I may not be able to help much, but there is some use in sharing experiences, and
letting ETHZ know about problems.  Some of them do monitor comp.lang.oberon.
I have bothered them directly with some problems, and they have been very helpful,
but the ones you ask about I have ignored or found workarounds.

I am running Oberon System3 on a 486DX2/66 with 8MB RAM, a notebook 386-387/20 with
5MB RAM, and a Sparc2.

I have had the same problem with the PC version.  I hope we all get an answer.
With the SPARC version you start it up with "oberon -f <font.name>", but I can
find no indication of an equivalent for the PC version.

The system font color changes work for me for subsequent text typed on the screen,
but on looking at the some code (like IFS/XYplane) it looks like the Display.FG and
Display.BG colors are defaulted as B/W, and I have not yet tried to change them,
though I would dearly love to.

I have an HP Laserjet IIP.   I tried the HP550-etc modes and they did nothing except
what you describe. Then I installed Printer.Obj to be postscript.Obj, and put in my
postscript cartridge. It then worked fine.  I would guess this is the only "standard"
printer mode that they support.

None of the alternate drivers worked for me either, so I am stuck with vanilla
VGA.  Reading things carefully I think the alternate SVGA drivers are for special
video cards incompatible with mine.  The effects are unpredicable corruptions of
other activities.

Hang in there Andrew. The pleasure of working with a well-designed (but not perfect),
lean and mean system based on objects is worth the learning curve (I think).  Though
they make no promises, the people from ETHZ are more helpful than I typically
get from commercial vendors.

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I have not seen anything about this, but here are two solutions that you
could do, quite easily.

1) The quick way.  Write a module called Configure, and export a
procedure, say Init.  Put Configure.Init into your System.Tool.  Click on
Configure.Init each time the system loads.  You can put whatever your
heart desires into Configure.Init.  (In fact, the ETH sources on neptune
do have a module in the System.Mod that _is_ loaded an initialized at boot
up.  You might check this out, find out the module name, and call yours
the same thing.  It might just work.)

2) The more involved way.  Proceed as with 1), except make Configure.Init
read a file of textual configuration information.  This way, you would not
have to recompile if you decided you did not like the current settings.

This will also solve the problem of screen colors.

As mentioned before, yes this is standard.  When the printing is done, the
system will respond.

No, this is not standard behavior.  I've renamed the files at work and at
home.  I have ET4000 at work, and the ET4000 driver works fine.  I have
ET4000 at home, but it does not work.  I don't complain, because I don't
use it too much (I spend most of my time finding bugs in my own system --
Files.Mod, don't ya know!).

Taylor "Never use an extra u in color" Hutt
Ecnmy of wrds is a gd thng.