /a and you'll see some Firth files. Open then the home folder view and be sure that the firth.iso file is on the disk. Click on this, and it opens like an archive, and copy the LISA_OAC.ZIP file and paste it somewhere. Then type cp /LISA_OAC.ZIP /a if you put it on the / folder. If it shows as small letters, write this by small letters. After a while, you can type umount /a and the file is in place. WHEN THE LISA_OAC.ZIP FILE IS IN PLACE ON THE DISK: After a fresh restart, with the normal wait between runs before you start Firth to cleanse RAM drivers away, you start it up, and from the Firth part of the harddisk, you type UNZIP LISA_OAC and, after confirming overwrite All, take a good long break. It will however be a fraction of the time of doing Virtualbox on the same PC. Then, switch it off, wait a full minute to be sure unless you know that you can do it faster with that particular PC, start it up again, and when it finally gets through with its considerable startup, type XO and press lineshift. Then type HM COPY \G15*.ZIP if you already have that g15sp_f.zip in place, if not, get it first and THEN do it. HM means go to c:\boehm\boehmian, which is a focal area. UNZIP G15SP_F and confirm overwrite again. Then HENNI G15STUFF.ZIP PART 1 and confirm with Y, and when done, it asks you to type X, and do so. Then, UNZIP G15STUFF and confirm overwrite. Reboot, with or without pendisk in, -- you unplug it when you know all has been written to it, and when you have switched the machine off -- and if you ever need to reformat it, check out the norskesites.org/fic3 where the linux fdisk /dev/xxxx command is mentioned -- the UNETBOOTIN will normally result in the need for the fdisk command d to be used four times, part 4, part 3, part 2 and part 1 are selected, then w to write stuff to the pendisk, then umount /dev/xxxx and finally mkfs -t vfat /dev/xxxx will entirely make it free and fresh again, if it is still good as far as hardware goes. To simplify startup (doing away with the need for XO, and making it faster), next time do this: COPY AUTOEXEC.BAT \ or take backup of the original autoexec.bat first somehow. Then switch it off, by typing ANEW (which for most PCs will reboot it, so you can switch it off easily), or, at classical PC's, type OFF can power off it. Wait. Start up. So, with a classical monitor shape of the professional upright format that gathers attention to one task rather than spreading it out -- namely, in short, the 4-3 format, you type G15 but if you have the right twenty-five percent of a 16-9 format screen (taped over?) you type NOISY and get the rough-cut texture slightly lower-res version of the same to work on the 4-3 left part of 16-9. (This is unlike how it is done when run within a Linux context, where the resolution is full even as it is run on the 4-3 left part of 16-9.) The G15 we regard as the pinnacle, the penultimate fountain of energy, the focal point etc etc of Firth. Other things won't look as good as G15 when on a stretched screen but if one has a variety of PCs and ways of running also G15, then one can accept these variations. The sound both of PcSpeaker and of SoundBlaster16 is maybe not there but you'll get these features out of Firth when you run Firth in other ways and sound often SHOULD be handled by separate units in order to focus attention. ENJOY! Congratulations if it works. And good work you must have put in! Let's learn this point, which matters a lot for some machines, and which at other machines must be done differently, or is no issue at all: USB mouse and USB extra keyboard plugged in: So, This may vary but :-- When you plug in USB Mouse you will normally find that this enables both itself and ALSO the mousepad on a mousepad-like laptop when a program like G15 runs. The inbuilt keyboard works, and the mouse works, and the mousepad. (On a PC where the only keyboard is one plugged in via USB and similarly for the mouse there are rare cases with getting it to work; you may be able to find a workaround such as unplugging one element at bootup time.) So since all works fine, you then enter e.g. the miniedit program, which calls on keyboard, and type a little, and then plug in the external keyboard. The differentiation between the two hardware units should after a while be established good enough that there won't be an issue with them. On some PC's such fine-tuning isn't necessary for it all works all the time. =====================ADDITIONAL HINTS!!!!!!!!! |HINTS| GETTING A PROPER FIRTH BOOT MENU IN CENTOS: That requires a slight modification of just two text files. I write it here elaborately because it needs to get right the first time you do it! I assume that this, or something like this, applies to Fedora and other rebuilds of Fedora also. * if you are using a newer CentOS than 5 and it jumps into loading CentOS without first offering a menu where it explicitly says, "Firth!!! Yeah!", then apart from hoping that these folks will soon learn how to get their stuff right, we can do it ourselves. Go into the CentOS -- this works with version 6 and onwards, for earlier versions check with what's in the readme.txt inside g15sp_f.zip which is free at our norskesites.org/fic3. Before you do what is next backup all and everything inside the PC that might be important to store for with a single letter typed wrong in the next, it may not boot again before it has its disk reformatted. Open a terminal. Get into administrator mode. This you can do by logging in as root or use the su command followed by the sudo -i command where after the first you answer with the root password. Do this: cd /boot/grub gedit grub.conf Leave most of this text file intact. Find the lines with default, timeout and hiddenmenu and modify them to this: default=1 timeout=10 #hiddenmenu Go to the bottom of the file and type this stuff, with a tabulator pressed before the three lines, and without any extra space inside (hd0,0): title Firth rootnoverify (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1 This should work if you have installed Firth as explained above, and the CentOS e.g. 6 or later after it, using the free space on disk. With other setups, it can get complicated. Ubuntu usually has advanced automatic configuration that handles these things and gives you a menu, where it may identify Firth e.g. as 'FreeDOS' or just 'Dos'. Ok, save that stuff to the grub.conf file. Ctr-s and ctr-q. Finally, a modification in a second boot-up file belonging to the Grub program. Type gedit device.map and in this, ignore any # comment lines. There is a line there with a /dev/ phrase and such. Just before that line identify the floppy-disk-boot-like feature of Firth: (fd0) /dev/sda Press ctr-s to save it, ctr-q, reboot and if you've done it right, it gives you Firth and CentOs (or whatever linux you have) as option. If you have issues with this the best bet is to go to discussion forums for a linux near the type you are using and searching wildly, for the official Grub manual requires several mortal human lives to decode fully and make use of. |HINTS| GETTING IT INTO A PC THAT CAN'T BOOT FROM A CD Firth can be inserted into a PC without a CD. Then we won't use MRBOOTER but we'll instead make use of a blend of isolinux with a version of FreeDOS we haven't made active use of, but which in original form from 2005 with sources is part of the archived sections of firth.iso; this is namely collaborating with such programs as UNETBOOTIN, that expects isolinux. Get something like CentOS LiveCD installed by the UNETBOOTIN maybe in Ubuntu or Xubuntu onto a flashdisk, www.pendrivelinux.com explains it. On a separate flashdisk, install the fd2005.iso which is in the yoga4d folder inside the firth.iso to this flashdisk by choosing the Dos option in UNETBOOTIN program or similar program. You can right-click on the firth.iso in a Linux so as to open it as a folder, or so as to mount it, in which case it will be available as a folder if you look around in the Computer folder e.g. in CentOS. Extract from firth.iso the LISA_OAC.ZIP (small or big letters). Open this LISA_OAC.ZIP and be ready to copy a bundle of files from the top of it, and from one particular folder in it called yoga4d. So, put the whole folder yoga4d as well as all .BAT, .SYS, .COM and .EXE (with small or big letters, whatever fits with how the file is opened) in the top part of LISA_OAC.ZIP, into the flashdisk just prepared by UNETBOOTIN or the like. Preserve yoga4d folder as yoga4d. Having done this, boot the PC you're going to reformat and do a fresh install of Firth and a second partition e.g. with CentOS, Ubuntu or Xubuntu on it. Boot it so that you select, in the Boot menu that you can probably get