Alpha testing on Pi

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

Sorry if I’m being stupid, but I’ve gone to the page summarised and switched to History view…I don’t see anything specific. Or did you mean the /whole/ page?

Shame about Fireworkz. Otherwise, it looks a reasonable set of files to get started with. I do have three comments:
1. /Nothing/ to do with music creation? Does RISC OS not feature any more in this arena?
2. Do any of the video players support XviD, or should we ask about MPlayer as well? [results aren’t so great with no GPU but it’s better than nothing; it would be usable if there was a way to do the half-size decode and blit it full-screen]
3. Probably a bit late in the day for this, but it’d be pretty nifty if ROOL had a “DevSuite Lite” version to preview the “official” tools (as opposed to BASIC, GCC and HLLs such as Charm).

don’t see anything specific

You’re not being stupid. I was going to post the diff, but Textile doesn’t seem to render them well where tables are included.

• v.42 – February 9, 2012 20:20:35
• v.43 – July 22, 2012 11:51:11

(The addition is simply a row for Tinct. Including it means we should be easily able to keep a record of the expected authorisation for distribution without trawling through forum posts. It should also help preventing duplication of effort. …and I note that I have a few to chase up!)

When I click on the link above for the Eighth download, it appears as a “Data” file

That appears to be a problem with Netsurf – it downloads a file ‘Alpha8.zip’ and then saves it as plain ‘Alpha8’. If it had saved it with the ‘.zip’ extension then it would have been assigned a filetype by the filer so that double-clicking on it would open !SparkFS. As it is you drag it to !SparkFS and its filetype is then set to Archive.

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?

It is part of the disc image: on the (latest 21 July) disc image as a file ‘Index/htm’ inside the directory ‘Manuals’ and is started up from !Boot.Choices.Boot.Tasks on start up. Most of the technical detail is now removed and will only appear if you click ‘More’. The ‘Alpha.htm’ version on the web is simply for those who do not have a Pi.

And about the SDFS_Up contents:

The 21 July disc image contained inside the latest alpha disto contains all the various components in a single download. The updates were for an earlier disto, now obsolete. You have applied one of the updates to a later image, hence the confusion (nearly empty directory !Cat, etc.). The updates have now been removed.

There will be a further updated disc image later this week to respond to the various comments. I shall try to do these sparingly as the download traffic is so great after releasing one that my e-mail becomes unreachable for a day or so.

Should ArmSort, Routines and MultiTask be in Programming instead of Utilities?

@Chris: In the current web Alpha.htm, in the ‘Configuring the machine’ section, it encourages ‘double-click over !Boot’. Should we be encouraging Task menu → Configure… instead?

Also, just below, it mentions ‘anit-aliasing’ in the text (not the png). Is this something new?!

@Kevin: the !ArmSort app does provide a utility to define a sort on many types of file, and just run it. But still debatable where it should reside!

There will be a further updated disc image later this week to respond to the various comments. I shall try to do these sparingly as the download traffic is so great after releasing one that my e-mail becomes unreachable for a day or so.

If you want to have the images mirrored I can provide some space for that if need be.

If you want to have the images mirrored I can provide some space for that if need be.

Many thanks, but at the moment I can cope. Alpha distro updated to 24 July 2012.

In July, Dave Higton wrote:

It fails with an “Outside file” error when trying to render JPEGs from my phone, for example.

This is fixed at last:

http://pond.org.uk/swiftjpeg/

…though it’s certainly true that SwiftJPEG can only do JPEGs; that’s the whole point of it really, but a more general purpose image display application may be of more interest to non-RISC OS people.

If I want to update the RISC OS ROM on my Raspberry-Pi or anything else in the FAT partition, how do I do it? On the Beagleboard we were recommended to use SDCreate, but what is it for the Raspberry-Pi. I don’t want to do a disc image as it destroys everything I have saved to the SD card.
I tried simply copying in (drag and drop) the latest Raspberry-Pi ROM from the ROOL ROM page via the !Boot.Loader window, but when I restarted the R-Pi I just got a rainbow coloured square, very pretty, but not what I want. :-(
By the way, I notice that on Chris Hall’s latest ‘distro’ the ROM type is &718 while on an earlier ‘distro’ it was &FE5

f I want to update the RISC OS ROM on my Raspberry-Pi or anything else in the FAT partition, how do I do it?

Double click on !Boot whilst holding down SHIFT to open the directory SDFS::0.$.!Boot and there is a DOS image file there called Loader. Double click on this and you can see the contents of the FAT partition. Just copy the new ROM image there, called ‘riscos/img’. Simples. The filetype of the file is not important. Make sure you use the Raspberry Pi ROM image. IF it goes wrong then you just need to use any computer to look at and correct the FAT partition, but it should just work. It is a good idea to look at the contents of the image Loader after putting the new image there and before rebooting.

I did just that and, as I said, it wouldn’t start again. The only difference I can see from what you have said is that I have RISCOS in the address where you have 0. In other words, the address of Loader is
SDFS::RISCOS.$.!Boot.Loader on my Raspberry-Pi.

