What is happening? - A users guide

Introduction

Within this FAQ, there are certain sections which may require you to make alterations to certain sections or files within your installation. Please note that you do so at your own risk, bearing in mind the current conditions of sale and warranty on the software and that the writer and/or contributors of this FAQ can accept no responsibility for any damage or loss of use of the software or other system componants resulting from changes made by you. If in doubt, please contact your dealer.

If you wish to submit a change to this FAQ or spot an error, please write to this address, stating clearly what needs changing. This FAQ was written based mainly on Oregano V1.10js, though it also includes Oregano 2 beta additions (thanks to James Wilkinson at Oregan). It will be reposted as required, with copies available upon request.

WARNING: This document applies to Oregano 1. Although some of it may be applicable to Oregano 2, not all of it will be. You should apply to Castle for details and errors concerning Oregano 2.

Contents

Oregano and WebsterXL are now the only browsers being actively developed for the native RISC OS platform. Of the others:-

1.1 And what became of...

Wrong! Voyager (the internet agent for Acorn/RISC OS machines from Freedom2/Argonet) still uses Fresco even though it is not being developed now (except where time permits), but it is Ant Ltd. that has withdrawn from the market, not Argo. Should the question of Fresco become a problem in the future, this would be addressed by Argo themselves (but see above section on Fresco about the actual support of the program).

2. Oregano V1 bugs (Updated 20-Oct-2001)

2.1 Known or reported bugs

This seems to affect gifs more often than other graphics. This only affects what is printed out directly from Oregano itself. If you snapshot the screen with Paint or use a similar tool, the graphic will show normally when printed.

Related to error 2.1, this occurs if you request the browser to save as a sprite. Save the required graphic in its native form, then convert using ChangeFSI or similar to avoid.

This seems to be most common on framed sites, where a click on the maximise/ minimise frame switch causes the browser to change the box size in an unexpected fashion. The drag frame size box, however, works normally.

Oregano uses TrueType fonts rather than the Acorn outline fonts. This means that there is a degree of flexibility in that some features can be used.

Of course this does mean that Oregano does not support native Acorn fonts. The result is that while it does mean that Oregano can do things such as supporting kanji scripts (and in theory any other Truetype font), the rendering is different to that normally seen on the RISC OS desktop, including aliasing.

This is not necessarily a bug, in that it was necessary to do this to allow this degree of flexibility. Please see section 4 below.

True. This has a lot to do with points 2.1.4 and 2.1.1, in that to be able to save the screen as a Draw file, first it has to be changed into something that could be saved as a Draw file. The other browsers don't suffer from this problem as they do not represent the web page in the same way as Oregano does.

True. There is some talk of one being introduced in a couple of revisions' time (the new version of Oregano should have a cache included with it). One freely available cache is Navaho, which can be downloaded from the Oregano upgrade site, another is Webserve, which was available as part of the Browse kit. See section 3. There is also Nutmeg, a commercially available product which can be found at your local dealer, or see section 3 below.

This fault is nasty in that it can crash your system to the extent that it needs a hard reboot. An error message may not be shown, though if one is shown, then it will usually be something along the lines of "VDU4 not supported by driver" or similar.

It has been reported that this can be alleviated by changing settings within the boot/run obey files, but only as far as getting the program to leave a trace in a log file. One such patch is to alter the <Oregano$Dir>.!Run file to contain:

Run <Oregano$Dir>.Oregano %*0 2> <oregano$dir>.blah

Other suggestions received are:-

If you instead uncomment the line:

If "<Oregano$DebugOut>"="" Then Set Oregano$DebugOut <Oregano$Dir>.stderr

(btw, Oregano also logs javascript errors to this file.)

There has also been some comments about the saving of old stderr files (in its normal state, Oregano overwrites this file on each run). Two suggestions came about to change this:-

If you're using the original suggestion, you just need to change the > to a >> and it'll append rather than replace. (Unix users out there will probably be familiar with redirects - > means write/overwrite while >> means write/append.) The following in the !Run file has been working for another user. It keeps a total of three previous incarnations of the file.

Remove <Oregano$Dir>.stderr3
IfThere <Oregano$Dir>.stderr2 Then Rename <Oregano$Dir>.stderr2
<Oregano$Dir>.stderr3
IfThere <Oregano$Dir>.stderr1 Then Rename <Oregano$Dir>.stderr1
<Oregano$Dir>.stderr2
IfThere <Oregano$Dir>.stderr Then Rename <Oregano$Dir>.stderr
<Oregano$Dir>.stderr1

This could be due to badly written tags, but some users have experienced problems with <A HREF="#name">/<A NAME="name"> tagging.