up by ESC and an additional functionkey maybe, to boot from the pendisk with the various dos elements on it. Select to boot the freedos here and then select RESCUE MODE. This is important, as there are key differences not all which are compatible between Firth and FreeDOS which can prevent even the main unzip of Firth to work out correctly. So only select RESCUE MODE. Then explore with DIR C: and DIR D: what's what, explore other letters also. If you have an empty harddisk, it will probably become D:, while when you type DIR C: you'll probably see the pendisk. Work out what's what. Type FDISK and confirm large disk support, then -- importantly -- go to the point where you select WHICH disk and it will normally be disk 2 which is the harddisk of the PC while disk 1 is the pendisk. Ponder over this for it may be different in some cases. The clue is to see what type of format it is, and what size. You can select one, view partitions, then the other. Having chosen the PC harddisk: Choose Show partitions and then Delete partitions and delete what's on it of the approporiate kind -- that is to say, if you're sure the PC doesn't have data you must backup. Create a Primary Dos partition of size 300000 (thirty thousand) MB not more, maybe a little less, and having done that, select on the menu to Set Partition Active. Showing the partition listing, it will then have the letter A associated with it. Escape out of FDISK. Reboot by the pendisk and again choose dos and RESCUE MODE. You know which letter is for the harddisk in just this particular boot-up context. In some cases, it is D:. So here I write D:, but you change it if it is different. So you write format d: and confirm this by typing YES. Then write sys d: and it will copy over some files. These must be changed to what is compatible with firth. So you then go into the pendrive. It could be C:, so here I write it like that, and confirm any overwrite: C: copy *.bat d: copy *.sys d: copy *.com d: copy *.exe d: d: mkdir yoga4d cd yoga4d copy c:yoga4d\*.* Having done that, you have done a lot. Next install a second partition by means of the other pendisk which has a linux with the type of Grub bootloader that is often used. Note that we don't use MRBOOTER here. So to boot Firth in the first place, we first install a linux as a second partition, and get a boot menu by it! Ubuntu may recognise the partition as a Dos. If it is CentOS, modify as just stated -- by using gedit on two files inside /boot/grub as stated in the lines above in this hints section. When you install, be sure to only use free space, not to replace existing partitions. And after all this you can start up the PC, at the boot menu it will say Dos or Firth, and you can choose it and you're ready to go up in this text to the place where it says UNZIP LISA_OAC and congratulations if it worked! So that's how one can do it without a bootable cdrom (or a bootable floppy). |HINTS| there are MORE ways of getting Firth234 operating approach for Personal Computer to run than what is here explicitly stated. Play with it, as long as you have backups |HINTS| MRBOOTER shareware is an excellent way to do it, but on those PCs which swap C: and D: (or swap C: and E:) when booted with a USB stick it seems that this bootloader will inevitably install on the USB stick, the pendisk, because at least this version of it connects to the bootup disk only. This is no issue when booting with a Firth CD -- when booting with the firth.iso from a physical CD, the MRBOOTER behaves correctly. It also behaves correctly on all those PC's which do not swap internal harddisk C: with the pendisk during bootup from pendisk. But on those PC's that do swap it -- and there is a certain enhanced compatibility when this is swapped when one wants to run such as Firth games or other applications while doing legacy boot from pendisk, having switched of any UEFI boot and switched on legacy boot in the Bios Settings -- one can use GRUB instead of MRBOOTER. So, for those who install a linux with GRUB bootloader as second partition, they will get the option to fix on the GRUB so that it starts Firth perfectly -- notes on this are also given in this document, above (and in another .txt the same paragraph above suggests that one should read also in some cases). But what for those who have such a PC where C: and D: are swapped, and they don't have a CDROM on it {which they should! -- it is important, as also noted above, to spend a little extra money on e.g. the laptop so that it has enhanced compatibilities compared to the subsidised laptops which are entwined with commercial platforms, also so as to get extra speed, speed enough to do good artistic work with Curveart, which is an important pedagogical instrument!} -- what do they do, if they don't want Linux as second partition, JUST Firth? This noble intent should be fulfilled! And the answer can obviously be this, a way that takes a bit of time but requires no extra tools whatsoever of any type: {1} install firth to the harddisk, while skipping installing a bootloader {2} install a linux which has grub bootloader {3} modify the grub bootloader {as explained above, it is usually a .cfg or .conf text inside the /boot or /boot/grub/ folder in the linuxes indicated above} so that it has a poetic startup-text for Firth, e.g. Firth G15 PMN Y6, and that Firth is the first option in the menu, and modify the linux menu option text so that you prepare for getting the linux option thrown out {4} test and correct if need be that Firth boots {5} go into this linux partition one last time and remove the linux menu option from the boot menu {6} boot Firth and use fdisk to remove any partition which is not its active dos partition of 29000 or 29500 MB or so. That'll do. |HINTS| if you use something like Centos go to a place like http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/repoforge/redhat/ and find a rpmforge subfolder for the version you are using -- i386 if 32-bit, and the main release number -- or search on rpms rpm and rpmfind and such in the search engine. Download the wanted program e.g. gftp and right-click on it when it is safely in place in your harddisk. You then get the option to install it. In this way, you don't have to rely on a software center. Be sure the source is a trusted one. ************************************************************** * * Using Firth in Virtualbox and FTP to move files in and out * through your ethernet router between the virtual PC and * the real PC! * (do begin with completing notes where it says that you must type AUTOEXEC in manually one extra time during installation to access the firth.iso when mounted as a virtual CD in Virtualbox) ************************************************************** ***note for those who use VirtualBox and who want to get this to work properly with Firth and also to run the G15SP_F.ZIP Yoga6dorg G15 programming language, the newest, available always at norskesites.org/fic3: the following firth-up.txt text was written a long time ago and there's a greater emphasis at present on real hardware to run it than having a virtual way of running it, after considerable more experience with both. Pls see added notes at the bottom of this text before you follow the instructions, as there are some slight changes in Virtualbox indicated there, including a vastly important simple workaround or two to get anything to perform at all. Thank you.