David, it sounds like you might need to also update your start.elf as well when you update your rom.

you might need to also update your start.elf

… hmmm…

Dual boot (Beagle / Pi) SD images should be doable.

RPi: Boot process is bootcode.bin → loader.bin → start.elf → kernel.img. I am guessing RISC OS uses a modified start.elf to load RISC OS instead?

Beagle: Boot process is MLO → uboot.bin → [scripted load]

As the files are entirely different, it ought to be possible to make a combined image.

The question is on file location dependencies. A lot of sources say the OMAP’s MLO must be the first file in the filesystem (something not backed up by official docs). Is this true? If so, are there similar restrictions on bootcode.bin?

Just a thought… ;-)

bq.(it sounds like you might need to also update your start.elf as well when you update your rom.)

If you have to update the start.elf evry time you update the ROM, then why is this not explained on the ROM downloads page of this Website?

With the BeagleBoard we could update the boot process files without having to wipe all our applications and saved files. I want to be able to do the same with the Raspberry-Pi. It is unsatisfactory that to update any of bootcode.bin, loader.bin, start.elf, riscos.img etc., we have to do a complete disc image and wipe out evrything we have saved in the RISC OS partition.

By the way, can anyone tell me how to do “block quotes”?

Can’t you just replace those files in the appropriate partition?

how to do “block quotes”

Textile requires a space after the full stop.

I replaced the elf.start file with one dated 7/8/12 and got further in that I got to the supervisor prompt. Entering desktop got me to er…. er… the desktop! But it seemed to be a default desktop. Next I replaced bootcode.bin and loader.bin with newer versions (24/7/12) and then it worked. One strange thing is that, according to the Boot.Loader window, the riscos/img is way ahead of its time with date er….. 1/1/1980. Must be from a programmer with forsight.
You say
bq. Textile requires a space after the full stop.

so why isn’t the apace there in the “Formatting Help” list at bottom of this page?

It still doesn’t work even with a space.

Textile requires a space after the full stop.
so why isn’t the apace there in the “Formatting Help” list at bottom of this page?
It still doesn’t work even with a space.

The formatting help is not very clear. If you look, you’ll see it is something followed by a period, followed by a space. Like p=., only it doesn’t exactly say the space is there or needed.

Really, Textile is a horrible parser. Consider:

this

example

here

this
example
here

and explain to me how stuff within markup is affected by stuff outside of markup? Both are <pre> blocks. The first has no blank lines around so ends up double-spaced. The latter has blank lines around, so is as written. Now point to where this behaviour is mentioned in the documentation.

Add to this, I logged in, wrote a reply to you, and this was then thrown away as I was asked to log in again. So this is attempt two. Whoever wrote this forum code needs their head examined.

It still doesn’t work even with a space.

It should do. But if it’s mid-post, you’ll have the same issue Rick points out for <pre> tags: you’ll need blank lines above/below the bq. section.

It is unsatisfactory that to update any of bootcode.bin, loader.bin, start.elf, riscos.img etc., we have to do a complete disc image and wipe out evrything we have saved in the RISC OS partition.

I’m afraid that’s the trade-off you have to make with using an alpha version of any software. The interfaces between all these pieces of software are a rapidly moving target at the moment – yes, the GPU code is still changing too, adding facilities that, without which, a fully functional RISC OS port is impossible. It is unreasonable to expect the developers at the moment to ensure that any random selection of older bootloaders, ROM images and disc images all work together when they are in such a state of flux – the combinations would rapidly become unmanageable. Their time is much better spent at the moment finishing the port than working out and documenting the incompatibilities, so for the time being, use contemporary bootloaders, ROM image and disc contents, or you’re on your own.

But I am not expecting random collections of bootloaders, ROM images. Is it possible to separate out the stuff that goes in the FAT partition, the ROM, Bootloaders etc., so that that stuff can be updated in one go without affecting the RISC OS partition which could be updated separately? In fact any method that doesn’t wipe out applications and utilities etc. and saved files in the RISC OS partition? OK maybe the boot directory has to be updated at the same time as stuff in the FAT partition, I can live with that.

The 22 Aug ROM and HardDisc4 images have a slight bug: when setting up DHCP networking (on a vanilla HardDisc4 image) the filetype of the file !Boot.Choices.Internet.StartUp is left as text (this is a previous bug, now resurfaced).

Despite the CVS repository saying that VCHIQ and sound support is now present, the ROM and HardDisc image do not seem to have the !!VCHIQ directory with module and obey file to kick-start the sound system.

Trying *RMReInit BCMSound gives the error ‘SWI &59200 not known’

Despite the CVS repository saying that VCHIQ and sound support is now present, the ROM and HardDisc image do not seem to have the !!VCHIQ directory with module and obey file to kick-start the sound system.

Yes – I meant to add it to the disc image last night, but forget.

I’ve been waiting eagerly for this :-D I can listen to music whilst coding!

I also noticed the new ROM hangs if you have a FAT32 disc in it on entering the desktop. I just copied the latest rom image and used the same disc image, so it may have been just that.

Potentially dumb question – but where are these revised disk images?