Wakefield Acorn & RISC OS Computer Show 2017

Imagine that it’s, say, a port of the current version of Firefox complete with YouTube support (this is just a wild guess). It’s one thing to have decided on that and have some money, but if there are no developers with the necessary skills then the work just won’t get done. It makes sense to not announce something until you’re sure that it’s possible.

True, fair point.

The metro centric view assumes that everyone is in a physical location to make attendance possible. There are numerous users/interested parties in various parts of the world unable to make it to the shows. Despite living on the other side of the world I have attended several shows (the first at Wembley in 1995) when I have been in England and a show has been on.

However on most occasions I depend on show reports to keep in touch with what is happening. Unfortunately many vendors are so stretched that their web sites are not kept up to date and don’t help one to keep abreast of what is happening.

For example GeminX – exactly what is this alluding to?

Vince will have understood that I was being ironic – that’s a bit like sarcastic but in a more knowing/understood sense.

English is not my language, so I was not sure.
Sarcastic and ironic is not needed because it works. ;-)

I’m not sure offhand what minimum spec is needed for Murnong.

The “alpha package” is developed on a Iyonix so it should work on it. I have only try the video with my MX6. Works without problems. For slower machines a “smaller quality” is usable.

Oh! Has Dave left the country then?
I tend to think of Dave as grumpy rather than whingey even in the new grump reduced version. :)

Oh! I didn’t realise it was me until the Grump was mentioned. (I’d gone to bed).

The Grump creature part is 99 percent under auto control these days. (The cage gets rattled now and again but doesn’t break open).

My big character flaws are… Disappointment, I don’t handle it well, and for as long as I can remember, got into trouble for saying what I think about things, instead of pussy footin’…

I have a long time love of Acorn/RO and when disappointment happens, as it did with the No news after the hype, the second flaw kicks in.

Aside from this PR debacle, I have great respect for Richard Brown, so I hope the project, whatever… Comes to fruition and is a success.

Aside from this PR debacle,

That I think is the heart of the problem – PR. Nobody appears to know what to do.

In what sense is the PR a debacle? They have achieved all their initial objectives and generated lots of interest and speculation….

+1

Interest is good.
Speculation… Maybe less so, as this thread demonstrates. :-)

Looking at the news pages on this site, ROOL’s “announcement of epic proportions” would appear to be FileCore support for large hard disks up to 2TB.

I’m not sure that ROOL’s PR strategy has been particularly helpful; encouraging speculation and then not delivering something of the calibre some were expecting only leads to cynicism and disillusionment.

No. ROOL product is ePic, a combination of RISC OS and NutPi. 50 £.
Everyone make reference here to the RComp message:

If all that wasn’t enough for you, the Wakefield show will be the event
where we unveil our new joint venture (with Richard Brown of Orpheus and
others) – RISC OS Developments Ltd. A massive project for the benefit of
all modern RISC OS users, this exciting new venture is our commitment to
the future of our beloved platform/operating system.

At the SW show I gained the impression from Andrew Rawnsley that the 2nd part of the filing system improvements bounty was about to become redundant. I probably got the poo end of the stick.

Frederick, you’re partially correct. John Ballance has done work on disc partitions for SCSIFS which can actually be traced back historically to his Castle SCSI card days! One of our industrial customers needed to be able to use more storage on SSDs, so partitioning was an obvious solution. As such, the work was prototyped and released on ARMX6 since that’s the system that John works on (he is lead coder on the i.MX6 port). AFAIK that work has been fed back to ROOL. At the time John said he wasn’t interested in claiming the bounty, but hoped someone would pick up his work and develop it further (eg. adding support for other filing systems and easier setup/config).

What’s needed is for someone to take these various “piecemeal” solutions: 2TB on ADFS (but which drives and what formatting?) ; partitioning on SCSIFS (but crude tools) and make them “universal” and applicable to everyone. Essentially, that’s someone to take the good work that’s been done and “finish it properly for everyone”.

Thanks for clarifying, Andrew. Perhaps that info might add ‘interest’ for someone?

Bounty still worth contributions then.

2TB on ADFS (but which drives and what formatting?)

Excuse me while I put on my Whinging Bad Guy hat for a moment, however I think we are long beyond when RISC OS needs to come with a filesystem recovery tool. I, personally, am not overly fussed as my SD cards (originally 2GB, now 8GB) are small enough that I can pop the card into my PC and image the entire thing to harddisc… But 2TB? Uh…!