*** MAKE FIRTH, NOT WAR BLAST YOUR EGO: EXPAND INTO THE FIRTH DIMENSION WITH MAXIDOS YOGA6DORG WARP-TRAVEL TO THE CENTRAL REGIONS OF THE UNIVERSES =*-=*-*=*-*=-* You are free to redistribute firth.iso and associated .zips and .isos as long as these are kept whole, unchanged, and that it is done with respect, and in a respectful context, with proper references to norskesites.org/fic3 and such, and with an honoring of the spirit of acknowledgements as indicated in our yoga4d.org/cfdl.txt. A lot of work has gone into including e.g. only such Pascal compilers as actually has been released as open source and/or freeware rather than including e.g. commercial version of Borland Pascal inside the early-style-modified FreeDOS.org compatible but heavily extended Firth234 platform suitable for classical-style PC's with 3"4 shaped monitors which are Vesa S3 compatible. Try to get such hardware rather than always using emulations because experience there is much richer. This work means that the platform, which affirms April 10, 2006 as the constantly renewed date due to the fact that not all classic Dos-software handle all sorts of dates, is legal freeware and legal open source and all acknowledgements are intact. Please don't mess it up, but you are naturally invited to provide compatible extensions on packages on the side that you deliver alongside instructions as how to get them into Firth. Good luck with this and thank you for always honoring the acknowlegdements and licenses involved. I have resisted the temptation of systematising the installation for my favourite background platform, the Ubuntu Linux, where Oracle's Virtualbox from Virtualbox.org perhap work really well so as to drive big portions of the Firth package. I started out trying it on all other sorts of background platforms, and this text is mostly written before I came around to realise the superior excellence of GNU/Linux in the Ubuntu extension to rule over all present hardware elegantly and easily for all, and at no price. The reason I have kept the installation as stepwise and as complicated is this: anyone who doesn't have sufficient enthusiasm for pushing through these steps probably won't catch easy on to Firth at present anyhow. This is gold for those who are willing to wash some sand. A general note: when you install the best operating system, ever, namely Firth or FIRTH234 or Lisa_OAC or what the fuck we should call it, then you are a kind of higher elevated being whose sense of compassionate anarchism is set on a path of endless progress, and blah blah, BUT: be sure that you learn to (1) switch of all and every needless question frame that the beautiful www.virtualbox.org will ask you, initially (ie, frames with an option to click on a 'Do not give this information next time'), (2) think of the operating approach of Firth rather as a city with villages, some more bohemian than others, and with compartements and treasures strewn about alongside things which may never really fully work, and (3) that you get the knack of hitting the right-ctrl button (or whatever it is set to, in your VirtualBox.org or other machinery), when it comes to getting the outer mouse pointer away and centering and aligning it with the Firth mouse pointer diversities as needed. By the way, behind the www.virtualbox.org supported by the Oracle Corporation, as generously released on GNU GPL Open Source foundation drawing on a great diversity of efforts both by themselves and by a huge number of programmers programming in the best of spirits connected to other, more or less related projects, there stands real human beings, each of whom has contributed according to own skill and according to the projects' needs. Though they are not named in this installation info, each one of them, we wish to say the greatest thanks possible for their work. This is what makes the Personal Computers of the 21st century have a real enduring meaning. Whatever else happens on the operating system front, a totally enduring permanence founded on what can be called the Y2000 classical PC with 1024*768 pixel monitor, a harddisk, a mouse, and a keyboard and some MP3 Soundblaster-like playback options, has been safeguarded, protected. This is a type of computer insight -- the Firth in particular -- where you know that what you learn in one decade, applies also in all future decades. The point we so often have emphasized in our works over all these very very many thousands of hours of background work is this: the Y2000 PC has a unique meaning-matching with the make-up of the human psyche, in terms of speed and 32-bit complexity, in terms of requirements both for practical use and for great mind-stimulating and not overglossy use. The Y2000 PC is a coherent product. It is like the concept of the Transistor as such -- something which -- once it has been achieved, cannot possibly be removed. Whatever else computers will do in the future, there will always be a majority of them that runs the true hard core of this classical 32-bit computing standard, with nothing else to occupy the computer monitor. So turn the roomlights off and switch on Firth. It's a good friend to have -- one that you ALWAYS can rely on. It took so enormous amount of work just because the feeling was, this is the chance to gather EVERYTHING of the BEST of what is made for that standard. This was done also with the sense that those programmers who had made versions of languages available for free, such as Free Pascal or DJGPP or APL or Perl or Lisp or Prolog or Forth, had made these free JUST BECAUSE they instinctively felt that these languages have a right to persist; that commercial interests should not overshadow the enduring presence of these languages or associated standard programs. The commercial languages, though we had them available, -- in other words, the languages made available only at a price -- we left out. Firth is legal. It is also made on the premise that ALL aspects of the FULL whole beautiful human being will have something that pretty directly matches own soul, at any point. After this many years of working on some many other things after Firth was made, it is possible to look at the work done then from a distance and say: all this propaganda is not propaganda at all, it is perception. Firth is the best, and it is impossible to go wrong with. The installation info you find written out at http://www.norskesites.org/fic3 and, identically, at http://www.moscowsites.org/fic3 has it all. But those pages have also somewhat more info than what is necessary. [[[This has to do with giving proper acknowledgements to recent works by FreeDOS which helped Firth being reborn in 2012 after its first release in 2006, due to the focussed attention the FreeDOS folks have given not only to VirtualBox but also to their recent work on File Transfers (FTP) within VirtualBox.]]] Nothing with operating systems is entirely and in all ways easy, and extra information may suddenly become crucial, so we'll let the extra information be there, also for that reason. What we'll do here is to give a kind of resume, hopefully complete, although not written the very same hour as these things are done, so that there may be a couple of things you have to experiment with, even if you have pretty much the same type of computers (a very broad range) that we're talking about here. I think you would do well in focussing on getting the program from at the 'Downloads' section from www.virtualbox.org installed on the computers that you are using, as point 1. This is easiest on Microsoft Windows but fairly easily also on most Linux'es and there are other platforms there as well. This is the number one step, and since there are some subtle differences in how to transfer files in and out of Firth between the two platforms, I'll give a list of points here that are for the most part similar, but slightly different at some points for these two main types of platforms. Again, there is no garantee it'll work in all cases without modifications. Also, as new versions of VirtualBox come, and new versions of MsWindows and Linux'es, these things might become subtly different -- often easier, occasionally at some points in fact more complex at times, before a later version cleans up the complexity again. So we'll make an emphasis to have a yearly update or so of this installation text fitting with newer versions of the platforms and programs. It is good to know that Firth is the same and the Lisa GJ2 Fic3 is the same, the latter is just updated with some EXTRA stuff on occasion, not changing that which is the established standard for F3. I'll give the MsWindows list of points first. Then the Linux list of modified. And pls have good luck!!! FIRTH AND F3 RUNNING WITH MSWINDOWS AROUND IT: ============================================== If you have a laptop or a desktop PC that tends to get a bit hot and with a fan that tends to spin very fast when you use it a lot, go and acquire a fan, and put it at a strategic point beside the computer, before you go on. Running Firth is using the machine for real. If it usually get fairly hot, this time it will get more than fairly hot, unless you get that fan. Or for computers of enormous speed, POSSIBLY adjust the CPU speed in the Settings menu just before you install the Firth. However, this is a much less smart idea than having a fan, or, better still, many fans. Who wouldn't like to have many fans? For adjusting the VB CPU-emulation speed wrongly affects a number of programs that make assumptions on how the CPU speed, as the program experiences it positively, is matching the time variable. By the way, in the Settings menu get that little minimenu appearing on bottom of screen in Fullscreen mode turned off, and also we won't have any use to save machine state between each run, nor do we need anything about clipboard -- these apply for other uses of VBox. If you do want correct use of Time and Date functions so as to reset Firth