RISC OS Direct 5.31 upgrade with Wifi and Web Browser

I haven’t tried to reproduce this error and its circumstances, but there seems to be a problem with Access (or the ShareFS filer). Just booting RODirect fresh and letting it idle for a while leads to an Address Exception and termination of the ShareFS filer. Standard wired DHCP networking. Happens on Pi4 1 GiB as well as Pi400.

But I also have a lot of stability problems atm with ROOL 5.30 and ROD 5.31 and it looks like the KVM Switch is the problem. And it looks like my old config.txt to enforce 4K@30Hz no longer works, the entries lead to non-booting – and removing them does not restore the previously working thing – just as if the Fat32 structure of Boot partition gets somehow corrupt. Does not matter if I change the file from within RISC OS or from Windows. Anyone seen something like this? I have already wasted too much time on this.

The downloads on the RISC OS Direct website have been updated to resolve a many of the things arising from this thread. The basic v2 download is now 7.3 GB (thanks David Pitt) and various niggles mentioned by Steffen and others, plus those that we observed at the Wakefield meeting have been addressed.

The 640×480 problem reported by Steffen has been reproduced with a monitor here, and a possible solution has been found, but it requires some coding time to provide a graceful handling.

Finally, the groundwork for the complete disc image has been laid, so hopefully that will be ready next week.

Many thanks for the improvement and quick take-up of the various suggestions and bug reports. Nice to see quick progress here. Now if someone could slightly improve the RODev website – I am constantly irritated by the “only one project in the Projects menu”, when you have to click on the menu itself instead of the entry to get to the full list of projects. Providing an explicit list of projects with proper links on the Home page would also be a good idea for a quick overview.

And why “The real RISC OS Cogwheel” is amongst the projects, I don’t know. Just provide a “Resources” thing somewhere.

But I also have a lot of stability problems atm with ROOL 5.30 and ROD 5.31 and it looks like the KVM Switch is the problem.

OK, that seems to be discussed in the “Bugs” forum here , so a well-known problem. Strange, I hadn’t seen it much during the first RISC OS version I put onto Pi4 machines, but I always saw it with Titanium. What was the first RO version compatible with the RPi4? 5.28? So I probably had a rather stable 5.27 from perhaps mid-2020 running?

3) Youtube is a blank page. This was probably a given, maybe some day.

If you use this url https://m.youtube.com/?app=m&persist_app=1 youtube should no longer be blank. The search works OK in !Iris.

Here it is in action,

Steffen – what is doubly odd is that the main change in 5.31 vs 5.30 was that the KVM fixes from earlier in the year are pre-compiled into that build. I think they have gone through some minor tweaks in the last week or so once ROOL got to approving themm, but otherwise AFAIK that functionality should be present in Direct 5.31. Direct is fully ROOL compatible ROM-wise, so you can pop in a newer nightly beta to see if it favours your KVM.

If you have time, feel free to follow it up with me at andrew at riscosdev.com – always happy to troubleshoot things. Only thing you’ve requested that I can’t do is alter the main wordpress website as that’s not in my control.

Thanks Andrew – free time is very “variable” at the moment, so no promises that I will be able to test things. My next plan is to use Direct on a Pi3 to see if what I see is XHCI-related.

One thing I can say for sure that, amongst all the probably KVM-induced troubles I have seen with RISC OS, the ARMX6 has been rock-stable. So despite its relative slowness CPU-wise, it is still my go-to RISC OS system if the emulators won’t cut it.