How many people have had “Broken directory”? Worse, how many have encountered “One copy of map broken” or “Bad free space map” which leads to a filesystem that may or may not be borked, and after a reboot might even be “Disc not formatted”.
You do realise – I hope – that *CheckMap does not work (well, it sort of does but not in any useful way), there is nothing in standard RISC OS that will touch a broken directory, and as for the rest of those problems…

Excuse me while I put on my Whinging Bad Guy hat for a moment, however I think we are long beyond when RISC OS needs to come with a filesystem recovery tool.

I guess you mean a free included version of !DiscKnight which is currently the outrageous price of £10 or circa 11.73 Euros.

You’re guaranteeing it works/will work with the new HugeDisc format?

I’ve said all along that a don’t expect a repair tool to equal DiscKnight, but that RISC OS does need something a little bit better than an “oh well, sucks to be you” message if/when something does go wrong.

You’re guaranteeing it works/will work with the new HugeDisc format?

Well that would be easy as we could ask the developer and if not there is a choice if the developer wants to update and charge for it or not or we start a new bounty to build on the one that is currently looking to add partitioning on this site.

I make no allowances in the above for the other constraint actually having enough developers to do it and more which brings us back to the RODL bit of the thread and sometimes lots of money is required to push things and make it worth while.

I make no allowances in the above for the other constraint actually having enough developers to do it and more which brings us back to the RODL bit of the thread and sometimes lots of money is required to push things and make it worth while.

So you reckon RODL should ask Druck to update DiscKnight into something to incorporate in the base OS.
Maybe they already have.

Where did you get that from in what I said?

I knew that the other half of the resident Morcambe and Wise act would be along in double quick time :-)

the resident Morcambe and Wise act

Hmm, name calling rather than wondering if perhaps there’s a point to consider. How very Brexit… :-P

PS – to be lumped into a category with Steve, I’d consider that an honour.

Rick,

Sorry if my attempt at humour was a little obtuse for you and no slight was intended.

I thought us remainers were the more intellectual of the species :-)

I would consider it an honour to be compared to a great team like Morcambe and Wise who were at the top of their game unlike some other double acts of recent times like Merkel/Hollande or Gove/Johnson.

Back on track my first line was also a rhetorical attempt, clearly a failed one, at opening up the discussion and hence why the question mark at the end of the line. Yes it does make sense to not reinvent things but not always and I was not making assumptions in my posts of the best way forward.

Yes getting Druck to update his code or agree to move it in to the source tree makes sense but is it the best way or are there other available tools that can be used that work with GUID partition tables etc. I guess the RISC OS part would be a downside to using existing tools and porting them but a hybrid approach could give the best of both worlds though more complicated as licence arrangements also need to be thought of.

Did you not note the sticking-tongue-out smiley?

While it isn’t always good to reinvent things, it is worth noting that the RISC OS filesystem is pretty much the only one I can think of that doesn’t come with some sort of tool to fix itself, because problems happen…

Nice but dim here :-)

Well it has a very very very basic tool and as pointed out a tool is available for FileCore formats at a small price but I agree it is one of the many things that is missing in RISCOS that others take for granted hence the bounties ROOl are doing and why I believe RODL have been set up to close those gaps so someone downloading RISCOS gets the same sort of experience that you get on other systems.

I guess you mean a free included version of !DiscKnight which is currently the outrageous price of £10 or circa 11.73 Euros.

You’re guaranteeing it works/will work with the new HugeDisc format?

Perhaps the part that’s been overlooked from ROOL’s news article prior to the on-stand demo last Saturday is that the disc format hasn’t changed (see paragraph 3 of ‘How does it work?’). It’s really just an example of the care that went into the rewrite of ADFS in C which considers all addresses internally as 64 bit byte offsets, so is good to 16 exabytes, built on top of the first of ROOL’s filing system bounties which added 4k sector support.

The drive is presented as a single 2 terabyte drive, or 1863GB using computing 1024’s versus marketing 1000’s. As the format’s the same, existing disc tools have nothing new to learn; DiscKnight already knew about 4k sectors from the 2013 bounty work, though it’s fair to say that both FileCore and DiscKnight fell into some 4k-bear-traps. We’ve been working with David and DiscKnight 1.52 will be available to coincide with the drives plus an up issued FileCore. For the gory details: it’s specifically due to differences in the alignment requirements between a hard disc and a RAM disc, which is what the 4k sector support was previously tested on because at the time no filing system existed that could talk to a 4Kn drive.

Bounty still worth contributions then.

There’s no overlap between the advent of 2TB/4Kn drive support and the bounty. Indeed, with the feature set hinted at by partitioning being integrated properly with FileCore you could get to 8TB, and nobody will ever need more memory than that ^TM.