to its standard date of 2006, April 10 (it's a monday), 10'00 o'clock, AM, in the morning, then you must delete time.bat and date.bat which comes with the dosbox package. I mention it here now in passing but it is something you do after having installed all this and learnt about it. The reason that Firth has a standard date that is 'phony' is that the classical Y2000 standard IBM Pc hardware did not have a capacity (unlike the VB emulation) for having dates far into the 21st century. By the way -- I like "by the ways", they are so convenient -- I feel like 2006..2024 being one cycle of a number of years that speak to my numerically oriented positive-affirmation mind in a good way. You see that I often put in dates in the yoga6d.org/ economy.htm section (we, A.T. with L.A.H., or ATwLAH), as a number then colon colon then A or B then a 2006..2024 number, then month and date-number. The first is our personally named cycle number, with an affirmative number each time. The second is A for first half year and B for second half year, or that which we call "season", in order to quickly sort out the general idea of the month number that follows, and also -- if a document with date has faded paper -- to aid reading of the number that follows. How in the galaxy did we come to this? Anyway ;) Log in as administrator if you have several log-in ways, or at least keep administrator password ready, if you have a division between administrator and normal user in your MsWindows. Also do not have any too much other programs running and be ready to reboot to refresh the computer after each big operation is completed. Look up where you have most disk space, several dozens gigabytes extra at least. 1. Start up MsWindows, go with a browser into http://www.virtualbox.org and go to Downloads and get the file stored at an easy location for you to find. 2. Open up the view of folders and files, find the virtualbox program you downloaded, and double-click on its icon. Confirm that you trust it. Let it install, -- with all standard options just be sure you put it where you have most free space if there is an issue about it. 3. Reboot. If the VirtualBox did not put an icon automatically on the Desktop, you may find it -- "Oracle VM VirtualBox" -- in the Applications menu or something, where you can probably do right-click on mouse to copy, then move to the main desktop, right-click to "paste shortcut" or something like that. Start it up. 4. At some stage you should look into every bit of the Settings menu and learn it, be unafraid, it is fairly easy to adjust what you want to have adjusted and most things there can be left to itself. But for now we just go ahead and you click on the large CREATE NEW VM or what it is called. 5. You select OTHER and DOS on the first page where it asks you whether it is Windows or Linux or what. 6. You accept standard suggestions for RAM and so forth until it comes to ask you whether you want Dynamic or Fixed disk allocation, where you select Fixed. 7. When you select Fixed at some stage you also get a slider to select size. At least 15 GB, at most, and recommended if you have considerably more on the disk, 30 or 29 but not above 30 GB (ie, not above 30000 MB). Watch out for the option of WHERE it is going to store just that virtual disk, the .VDI disk file. Perhaps you have very much more disk space on D: than C: and want to put it there. You may want to go into a folder view and make a folder for it, e.g. D:\firth or something, and assert that it is going to be put there. It is easy to overlook this option in the VirtualBox 'Create VM' settings. At the moment of writing this, I don't recall whether it is at exactly the same place as where you move the slider for the number of gigabytes, or whether it is in another page of the installation, but it is around there anyway, and you click on a kind of folder symbol to show the VirtualBox where to store the file. If you have plenty of disk space everywhere, it doesn't matter. 8. Go on and confirm and let it format its virtual disk. 9. Having done as much, exit the VirtualBox, you may also want to reboot the PC, just to refresh maximally. Then start up the VirtualBox and just to get a sense of whether it works at all, let's go ahead and start up the virtual Firth machine -- the symbol and its name will be there, easy in view. Get it started. We haven't installed anything in this virtual disk so it won't give any other than a kind of neat-looking 'FATAL ERROR' about nothing being installed, but just allow this. All the little frames that appear with 'Don't remind me of this again' or the like, do just quickly look at them and click at them in the way that makes them not come up the next time -- get also the 'First time running wizard' and such away, click on Cancel on it. 10. Normally, this works really well, this first time running. Next get this almost 700 MB file to your PC and have it available in a folder you can quickly find: http://www.yoga4d.org/firth.iso 11. Quit and restart the virtualbox. Start your Virtual Machine. Ignore the startup message that nothing is installed yet. We will now look at the frame where there is a menu with the word 'Devices'. Here we will select the option of opening a file as CD, and you will get up the files, and you select just that firth.iso. This is the standard 2006 product. We will soon on also get a little more such .iso's, much smaller ones, and one or two .zips, to complete the foundational Firth MAXIDOS YOGA6DORG operating system of operating systems. 12. The CTR or CTRL button on the keyboard on the right-hand side of the keyboard has a special role and the first time you use this, there is an info-frame that you can indicate that you don't want to see more. The CTR key on its own you will get used to clicking a lot both to align the Firth mouse pointer with the outer mouse pointer several times during switching between many programs, and also to recover the outer mouse pointer for MsWindows after it has been 'captured' by the Firth. In addition, this CTR button, which we from now on call R-CTR, can be used with the letter R for reset of Firth -- rebooting the virtual machine, in other words -- and also with the letter F for selecting fullscreen on/off. We suggest you, for fun, select R-CTR-F now, and also R-CTR R. That means that you will get a chance to see the booting from the virtual CD on the virtual machine fullscreen. If the Device is set correctly, and you have not changed the normal 'Bootup sequence' in the Settings menu (perhaps time to learn all the submenus in the Settings menu soon), 13. Thirteen is a lucky number. You have just booted from the CD, we suppose. Congratulations! When you have done the install, unclick the firth.iso from the Device menu of the virtual machine, so it will boot from its virtual harddisk instead. But now we are gonna do the install. I assume you see something like "CHECK WITH YOGA4D.COM FOR INSTALL" (yoga4d.com and yoga6d.com was renamed yoga4d.org and yoga6d.org in 2010 and only the sites at yoga4d.org/updated.htm and yoga6d.org/updated.htm are in use by us, the makers of Firth, and we do not use any such site as yoga4dmirror.com or such as talked about in earlier installation texts inside the Firth.) You also see something like A> there. And you can type. The keyboard is English, with English-layout. Hope you can accept this, as this is beyond ethnitism. Type FDISK and press lineshift (ENTER). Answer Y to the question of enabling large disks. Select 1 on the menu to create partition, and select again on the menu to create Primary dos partition and set it Active. Then answer Y to use all free space for it. Then leave the menues and leave FDISK by click on the ESC button. Wait a second, then R-CTR R for reset of the virtual machine. 14. Type, within the virtual machine, FORMAT C: and write YES for formatting all of the virtual disk. 15. When done, click R-CTR R for reset of the virtual machine. (For extra refresh, R-CTR F to unset the Fullscreen, then exit out of VirtualBox, perhaps reboot the PC, and enter again into VirtualBox and start up the virtual machine, the firth.iso still loaded in the Devices menu, so it boots from that.) Then type SYS C: and again reset by CTR-R. Next time on type this: C: DIR D: DIR D:\DISKETTE\ if it whenever you try to access the virtual CD (or the real CD, if you have chosen that option in the Devices menu) asks you to R)etry then do click on that R, if need be several times (if it asks you several times). Or if need be, type DIR D: several times, and you can repeat a command recently typed by pressing up-arrow. On some machines it may be E: or F: or G: or so, in case modify the upcoming lines. 