First RISC OS Distro for Pi?

For me, running Fat32FS on a beagle simply locked up the machine as soon as a drive access was attempted.

There are a number of ARMini users routinely using Fat32fs without any problems. I use a 300GB external usb drive for large file storage (jpg and mpeg), and also for regular backups of the 16GB pen boot drive using Syncdiscs. I also use a similar 300GB usb drive on the Iyonix. I don’t think there is any intrinsic problem with Fat32fs. It is also faster that a RISC OS format drive.

I can also confirm that Fat32fs works accross all three of my machines: PandaBoard ES, ARMini (BeagleBoard xM) and my Raspberry Pi.

Interestingly if you have one of these dual partitioned SD-Cards it grabs the FAT part so you can’t see what is on the SDFS part.

Now that the 13 July 2012 distro is ‘stable’ and should not need to change whilst it remains ‘alpha’, I have produced an update here

Instructions here

Adds !InterGIF, fat32fs and updates the ‘welcome’ page. Please feedback your success or any problems with this method (as this is also part of the testing!).

I added the fonts here http://sinenomine.co.uk/software/freefonts.zip
to mine, which improve netsurf on non latin text, could this be added?

All, this is awesome – thank you all for your work so far.
Playing with RISC OS again.
Have a number of RPC on desks and a few BBCs in a box (got rid of the machines in between).

Have a beagle too but haven’t fired it up yet – hopefully it will be as easy as using the RPi – can anyone point me to a simple step by step how-to for the beagleXM
(have a CMOS chip and have ordered a battery backup)

Just updated the RPi 13Julydistro including Fat32fs – works nicely – have just tried it successfully with both 8 and 16Gb USB drives – fast.
Will try a USB hard drive next.

Found that a number of USB keyboards would not work, but finally got a Logitech Classic New Touch Keyboard 200 USB to work (another logitech cabled USB KB did not work).

Using a Lexar plantinum II 4Gb SDHC 100x card and the boot up time from cold to the desktop is less than 20 seconds – amazing compared with the Linux distros I tried last week. -and this is even with a pause while it looks for the network to set the clock.

Have put the pi in a shapeways case – fits well and looks cool – got a white one:
http://www.shapeways.com/model/486999/

This looks good from CJE too – presume it doesn’t work with RISC OS yet – might not fit in the shapeways case though… will give it a go…
http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/individual/newprodpages/prodinfo.php?prodcode=4D-RaspberryPi-RealTimeClock-Temp-RTCT

One issue i found so far is that if choosing the reboot prompt after doing a shutdown it doesn’t seem to work.

That’s Ok – just swith it off and back on – in 20 seconds it is up and running again – put an in line switch on the cable for a nokia phone charger power supply so don’t have to pull the power cable out all the time to power on and off.

Once again – well done everyone – the Pi seems to be so much faster than the RPC – once progresses to a full release may not be any need to use the RPC (well once Aemulator is working with Impression anyway)

Netsurf is quite usable – loading the welcome page on startup is a great newbie / return user greeting – loaded some software straigt away (PDF and PrivateEye) – (pity it doesn’t have javascript or flash – does firefox work on the pi?)

mmm.. off to do some work

mmm.. off to do some workWill be away on holidays for a while, but happy to keep testing from a user’s persepctive when i get back – is this the best place to report bugs etc, if not can you point me to the the right place (excuse the newbie question… first time i have registered and posted to an acorn/RISC OS newsgroup/forum ever – even though have been using and selling the machines for 25 years – shows i was so impressed that needed to register and post here).

mmm.. off to do some workWill be away on holidays for a while, but happy to keep testing from a user’s persepctive when i get back – is this the best place to report bugs etc, if not can you point me to the the right place (excuse the newbie question… first time i have registered and posted to an acorn/RISC OS newsgroup/forum ever – even though have been using and selling the machines for 25 years – shows i was so impressed that needed to register and post here).cheers
jock

not sure why the post repeats at the end – tried to edit it but doesn’t show up when editing
J

I might well being dense, however when using the newest distro image the desktop screen seems to be larger than the 1920×1080 supported by my monitor (Samsung SyncMaster P2450). At first glance it looks like the desktop is 1.5cm too large in each direction. Is there a way of tweaking this?

Sounds like the monitor thinks it has an HDTV input and has decided to apply overscan. I’m pretty certain I saw a Samsung monitor doing that once myself. It might be something you can override in the monitor’s menu somehow – failing that, once we can generate different resolutions, the Samsung monitor I’m thinking of turned off overscan as soon as the resolution was anything other than exactly 1920×1080. It might be worth trying a different refresh rate (again, once we can support that).

@James: There are a couple of things you can do by editing the config.txt file in the root of the SD card. Firstly, enable/disable the overscan:

disable_overscan=1

Next, you can control the amount of overscan (or underscan) for each of the dimensions:

overscan_left=15
overscan_right=15
overscan_top=15
overscan_bottom=15

There’s a complete reference to the config.txt settings at eLinux.org

Hope this helps.

@Ben: what is being described here is underscan, not overscan. I saw the same on my TV, which is native 1920 × 1080.

Bah, semantics. The monitor is assuming that the incoming video signal includes pixels of overscan, and so is cropping them and enlarging the remaining pixels to fill the screen. I think we’re talking about the same thing. :-)

Success! I had a look at editing the config.txt file but since overscan was already disabled, I thought I would try and tweak the monitor settings first. With the monitor in HDMI mode having booted the Pi, I was able to select an option to fit the image to screen. Now the whole desktop fits wonderfully! Not use to thinking of my monitor as a TV.