There are usually three answers to this.

See section 2.2.2 for a run down on how to practically tackle most errors and bugs that you may find.

Oregano will hang when attempting to post a form if over 4KB (approx) has placed in one of the fields. Oregano cannot be killed when this happens and a reboot is necessary.

"Why, when I find myself on a page full of images, does Oregano insist on waiting until they have all been loaded before following a link (which I clicked on as soon as the text loaded)? Obviously I could click on the "STOP" button before clicking on the link, to stop the images loading, but I'm sure that most other browsers stop loading the current page when you click on a link." - Hilary Phillips <hmphillips@brookes.ac.uk>

This pretty much explains itself, in that although Oregano does not stop loading the current page when a link is selected, it will if you STOP the load from the top line. However there are certain circumstances where going directly to a link while the page is loading can be a pain as well (for example if the link in question is on the same file but has yet to be loaded).

This occurs due to a "timeout" (all downloads are subject to a time, the expiry of which is called a "timeout"). To try to reload an image, simply CTRL-select the image concerned.

It has been noted that frames set up with moveable frames do not work properly. This is where the NORESIZE tag is omitted from the definition of the frame. Frame borders are also not shown.

Some users have asked to be able to load PDF's (portable document format files) directly to RiScript or !pdf from Oregano.

To do this, click on Choices from the icon bar. Click on Media. Add

adf

to the list of runnables. Save. One warning is that these files are stored by Oregano in !Scrap and does not clear them afterwards. You may want to keep an eye on this. (This appears to be an Oregano specific bug).

This occurred with a specific page that was meant to be updated dynamically yet suddenly froze on a particular date. The fault appeared to be related to a cookie related to that page (in the case of the reported fault, myriscos.co.uk).

To cure this, first quit Oregano, *RMKill HTTPStream, then edit the cookie file (!Boot.Choices.Cookies) to remove the line containing the cookie for the site. Then restart Oregano (Note that you do not need to restart your machine if you have killed HTTPStream first).

According to one report, the contents of check and radio boxes are not initialised in forms. This would require the manual entry of values, which may be a problem if you reload the form for any reason. For now, the only advice is type carefully and check before you click "submit".

2.2 Other useful notes

2.2.1 Faking Netscape/MSIE

In the case of (b) above, it is worth remembering that Oregano has the ability to fake responses to browser interrogation, so avoiding some of this behaviour. Go to Choices > Misc from the icon bar, and at the bottom of the screen you will see a field marked "Who am I?" This can be set to one of three settings:

• Netscape© 4.72 (Mozilla)
• Internet Explorer™ 4
• Internet Explorer™ 5

plus it can be set to Oregano (this applies to both 1.10 and beta 2). Obviously it would be nice to make it so that this sort of "faking" would be unnecessary, but again we are at the mercy of the web writers that insist on this type of interrogation.

You are getting frustrated trying to grab a page. The following should help you out. Try each of these before tearing your hair out/reporting the fault to the mailing list:-

• Quit Oregano, reload and retry
• Quit Oregano, press ƒ12 then enter the commands:-
  

                              *RMKill HTTPStream
                              *RMKill XTTFont
  

  Press return a second time to re-enter the desktop, then restart and retry (see note below)
• Try doing it again after you have rebooted
• If you use Webserve, try turning off Proxying in Oregano (The simplest way to do this is to go to Choices > Network from the icon bar and untick "http".)
• Experiment Oregano's "Who am I", "Enable Javascript" and "Fake document layers" settings (see 2.2.1 for the "Who am I" setting)

Note:- Sometimes "*RMKill HTTPStream" takes down the machine to an unusable state. I've found it much safer to do "*RMKill MemoryAllocator" before doing the above two *RMKills.

3. Caching

The following was written before !Cassia and !Nutmeg were released. If you wish to try these, see www.imagesoft.co.uk for details and ordering.

Oregano 1.10js does not have a cache of its own. While it can be made to support an online proxy by addressing it, the only way to cache is to use a third party package.

3.1 Acorn Webserve

To install this, you should have the New Boot sequence installed. This was made available in many places, including the Acorn User CD ROMs.

The installation includes a special install routine which, once it sees your boot directory, will then attempt to load the various required parts into the directory. Once loaded, reboot your machine.

First call up the choices page on Webserve and make sure that you have the local port set to 80, tick "Assume connection is already active" (unless you are using Socketeer or other diallers that support Dial on Demand), and untick "Don't allow other machines to connect".

I prefer not to use a remote proxy, so I leave that blank, but otherwise your ISP will give you the necessary address for this if they supply such a beast.