16. Now get some stuff into the virtual disk. Type this: C: DIR D: COPY D:\DISKETTE\*.* COPY D:*.ZIP and at this completing line you will have to wait possibly many minutes. 17. Having got the stuff in, you can start the really time-consuming command. With a very fast PC, it is half an hour. A slow one, a day and a night. UNZIP LISA_OAC It will ask you whether to overwrite y/es n/o A/ll and such. Type in the uppercase A and press lineshift. We want overwrite of all. 18. When it is finally done, do a nice R-CTR R, and then R-CTR F if you have fullscreen off, get away the frame, confirm that it is to power off by a lineshift at the question, close the virtual box, reboot the PC, and start the virtualbox up again, and start the virtual machine. But this time ignore the start, and go into the Devices menu and unclick the firth.iso. That will make it boot, for the first time for real, from its virtual harddisk. 19. So click R-CTR R and if you like also R-CTR F for fullscreen and you get the first taste of Firth going, if all has gone well. When it has started up LISAMENU stuff (very early and not in color model compatible with the present version of VirtualBox it seems) just type XO and press lineshift. It will then get over to the command line, which looks like $$$Lisacode$$$ but in the updated version, it will rather say something like F3VC:\BOEHM\BOEHMIAN* -- in any case, XO is the command that exits this much earlier version of the F3 language, and it is a command that also works in the ripe version. 20. Now we are going to not rest on our laurels but get the file transfer package enabled [[[thanks to the lovely works of the FreeDOS.org folks, see acknowledgements and sources and open source licenses strewn around both inside these downloads and also in other files at norskesites.org/fic3]]]. So get hold of this file and put it in a folder that is easy to find: http://www.norskesites.org/fic3/firthftp.iso If there is a slowness about norskesites.org just get it from here instead -- sometimes much traffic on the site can make it slow (this can also be the case with yoga4d.org/firth.iso but then try it some other time -- or follow instructions to get the smaller 10MB bundles together). http://www.moscowsitesorg/fic3/firthftp.iso Having got it, start up the virtual machine and exit to command line with XO and select in Devices menu on top of the virtual machine frame (when not in fullscreen mode) the CD-iso-file called firthftp.iso. Having done this, and maybe if you like reset the VM again though it shouldn't be necessary, you should be able to type DIR D: and then after a usual possible R)etry a couple of times, or writing DIR D: a couple of times, you would be able to see the content of that .iso file, which is FIRTHFTP.ZIP. So write TOP COPY D:FIRTHFTP.ZIP The word 'TOP' is the same as writing CD \ in other words it means go to the top, the root directory, within the Firth. Then type UNZIP FIRTHFTP This will only make sense if you do it from the TOP directory, otherwise the files will be put in the BOEHM\BOEHMIAN subfolder, and they won't affect the startup. 21. Start up your favourite FTP program in MsWindows. You may want to go to sourceforge.net if you haven't any, and e.g. get filezilla or ftpzilla or what it is called. This one is good but like some others it may give a bit confusing messages when you use it to transfer very big files compared to its transfer speed. [[[For it may say 'Time out -- type faster next time' or the like, while it really keeps on working quite nicely -- and the reason is that it opens several connections at once, allowing the unused ones to time out. Just so you know, -- the ftp program is really much better than what these messages sometimes indicate.]]] Get hold of http://www.norskesites.org/autoexec.zip and our first test of our FTP is that we get this one in. This will allow the FTP to be switched on/off during start and at the time we made the firthftp.zip we weren't aware of how important it is -- it is indeed very important for some lovely Firth programs will ONLY start when we do not occupy the base memory with FTP stuff. It also has a funny and perhaps very slightly informative startup text. This autoexec.zip you put into a folder which is easy to find on your MsWindows. 22. In your MsWindows VirtualBox, go to Settings and look around, I think in Network submenu, until you find an option to select (we do this differently in Linux) Enable network adapter: Attached to: where you select HOST-ONLY ADAPTER and then the next line will in MsWindows say Name: VIRTUALBOX HOST-ONLY ETHERNET ADAPTER [[[I assume that at some stage it may also give the same option in Linux, which would make it easier in Linux to get it to work fully.]]] Also, it seems right, at least as a start, to click on Advanced, when doing this in MsWindows, and select Promiscuous mode --> Allow All, (quite a delish choice), and also be sure that it says CONNECTED as for CABLE. 23. Go into the CONTROL PANEL of MsWindows and select option FIREWALL, and you may want to have a shortcut to this pasted on your desktop for it will go on and off all the time when we do this, and having it on the desktop will remind you to check it before going to the internet. You must disconnect from the world's internet a little bit to be at ease with selecting that Firewall is not up. Perhaps you unplug the cable or you select the 'Disconnect' option connected to Wireless somewhere. You then assert no Firewall, whether it is a Home network or Public network. And you make a note to put it on again -- your responsibility, not mine. But it is necessary in the versions we have seen to get it off to get the FTP to work fully in and out of Dos inside MsWindows using VirtualBox. OR, you must add VirtualBox to the list of very trusted programs somehow. But this is the quick way. If you feel like it, do a reboot of your PC physically at this point, and restart that FTP program of yours. You also start up the VirtualBox. 24. So you start up the Firth virtual machine, and do the XO to get out to command line. You then type TOP FTPSRV with small case or uppercase, doesn't matter. After FTPSRV is typed, you press one or two extra lineshifts if it asks for floppy. Such questions are typical inside the DOS platforms since they also worked for smaller machines. With luck, it reports now a number like 192.nnn.nnn.nnn or possibly 10.nn.nn.nn or the like, rather than something like Time-out. If Time-out, it can be Firewall, it can be that the FIRTHFTP was unzipped not at the toplevel, it can be that the VirtualBox version is not ideally fitting with the MsWindows, -- but in every attempt we have done to get this to work it did work at once. In the FTP program of your choice, then type in that number with the dots as the host address. Give 123456 as user name and 123456 as password, something you can change inside the Firth by going to file C:\FDOS\FTPPASS.TXT e.g. by command \yoga4d\edit \fdos\ftppass.txt or a quicker version, E \FDOS\FTPPASS.TXT [[[and please note that in Linux, there are subtle differences between a Linux text file and a DOS text file that can be cured by just that \yoga4d\edit command -- a quick addition of a lineshift, then remove it by backspace, then save the file by F2 and exit the program by ALT-X, and the text file is cured. This can cure also an AUTOEXEC.BAT file that has been taken straight from Linux, otherwise the AUTOEXEC.BAT may simply not work at all, just cause an exit. That's why we here do it by means of an autoexec.zip file instead]]]. With luck, you are now free to move files back and forth with ease. The speed will not be like high-speed USB but it will be quite rapid relative to even moderately fast internet connections. Move the autoexec.zip into the Firth by the FTP. We want that autoexec.zip to go to the top level, which looks to the FTP program like \DRIVE_C\ rather than to a subfolder like /DRIVE_C/BOEHM/BOEHMIAN [[[and if you in Linux type ftp then open 10.nn.nn.nn inside a terminal, then specify that the place to store the file, after put is: /DRIVE_C/AUTOEXEC.ZIP and it should work nice, -- or another name, like /DRIVE_C/AUTO.ZIP, if you already have a file called this. Then type quit to leave the ftp]]]. Then quit the FTP program, and press CTR-C within the window containing the Firth MAXIDOS, to get back to command line. Type TOP COPY AUTOEXEC.BAT AUTO1234.BAT UNZIP AUTOEXEC.ZIP and confirm overwrite. (If it didn't work out you can copy the AUTO1234.BAT to AUTOEXEC.BAT again.) Try it by R-CTR R and it should give a message where you each time press Y Y when you want to enable FTP and N N when you want to use that base RAM for other stuff. 