Unfortunately, my keyboard & mouse combination seems to be a bit iffy otherwise I would have typed this reply on my Pi. Has anyone else experienced problems with keyboards with a sporadic auto-repeat and mice that seem unresponsive to clicks?

Many thanks for the advice already provided.

Yes. If you get it a lot, I’m sure Jeffrey would appreciate your help debugging it!

Ahh, thanks for the pointer to the thread. I do seem to get it a lot. I’ve posted in the above thread to see if I can be any help to Jeffrey. Might be worth me double checking the list of troublesome hardware for the Pi, although it is a fairly simple wired Logitech keyboard.

I was going to ask whether anyone had managed to get Ethernet working, but people clearly I have. I cannot. :(

After configuring via !Configure, I get the following symptoms:

• An error “Route: add net default: gateway My gateway IP address:Network is unreachable” on boot.
• The setting for “Netmask” doesn’t stick. On my network it should be 255.255.0.0, but after a reboot it always reverts to “default”, whatever that means
• DNS resolution fails (perhaps not surprisingly), and pinging any IP address results in “No route to host”

Suggestions? (Or a suggestion for a better place to ask, if this is the wrong place.)

After configuring via !Configure,

The alpha distro is presently set to DHCP and should not need configuring. What distro are you using?

I am using the alpha distro, and it does indeed acquire an IP address from DHCP, but it does not set any DNS servers, nor set the subnet mask or gateway.

This is a known issue with some DHCP servers, unfortunately.

That is, it’s an issue in the RiscOS implementation of the DHCP client, but seems to be specific to Windows DHCP servers. There are a number of parameters that the client can request – DNS, Gateway, etc., and the DHCP client is not asking for any of them. It would seem that most other OSs supply these as default, whether requested or not, but Windows sticks to supplying exactly what’s requested.

There’s a few DHCP fixes just checked in, but from what Rik’s said, I think the fix for this will have to be in the next round – in the meantime the only workaround appears to be to set them manually on each reboot.

As Tony said it’s an issue that’s been raised and has been identified as being a Windows DHCP related problem.

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/4/topics/1165

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/3/topics/1166

Are you using a Windows DHCP server or something else? If it’s something else then it would be worth reporting that you are experiencing the same issue on the relevant topic posted above.

Paul

Yes, it’s a Windows DHCP server.

If I switch to static IP configuration, would that work?

I manually set the DNS and gateway settings and leave the IP address as being set by DHCP at the moment and it seems to work and hold the settings across reboots. Alternatively, yes, you can set the IP stack completely manually and it should work just fine.

Distro now updated, incorporating all updates so far. The download is 48.2Mbytes and contains 121Mbytes of software plus the ROM and boot firmware. No further updates will be issued for the moment while I test it thoroughly.

Zap and StrongEd both now included as well as TaskUsage and Reporter.

Zap and StrongEd both now included as well as TaskUsage and Reporter.

Permission to include StrongED came from where, exactly?

If the information on the website is correct then 4.69a5 is included which is no longer supported (and is not available as a download anymore) as it has been superseded by 4.69a6.

I’m also not too happy about the implicit judgement call by putting Zap in ‘Programming’ and StrongED in ‘Apps’.

Permission to include StrongED came from where, exactly?

Ouch!

That said, the conditions state: “PD libraries and other collections may not distribute this application in any form without written permission: this is only so we can ensure that the latest version is available.”.

However, to raise a query, Mr. Vik’s last version (v4.60) says that it is “Freeware” (with no specific qualifications) plus “This is also the last StrongED ever. It’s been a fun ten years, but now I’m moving on. Anyone wishing to continue developing StrongED is free to
do so; I’m releasing the source as well.”

Those latter statements, the earlier ones, are quite dodgy as it is rather open to interpretation as to what it actually means. Nailing down actual terms of use in Guttorm’s version is not really possible. Just a vague notion of “freeware” and “I’m releasing the source as well”.

The latest version available has a “Conditions of use” that states terms more clearly; though one could ask who put it there? It is, however, necessary to make things clearer, albeit potentially more restrictive than that intended stated by the original author (depending on how one chooses to interpret the original statements).

I’m also not too happy about the implicit judgement call by putting Zap in ‘Programming’ and StrongED in ‘Apps’.

One could think this may disadvantage Zap, as people will surely look in Apps before they look in Programming… ;-)

Is the aim to have the best RISC OS experience, or the most comprehensive? As Matthew Phillips says

Better to give people a good experience than lots of apps with overlapping and incomplete functionality.

This distro is going to be the first experience lots of people have of RISC OS – or the first screenshots they see of it, so I think it’d be worth being very clear about the aims. To my mind it should be:

• As pure an experience of possible (not lots of extra ‘twiddles’ enabled by default)
• Demonstrate the best software available on RISC OS – not all software available
• Provide a simple Welcome-equivalent (Michael Drake’s comments are spot on IMHO; I’d add that NetSurf supports CSS well, so having something look a bit more modern, and less like the web from the 1990s would be useful)

The point of a distribution (in the classic sense) is the distro developer choosing the best app for each intended use, and including it. Pick one of Zap and StrongEd and ship it (licence terms permitting).

For example, we wouldn’t include Browse, Fresco and NetSurf. It’d just be NetSurf.