Once that has been done, call up Choices on Oregano and select Network. Tick the HTTP box and enter the following into the field next to the tick box:

                               127.0.0.1:80

All this means usually is that you have not loaded the Webserve program. You can either do this manually by double-clicking Webserve (I keep it in AppDock myself) or by scripting. However I do not give a script for it here since this involves changing the code in one of your Oregano files, something for which I shall defer to the programmers at Oregan. (In other words, I ain't takin' the rap for telling anyone to rip their copy. If you want to do it, don't involve me!) Having said that, see section 3.1.4 below.

Make sure that on Choices > Network, you have ONLY ticked http. Normally, the proxies box should be empty and unticked except for http (this doesn't mean that you cannot tick the other boxes should you need to for other purposes). It is especially important that you both tick the box and enter the address (as shown above) since the address by itself or a tick by itself will not be enough to get the program to use the cache.

Some folk may wish to do this, especially if they want to get at specific information or graphics. The program CacheFS from David O'Shea allows this. The program is available from http://ocean.ucc.ie/99/oshea/

You may want to make it so that WebServe runs automatically when you run Oregano. One solution is to load WebServe into your Choices.Boot.Tasks directory so that it is already there, but if you are tied for memory or you just plain don't like that, the following can be added to get Oregano to load WebServe.

Make sure that you keep backups of the files that are to be worked on, just in case something goes wrong.

First, you must add the following parts to the WebServe.!Run AFTER the last group of RMEnsure commands:-

| So Fresco/Oregano knows it's running
set webserve$running 1
| Configuration set by last run.
IfThere <WebServe$Dir>.!Config Then Obey <WebServe$Dir>.!Config
IfThere Choices:WWW.WebServe Then Obey Choices:WWW.WebServe
|
Wimpslot -max 96K -min 96K
Run <WebServe$Dir>.!RunImage %*0
unset webserve$running

| Run WebServe
If "<webserve$running>"="" then filer_run <WebServe$Dir>.!Run

Note: The above script is supplied as is, and I can take no responsibility for any errors that you may encounter as a result of adding this code to your copies of the programs. It is always a good idea to keep a copy of the originals so that you can reinstate them should the worst happen, but if you don't, on your own head be it! Please also be aware that you may find that support may be withdrawn for unauthorised changes made to the code (well, Oregano at least - I doubt that anyone at Pace is particularly bothered at this point!)

In other words, you make the above changes at your own risk!

Navaho is a program that provides a number of server functions. In this case, however, we only want to use it to cache, therefore a fair amount of it will be disabled for our use. In that respect, all that is detailed here is how to get it to work with Oregano as a web cache. For the rest, you will need to go elsewhere for details. Note also that this version of Navaho is a beta version, and while many users have now got this loaded and working, there is no guarantee that it will work on all configurations.

Download the program and unpack it to somewhere where it can be got at. A good place is in the same place as where you have Oregano itself.

Having run it, you may find that you will need to "unlock" it. Click on the iconbar icon and enter the default user name/password (sysman/anasazi).

Select Tools > Quickstart config from the iconbar and tick Dial-Up connection. Leave everything else empty (Country should be "None").

Select Tools > Suite Configuration, then select "Mail". In the SMTP Server box, untick "Enabled". Do the same in the POP Server box and the IMAP server box.

Now click on News and untick NNTP Server "Enabled".

Now click on Proxy, and untick "Enabled" on all the servers in this page EXCEPT http, which must be ticked. You will also need to adjust the Cache management box, which is the last but one box on the Proxy page, including how much space you wish to devote to caching, maximum file size and so on.

The misc section doesn't need to be touched unless you are required to do so.

Now select Web and untick "Enabled" in the HTTP Server box.

Click on Utilities and untick ALL the boxes in the servers box, then enter the IP Address 127.0.0.1 in the Ip Access > Allow box.

Click on SAVE.

Now you need to change Oregano as shown in section 3.1 by changing the Choices > Network > Proxies > HTTP setting to ticked with 127.0.0.1:8080 in the address field and set "Don't proxy" to "local".

You should now reboot your system, then reload your dialler followed by Navaho.

1. SHIFT-Doubleclick on !Navaho
2. SHIFT-Doubleclick on the !Run file
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the file
4. Find the line that reads:

    RMEnsure PPPdriver 0 RMRun <NavahoPPP$Dir>.NavahoPPP 1500
   

5. Go to the start of the line.
6. Comment the line out by typing a '|' -this is to the left of the z-key, and is SHIFT-\
7. Save the file.
8. Shut down, reboot and run !Navaho again.