25. Finally, get the newest F3 programming language, where the command F3V will have the extra line inserted in its high-level function DONE-GRAPHICS to allow a normal exit from any F3 program, whereas some programs can only be exited with the present version of VirtualBox by resetting the virtual box. So just type F3V where in a Dosbox you would type F3. The language is the same. It is only that the exit has been tweaked to work with VirtualBox in its present version because of this slight, eh, omission in the present VirtualBox.org implmentation. But we are forgiving. The VirtualBox.org is just the most marvellous thing that has happened since the computer found its standard with the IBM PC format. So you get this file from here or moscowsites and put it in an easy-to-find folder: http://www.norskesites.org/dosboxex.zip You can also get it as dosboxex.iso so you can get it in as a CD that you mount with devices and fetch from D:. But why not practise the use of FTP? So we get the .zip and then: Start up the FTP program, having ensured that the Firewall is off, start up the VirtualBox with Y Y on the startup, type TOP FTPSRV and allow the dosboxex.zip to be inserted into the top folder /DRIVE_C/ of the virtual machine. Then CTR-C within the Firth, and exit the FTP program outside of VirtualBox. Inside the Firth, type TOP UNZIP DOSBOXEX and approve of overwrite "A"ll. Reset the Firth by R-CTR R and after XO try to type F3V and you should see the greeting Lisa GJ2 Fic3. This allows you to see the manual for the language if you type the word WORD or to go into the text mode editor by the command :XXXLT IN and load any of the essays into the editor when you look at the essays with programs (so you clip out the programs) that are continually updated (occasionally also with games) at http://www.norskesites.org/fic3/fic3inf3.htm And there will be some additional startupways also, for forthcoming games and other stuff. Note that only a selection of the vast diversity of options are fully implemented or fully compatible with any particular VM. Find the ones that do work. PcSpeaker stuff is not active. Pls have a look at the Linux points of installation also -- especially the FTP part, where there are some useful extra comments -- incl on how to make a zip file in Firth, and on how to quit a VM fast. As said on norskesites.org/fic3 and moscowsites.org/fic3, type always XO after the very early (and somewhat incompatible with this VM) startup-program has, indeed, started up. The particular sequence of the AUTOEXEC stuff cleanses and prepares RAM for maximum overall compatibility, which is one of the main challenges in driving an operating approach for computers which allows a full diversity of graphical as well as textual variations. But use of R-CTR R is necessary in order to get out of graphics program that the VM is not able to find a way to reset, though a physical PC would. These things are however not critical for the Firth OAC is, in a sense, a network all in its own right. It is a compassionate anarchy of programs coherently woven together by text. This text you get up by typing U either inside F3V or on the command line. You can start F3V programming language by typing HM which moves to the 'home page' or 'home directory' which always is C:\BOEHM\BOEHMIAN, followed by F3V, as command, or F3V can be typed directly if you already is in this directory, which is also where you should load all new F3V games and stuff, generally speaking. When you have activated such as the U menu or one of the many programs we (ATwLAH, as we call us sometimes) have set up so as to cleanse RAM maximally and also to give a little bit extra explanation, or apology that only a bit of what the program says it will do, it will do, or the like ;), then it is good to know that the command 24 puts screen to larger text size again, and also that when you start HM then F3V then type XO you get a brighter intensity of the font if the use of the U menu has turned the intensity to something murky blue. There are hidden gems in this for the stamash pro. GOOD LUCK!!! FOR LINUX PLATFORMS, HERE ARE THE NOTES THAT MODIFY THE ABOVE: First get your Linux. There are sometimes better more compatible versions that are earlier than the present versions. If you have any trouble getting e.g. Fedora16 to run on a laptop then Fedora14 might do the trick, however if the vidoecard is unrecognised it may stretch the pixels -- however it will at least work technically, and there is the option to plug in an external monitor that is likely to work well in many cases so as possibly to correct that stretched-pixel issue. We typically choose 32-bit Linux'es. You must have Software Developer type of installation rather than merely a minimalistic internet browser installation. In particular, if you are a pro and try to go for something like Centos.org, you must be sure that /usr/src/kernels do have content, namely the content that fits the exact version of your Centos, -- and this is not obviously entirely easy to do if the Centos is an early one like 5.5 unless you look around in early download libraries. Getting VirtualBox up on an early Linux may require a bit of extra knowledge and also luck, especially if this is a Linux that is not entirely right on the mark of what is supported by Virtualbox.org at present. Still, Fedora14 works with VirtualBox even more snappier as for its installation than Fedora16. In Fedora16, it will typically ask you -- after the virtual disk is started the very first time -- to run a command that has to be typed in at a Terminal, after su, and it looks a bit complicated and it gives a bit complicated messages, but THEN it works all right, just fine. 2. If you have any question about disk size and your Linux doesn't automatically allocate many dozens of free gigabytes in the /home/yourUserName area where the VirtualBox will automatically put its virtual disk, then open up a Terminal, type su if you are not already logged in as root -- in Fedora you usually type su quite often, then give root password, when working our ways. In more textually and server-oriented platforms like Centos you can conveniently be root rather all the time, I find, but security experts may in some contexts have entirely different advices. Type then something like cd / mkdir folder-for-my-hardisk Or whatever foldername you like. Then do something like this chmod 777 folder-for-my-harddisk Or put in other numbers if there is a possible security issue. This in any case allows the nonroot user that starts up virtualbox to access it fully. But PLEASE only run VB Firth on FAST PC's. It is out of the question to have proper experience of what Firth is about if it goes on damp engine speed notions. Then get www.virtualbox.org for your Linux. This may be listed as i386 version when you have 32-bit Linux. 3. Be sure then if there is any issue about disk space to select that particular folder that you made in the point just mentioned for it. 4. In the Network Settings part of the Virtual Machine that you make, you may find that the HOST-ONLY ADAPTER is not a working option for the next line gives an error and doesn't allow that selection to go through. This is the case with the 2012 VirtualBox.org versions for at least some Linux'es. Then select BRIDGED ADAPTER. This is the case also, it seems, for Unix like Apple OS X. Allow the standard settings that then come up. THE BRIDGED ADAPTER MAY ONLY BE FUNCTIONING WHILE PHYSICALLY CONNECTED IN FACT TO THE REAL INTERNET PRIOR TO THE STARTUP, EACH TIME, OF THE VIRTUAL MACHINE, WHEN IT COMES TO USING THE FTP IN AND OUT OF THE VIRTUAL MACHINE. This is puzzling but at the very least, you do not have to adjust firewall settings. But if you do this a lot you may feel more at ease with adjusting password with C:\FDOS\FTPPASS.TXT. Just change the 123456 and the 123456 that are there, to a more complicated user name and password, allow the [none] and such to remain. 