Alpha testing on Pi

A new image has been uploaded for the Raspberry Pi and the ‘help’ information for the Raspberry Pi development rom image has been updated – see here.

The new image, developed by Ben Avison, allows RISC OS access to the rom image under SDFS so that all updates can now be processed under RISC OS. This method is also subject to alpha testing!

Latest alpha distro is 22 Sept 2012 and contains all components. No further updates are planned at present. A beta/release version is currently undergoing testing.

Further SD card images should therefore not be necessary for the time being, updates to both rom and disc image can now be done incrementally.

First update 12:00 14th July.
Second update 12:00 16th July [includes First].
Third update 22:20 16th July [includes First & Second].
Fourth update 10:30 17th July [includes First & Second & Third].

The updates are getting larger and so further updates will be incremental but will rely on the fourth & last update having been applied.

Fifth (incremental) update 10:31 17th July
Sixth (incremental) update 17:30 17th July
Seventh (incremental) update 12:00 18th July
Eighth (incremental) update: 12:00 18th July

Fifth update includes (only the changed items):

• The disc cataloguing untiltiy ‘!Cat’ has been updated so that any draw files saved from it now (mostly) use the old format sprites. Although new format 256 colour sprites are shown correctly in both !Draw and Impression Publisher, they are not handled correctly by ArtWorks.
  
• SharedUnixLib is now at version 1.12 (5-Feb-2011).
  
• The ROM image is updated to 17th July 2012.

Sixth update includes (only the new/changed items):

• Perl
  
• Lua
  
• PHP
  
• Charm
  
• DrWimp
  
• Snapper

Seventh update includes (only the new/changed items):

• !AWViewer
  
• a programming example in BASIC
  
• an ‘images’ directory

Where’s the 4th update? You’ve updated with such frequency, I’ve missed updates 2, 3 and 4 and as subsequent updates require update 4 to be applied first they’re useless for me.

Found the 4th update here:

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/9/topics/997?page=19#posts-13783

Paul

Hi Chris. What are the chances of a new drop of the distro which includes all of the incremental updates? I could do with a copy here to test something with.

What are the chances of a new drop of the distro

Will tomorrow morning do (out to the theatre now)?

Sure, thanks.

What are the chances of a new drop of the distro

Files uploading now. Email on its way.

Eighth update includes:

• a minor bug fix in a programming example
  
• links to BBC BASIC manual and Programmers’ Reference Manuals
  
• links to a collection of stronghelp manuals

see screenshot here (thumbnail below)

Distro now updated to include all updates so far. No further updates while I test it all thoroughly.

Hi just tried the latest update and I’m getting “unknown partition table” from linux on inserting the SD card and the PI won’t boot. (as in nothing no boot, as there is no partition table)

A corrected image being uploaded now. Have now downloaded and decompressed it, checked its CRC, written it to an SD card and booted up the Pi successfully. So it should now be OK.

I’ve got a few comments and questions about the disc image.

Firstly, about http://www.svrsig.org/Alpha.htm

• I’m not sure when this document will be seen. Is it launched on startup, or available as a file on disc somewhere?
• On the “Welcome to RISC OS” page and “Free software” page, it says “Netsurf” instead of “NetSurf”.
• Some of it seems far too verbose. Most people don’t want to read loads of text. For example, instead of a paragraph about opening application directories, an image or diagram would be better.
• Sometimes it rambles a bit off-topic or has bad heading choices. For example under the “Application directories” heading, the first paragraph is on application directories, and then it talks about the switcher, task manager, cooperative multitasking, and finally how to quit an application.
• I’m not sure who the document is aimed at. New users? If that’s the case I think it should be the minimum needed to get them going. For example: “As each application is given a chance to ‘do its thing’ it is paged into memory at a fixed point, offered the chance to do some processing, and it hands control back to the system when it has done its next operation (whatever that is).” Things like that should be in a different document aimed at people who want to learn a bit about how it works, rather than in a guide to how to use it.
• In the “Useful links” section, the software that’s included doesn’t have a link, but a user may want to look up more info on the App anyway, so I’d include the links.
• In the “Useful links” section, StrongEd, for example, hotlinks a file, rather than pointing to the web site where users may find out a bit about it first.

And about the SDFS_Up contents:

• I thought it was to include NetSurf, but I could only find the NetSurf source code.
• There’s a ThirdParty directory with !Cat, images (directory) and Page20/htm. !Cat is broken, containing just a Sprites11 file. Why have a ThirdParty directory when there are loads of third party apps in Utilities, for example?
• SwiftJPEG seems like an odd choice, since it’s a viewer than can only do JPEGs. I think it would make more sense to include a multi-format image viewer, so users get a consistent user interface whether they’re looking at a JPEG, PNG, BMP, etc.

Actually, is the AlphaUp.zip file correct? It should be the base version, right? It would explain why things appear to be missing if AlphaUp.zip is broken at the moment.

SwiftJPEG seems like an odd choice, since it’s a viewer than can only do JPEGs.

And, sadly, it can only do some of them. It fails with an “Outside file” error when trying to render JPEGs from my phone, for example.

ShowJEG seems to work better.

Who knows, maybe I’ll have fixed it by then (cough). Sigh.

Don’t forget this :-)

http://pond.org.uk/superchain/

Just a quick question. I’m using NetSurf on a RPi.
When I click on the link above for the Eighth download, it appears as a “Data” file and when I download the latest ROM image is an “Archive”. Why is this? Not a major problem, I just re-assign the type from Data to Archive.

Same issue with the link in the previous post for Superchain. Data file, not Zip or Archive. Superchain appears to work, but haven’t got a clue what’s going on yet! :) Three computer players kicked me off and carried on without me! Maybe I’ll read the instructions at some point.

New suggestion for distro: A sensible default MimeMap file (plus module, if not already included).

SwiftJPEG seems like an odd choice, since it’s a viewer than can only do JPEGs.

I’d vote for PrivateEye if it’s not already included. And if it makes some of the other viewers superfluous, remove them. Better to give people a good experience than lots of apps with overlapping and incomplete functionality.

I’d vote for PrivateEye

I think that PrivateEye uses the Tinct module, which gives problems on the BB at least – NetSurf users are recommended to set choices so Tinct is not used. The NetSurf developers said at one point it was unlikely that Tinct would be made ARMv7 compliant because the source was unavailable. I’m not sure whether Tinct would cause a problem on the RaspPi.

I have been in touch with the author of the Tinct module (Richard Wilson) he is planning on making Tinct ARMv7 compliant and releasing the source code!
Richard is short of spare time to do this, hopefully he’ll find the time soon.

Great news! I’ve added it to the Raspberry Pi disc image proposals. If I’ve poorly summarised, please feel free to amend. Thanks.

Is !Manuals included? Finding the links to the StrongHelp manuals is relatively easy, but it took me far too long to find !Manuals (which is in manuals.zip in the parent directory)