4 Add ons

The following sections concern additions for Oregano 1

4.1 The Cyberbit connection - how to support Japanese sites.

Of course this does mean that Oregano does not currently support native Acorn fonts. The result is that while it does mean that Oregano can do things such as supporting kanji scripts (and in theory any other Truetype font), the rendering is different to that normally seen on the RISC OS desktop, including aliasing.

To add this, first you have to find a copy of the Cyberbit font as it would be supplied to a PC user. This is becoming increasinly hard to find but a good rifle through the Internet with a search engine (www.google.com for example) will usually turn up a copy.

Using SparkFS or Sparkplug, open up the archive and extract the cyberbit.ttf file from it. Save this into !Boot.Resources.!OreganRes.Fonts as a data file called "Cyberbit". Close !OreganRes and open !Oregano.

PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU ALTER THE CONTENTS OF YOUR COPY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Open the "Messages" file and find the section headed "# Fallback font for stackable system". Change the variable below it to read as follows:-

                 font.fallback:TrueTypeFont:Cyberbit

The "Messages" file inside !Oregano may well have been overwritten as part of a recent program upgrade. You may need to re-edit the file to allow it to work. Similarly the Cyberbit file may have been removed, so replace it as before.

4.2 Skins and hotlists

Sendu Bala has created a help page for users interested in creating skins for Oregano 1 and a guide on Hotlists. To read, see http://www.drood68.freeserve.co.uk/Oregano/

5. Oregano 2 beta

Note that the version discussed below is the now aborted Oregano 2 project. Castle now market a new version to replace it based on a later project. The details below and the programs it relates to should not be taken as an intention of future projected programming for this program. The version that this section relates to is now unlikely to be made public, so if you don't have it, don't bother to ask for it.

Q: Why doesn't O2b make more use of the RISC OS Window Manager ?
A: Oregano2 beta used the RISC OS Window Manager for the top-level windows and each of these contained a 'session' which consisted of multiple Oregano2-windows. The Oregano2 beta windowing system was optimised for Oregano2 beta's purposes and had many key features in development.

Q: What on earth has happened to the Skins ?
A: Skins in Oregano2 beta were radically different to Oregano(1) - they are very flexible, written in HTML and were platform-independent.

Q: In more than a year, is that all that's changed ?
A: No - Oregano2 beta was a significant re-design over Oregano(1) and this allowed new features, improved stability, increased performance and easier development. Some of the highlights included a new TrueType font-rendering engine with direct-to-screen fast redraw, JavaScript 1.5 support, improved CSS support, the new GUI mechanism, increased configurability, features for network users, and more.

Q: Will I always have to use Oregano(1) to download updates to Oregano2 ?
A: This question is no longer relevant since this version has been discontinued.

Q: Is the GUI script language JavaScript?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: JavaScript required a Document-Object-Model (DOM) for each window created. As Oregano2 beta Skins (GUIs) were written in HTML, this would have required a JavaScript DOM for all windows in the Skin. When you multiplied this by the fact that each top-level window used it's own copy of the Skin, memory consumption due to DOM structures soon became unworkable. The GUIScript that was available was JavaScript-like so that it was familiar, but a very simple language.

Q: Can I use JavaScript in Skin windows ?
A: Yes, but it will use more memory (see previous answer). Check Task Manager for details.

Q: What happened to HTTPStream ?
A: It was no longer needed. As part of the development of Oregano2, the functionality of HTTPStream was integrated into the core of the browser where it could be extended more easily. Many of the problems with Oregano(1) were related to HTTPStream and were therefore extremely difficult to track down.

Q: What happened to XTTFont ?
A: It was no longer needed. Oregano2 beta included a new TrueType Font rendering engine that could blend fonts directly onto the screen. It also included caching so that often-used letters were quicker to access. In low-colour screen modes, the font rendering engine would fall back to using RISC OS Sprite mechanisms.

Q: Does '*Close' or 'CLOSE#0' still hurt ?
A: If a file that Oregano2 beta was using is closed while being used, Oregano2 beta would re-open the file (if possible) otherwise it would fail gracefully.

Q: What is the 'Utils' module ?
A: This module provided access to some of the low-level features of RISC OS, such as key up/down detection and socket activity notification.

Q: Is there a new demo ?
A: Not of this version. This version of Oregano2 was discontinued after Oregan decided to change te direction in which they were developing the product, so Oregano2 beta was effectively a dead end. A new program based on the current non-system specific Oregano is to be released by Castle, and a demo should be available for that at some point. Keep watching for more details.

Other acknowledgements

and of course...

Oregano © 1998-2003 Oregan Networks Ltd.

...and any other marks I have forgotten to mention. Let me know if you want a specific mention! - Chika