5. If you have any trouble mounting the firth.iso as a CD-file using the Devices menu of the VirtualBox frame right after downloading it, -- as MIGHT happen e.g. on a Fedora14 in SOME contexts -- then do this, which -- given that everything else is normal -- usually will cure it at once (or do something like it): Open Terminal, type su and press enter and answer the question for root password correctly. Then, if you haven't a folder this named already, make folder /backup1 by doing this: cd / mkdir backup1 Then set the backup1 folder read/writable for all users: chmod 777 backup1 And go into it, get the firth.iso and any other .iso you would like to mount as CD to the Firth platform as its D: disk, over to this folder and do the same with them: mv /home/my_user_name/Downloads/firth.iso . chmod 777 firth.iso where you put in your user name in my_user_name and change the description of where it has been downloaded if it has been downloaded to another location. You can specify in a browser to 'ask each time where to save' in its preferences menu, usually. This will make it easier to see; however in Linux a browser is tied up, usually, to a user which has write-access to some but certainly not all folders, and a browser may not inform you if you try to save it to an un-save-able place for this user, so it is good to stick to the /home/user_name/ area or the /home/user_name/Downloads area, generally speaking. Having done the above, close all programs and in a terminal where you have done su for superuser, type shutdown -h now in order to shut it off, and start up the machine to cleanse the RAM and all that. THEN you start up the Firth, and mount the .iso with such wonderful success that it is just incredible. 6. In most Linux'es and in some Unix'es at present it seems just as well to get used to using the command line version of ftp rather than a graphical ftp program as the file list is blocked from passing through the machinery from within the virtual machine and to the outside. You can do file transfer freely both ways but you must know the names of the files inside the VM to get them out of there inside e.g. Fedora14 or Fedora16 using the 2012 VirtualBox.org, unlike MsWindows. So the main point is this: Start up a terminal, type su for superuser, type root password, then type ftp open 10.nn.nn.nn or whatever number that presents itself when you do the job of getting the VM up and typing there TOP then FTPSRV and such, as described in the list for MsWindows above. The open command will prompt you for user name and then for password and -- consult the MsWindows list of points above for how to change this -- it is 123456 and 123456, initially, that is. A comment on the side: Do a R-CTR R (right-ctrl-click with letter R) after every important thing you have done and completed, as a rule of thumb. And yes, R-CTR Q with the option of 'not saving machine state', so that you, after having selected this option the first time, merely press lineshift after the R-CTR Q, is sufficient to complete a fulfilling F3V session. Then type put and you will be able to give the name of the file e.g. /dosboxex.zip or dosboxex.zip or /backup1/dosboex.zip in the Linux (or Unix) platform. After lineshift you will write the name with full path, such as /DRIVE_C/DOSBOXEX.ZIP and you can also write such as /DRIVE_C/BOEHM/BOEHMIAN/NEWEST.ZIP It seems that I wrote it a bit quickly in the first enthusiasm when the FIRTHFTP.ZIP was made, -- it is not enough to merely write the folder name (e.g., it is not enough to write /DRIVE_C/BOEHM/BOEHMIAN when the ftp asks for where to store it). Full path including filename is called for. You can also type get and get files out, the other way. Other things to know about Firth: It is easy enough to learn to make a .zip inside the Firth. Suppose you have done COPY MYPROG*.* \BACKUP8 where every program or document beginning with MYPROG is stored into the folder \BACKUP8 which perhaps you have cleared of files already. Then you can type e.g. TOP zip -r backup8 backup8 and this will make backup8.zip composed of all files within \BACKUP8. Be sure to write any zip or unzip command with small letters for -r must be -r not -R at least in Linux and it is good to be certain that the command gets through right. You can check such files by unzip -t backup8 | more and don't worry about warnings about UTC times. If I haven't said it before, and if you don't know it, then after opening a terminal with su in Linux you can type exit then lineshfit then exit again to get out of the terminal, and if in doubt whether it is root or a less powerful user then type id and it will tell you, and if you want to be sure where in the disk folder hierarchy you have that terminal going type pwd and for a list of settings type set | more and to quit the ftp program the word quit will do, as for Linux, while CTR-C will do, as for the FTPSRV. 7. Note that the .txt format in Linux and the .txt format in Dos is just enough different to make it important that you think through, on occasion, what you do when going between the two -- as for lineshifts. In particular, get the autoexec.zip into Dos from Linux rather than the autoexec.bat or autoexec.txt directly. The .zip format protects the lineshifts, so that if the original was prepared correctly, the result will be correctly when unzipped. If you have to get it to work there is a fix, as mentioned also above, and it is this: \yoga4d\edit autoexec.bat this edit command is the freeware Setedit in-built editor in Firth. It can be started direct EVEN if the autoexec.bat DOES NOT WORK but rather, because of lineshift issues or other issues causes an exit during startup of Firth. So this is a rescue operation worth knowing about. You make one change of the file e.g. a space bar, that you then remove by backspace, allowing you to save the program by F2 then exit the Setedit by ALT-X (the ALT-key combined with the X letter). This solves the lineshift issue, if that was an issue. Pls fineread stuff in some of the points at the U menu to get contact with all the very practical inbuilt command programs incl mvfile merge and so on once you get around to make programs or other things in Firth. I think CODEOVER is one of the overview files over lisacode, another name, in a way, for Firth. The PcSpeaker doesn't seem to work but MP3 playback through SoundBlaster 16 emulation does work. GOOD LUCK!!! A D D E D N O T E S F O R V I R T U A L B O X U S E (notes haven't been updated after the first section of this whole firth-up was added, above the asterix**** line, in other words, the following text doesn't reflect the new ease with which Firth with G15 runs on mostly all new PCs) The notes just above on Virtualbox was written before the new developments of the Fic3 language family. Understand then that http://www.norskesites.org/fic3/archived_programming_language.htm is the correct reference when the ../fic3/.. page is references just above. Most of this note is a bit technical. You should be aware that if you use a virtual PC instead of a real PC there may easily be undocumented things that you have to find workaround for. These may in addition change from year to year, and from platform to platform. For instance, in Virtualbox, there is an issue with exiting from many high resolution graphics applications, and also an issue with correct palette handling. The workaround for G15 startup is to start by command G15FIR instead of command G15, which then doesn't start up NEWSTARS; the NEWSTARS is a lovely way to cleanse RAM for physical PCs running this and that; and it shows beautiful graphics also. But NEWSTARS may not be capable of exiting at least in some Virtualbox versions. Solution is to skip it for, though nice, it isn't necessary in that context. In the some versions of Virtualbox, there is a timing issue with regard to the boot-up relative to the virtual CD-ROM. The workaround is that when you follow the instructions above in this text, you type AUTOEXEC before any attempt to access the CD-ROM during the installation. This re-runs the loading of the driver for the CD-ROM, and it should be accessible as stated in the instructions. Be prepared to do this -- this is an issue that came into Virtualbox after a certain version number. Clearly, it is not always checked towards the full i386 PC machine compatibility but rather tailormade to be checked towards some types of platforms. This is however easily to be expected with any virtualisation packages, as there are various forms of utility that are being sought by them, and they are often very complex as far as applications go. Virtualbox is best installed on 32-bit PC in order to have maximum speed -- the difference can be enormous, and the type of Linux used to run it affects its speed also. Ubuntu and Ubuntu flavours of the 32-bit kind seem to have an upper hand with regard to speed here. When doing Virtualbox stuff, one has a bit simpler route to the installation, one goes straight from FDISK to FORMAT to SYS to copying in stuff to reboot from harddisk as explained in above text. But when doing the real thing on a real PC dedicated to run Firth, and that's a fantastic experience however good Virtualbox sometimes is, on some exceedingly fast PCs, one must often do such as MRBOOTER before rebooting from harddisk, since the harddisk may have a boot menu already installed on it that hasn't taken Firth into consideration. Or, one must -- and see the g15sp_f.zip, the readme.txt inside this -- modify the startup menu, which is generally fairly straightforward to do if one has something such as GRUB to start up Linux. Go very slowly about these things if there is anything on the harddisk of the dedicated PC (now not speaking of Virtualbox) that is to be kept when installing Firth, as the boot menu of type MRBOOTER can handle only some types of platforms, and Linux should better be installed after installing Firth on a 20-30 GB partition of that harddisk for that reason. But you may need MRBOOTER in order to get the Firth up in the first place, even in such a case! So, just to have stated the technical specifications of the best type of personal computer made in human history: The best is to use firth.iso in a perfectly compatible classic Y2000-compliant i386 PC with SoundBlaster16 comptibility, 4 MB Videoram for Vesa S3 Videocard with a physically shaped four times three monitor capable of 1024*768 without pixel stretching and without black portions shown on it when in that mode -- analog video monitor type, can be LCD. This PC ought to have IDE type of disk controller and 30 GB harddisk size or twice that if another partition e.g. with Centos 5.5 is to be run simultaneously. It should have a large keyboard with twelve function keys and numeric pad, and a mouse, and these should be connected in the classical way, or, if done by USB, by means of a PC that handles the USB-connectors so that also classical platforms can make sense of keyboard and mouse wirings. The install.txt at the early location yoga4d.org/download or yoga4d.org/downloads (one of these!) tells how to install Red Hat 8.0 which is like Centos 5.5, before even Fedora came into being, but Centos 5.5 has more hardware support and more USB support. The program MRBOOTER is freeware or shareware with proper documentation included in Firth for those who wish another type of platform than Linux on top. To repeat, Virtualbox requires, for best functionality with classic 32-bit platforms, sometimes a 32-bit Linux rather than a 64-bit Linux. We're talking also of a tremendous performance increase when run in 32-bit Linux -- as often is the case. The 64-bit and 128-bit and such are generally oriented towards mindless databanks of massively long videos and meaninglessly done quasi-AI programs and other big data nonsense. 32-bit is for good programming, for good PCs. Anyway! Furthermore, when you install Virtualbox to Ubuntu by means of its Software Center, or indeed in any context, do so only after you have maximally updated and expanded your platform with all sorts of possible required extra libraries and extensions and mp3 stuff and what not. In newer versions of Virtualbox what is said above roughly still applies, but note that if it comes with messages that re-appear, unnecessary messages about mouse capture and so on, on some linuxes you may have to RIGHT-CLICK on the mouse to get the option 'Click to not get this message again'. Getting away the bootable CD .iso so as to begin to boot properly from the virtual harddisk is sometimes slightly complicated in Virtualbox. In the Settings, you can specify that it will record whatever changes there are during runtime of mounting of CD .iso's. Click on this part of the settings. In that way, you can consistently quit, e.g. by right-ctrl Q, using the option 'not to save the machine state', and it will be consistent in not booting from the CD if you got it away during the running of the virtual PC. The way to get the .iso out of the virtual CD is, when the virtual PC is not in fullscreen mode (right-ctrl F toggles), to go to the top menu and find 'Devices', and there one can uncheck any .iso that is listed there. As an alternative, you can press the F12 during boot-up to select boot-up from harddisk; or you can, if you haven't modified the settings, do a 'Save the machine state' the one time you really need to get the bootable CD out of the virtual CD-drive, and you have just unhooked it in the Devices menu. So, as said elsewhere, the references to yoga4d.com and yoga6d.com are obsolate. Before, yoga4d.org was called yoga4d.com, and the change-over to .org for yoga4d and yoga6d occurred in 2010 due to a mischiveous webhotel that tried to hold on to the site when we wanted to change over to a new webhotel; in march/april 2010 we started using a fantastic webhotel for yoga4d.org, yoga6d.org etc called www.proisp.no, a webhotel which we recommend strongly, and this we of course still is using; and we won't take up use of yoga4d.com or yoga6d.com again. After you have successfully unzipped the big .zip over hours or -- if the machine is not very fast, and/or its a 64-bit platform -- a day or two it -- the natural course of action is to get it to boot from the harddisk; if it does, congratulations!, then get the firthftp.iso, a small file we've prepared for you as stated elsewhere also in the archived sections of norskesites.org/fic3 and in this text, and get the .ZIP inside this little CD over to the top and unzip it there with overwrite All. Having done this, next time on, you can get the g15sp_f.zip from the norskesites.org/fic3 into it, unzipped, and the HENNI command will build the proper new .zip and get this also unzipped, and it will contain a lighter autoexec.bat that you can copy up and use so that you can select whether you want the FTP during startup each time of the Firth. The program FTPSRV is then used to get files in and out of Firth when the Virtualbox is running on a PC that is also connected to an ethernet modem. There are some settings involved with this, explained above correctly in this text, and in general you shouldn't expect the file-directory to pass from Firth to the surrounding platform. Just specify which files are going to go from where to where, and it will generally work, when settings are right (Bridged Adapter is the name in Linux Virtualbox) and when also connected to to a routing ethernet modem at the very same time. To test the SoundBlaster, try command U6 and wait for a while, and if it plays, press the letter a in order to switch to another bit of music (or squeek, in some cases), and the letter q to leave the program. Press lineshifts several times, as a general rule in Firth, and type 24 to get bigger text back, and g15sp_f.zip has the command GREEN if I remember correctly, which switches from the blue it often uses to a more lucid tone. may easily require, A technical note for those programmers who wish to use CentOS with VirtualBox but who ordinarily use Ubuntu (I use Ubuntu all the time for all sorts of purposes but like a connection to such as CentOS for variation etc): the UNetbootin is good to get up other Linux platforms when you have Ubuntu on your main programming and working PC's, including such as the newest CentOS when you have pendisks; using the Centos 5.5 on a classic PC gives you the option of formatting these with ease by the mkfs command indicated at the yoga6d.org/economy page; it may in some cases required an install with 'basic video driver' first, then, using LiveDVD iso, at quick click on the 'Install to harddisk' at the second it has booted -- for after kernel changes in Linux, there is sometimes a constant remounting of USB pendisks. CentOS can run Virtualbox but take care to follow Centos Wiki carefully so as to install DKMS and Kernel source and Group of Developer Tools, and to expand Yum Repo and also all new updates to CentOS before you do a yum-install with the newest version number of VirtualBox. GOOD LUCK!!!!!!!! :-) ATWLAH P.S. What part of the Manhattan Transformation has any truth to it? How was it written? Does it have any predictive power relative to the actual unique events the scifi opera ties in with, that followed after Firth was released as 10MB bundles available at yoga4d.com/download which then in march 2010 became yoga4d.org/download and then in 2012 was gathered together to one big .iso and thus made even more easily available? Finally, is it to self-glorifying? One point should be made: the Manhattan Transformation started out, in terms of the remembered empirics of writing it, as an attempt to write about the wonders of the erotic free world using characters where names didn't refer to anyone around here. As part of it, after writing about Athina walking barefoot at a beach, the name Aristo Tacoma popped up in it; AFTER writing the whole MT, the name Aristo Tacoma was adopted as the main pen name -- leaving one with a sense of a great deal of self-glorifying being put into the MT (which, incidentally, is also the initials of the mountain called Mount Rainer, which lies in Tacoma, Washingtong State.. hm).