CD-ROM not found

On 21st December last I ordered a stick which was delivered with rpcemu-0.8.8-devel. I compiled it under Fedora 15 (very helpful instructions) and have a working emulator, but it can’t find the host CD-ROM drive. I have checked and /dev/cdrom is indeed pointing at the dvd reader/writer on the host machine. I need the CD-ROM to read my Techwriter CD because my reason for seeking out the emulator in the first place was to run Techwriter on my Linux box.

Searching around I find that version numbers are up to 8.10 and 8.11, and that problems with finding the CD-ROM were resolved by version 8.10. Is the Linux version lagging behind? Or have I just been sent an old stick with an obsolescent version of the software?

Thanks in advance for any information and/or advice.

Or have I just been sent an old stick with an obsolescent version of the software?

You mean the DDE stick? They forgot all that ‘extra’ stuff on mine. (^_^)
Still, wasn’t too hard to track down the PDF reader and such.

Looking on the official website it looks as if you got an older version of the source. The 8.11 is available; just grab a copy from there and build it. Which reminds me, I ought to update mine to fix the annoying mouse behaviour at startup. And here’s hoping v8.11 will be along soon, to prompt you if you accidentally click on the “close” icon. ;-) Oh, and switching freely to/from fullscreen would be nice as well.

Just as two “what the hell” suggestions: Is there any consideration within the RPCemu developers to emulating something of the RaspberryPi era (or, at least enough of it to run RISC OS – I know the GPUs will not really be possible)?
It might be useful to emulate the newer style of ARM instructions with their different behaviour, specifically regarding unaligned loads and such.
Secondly, would it be possible for a debug extension that if the machine crashes (and I mean the emulated one, not the emulator! ;-) ), to bring up a window showing processor state and allowing access to a dump of the system memory – so if you are writing some finickety code and it all goes horribly wrong, you can look to see why.

[I don’t have access to my domain’s email config right now, so making an address specifically for the mailing list would probably mean creating a new email account – and where? I think Yahoo! wants paid for POP access on new accounts, I don’t want to use GMail now that Google is desperately trying to ram Google+ down our throats (and that incredibly annoying “log in once, log in to everything” yet logging out of one service (ie YouTube) funnily enough leaves you logged in to others (ie Google search)); does this leave many options?!?]

Is there any consideration within the RPCemu developers to emulating something of the RaspberryPi era

Interesting idea – let’s wait for them to catch up with the concept that there is a version of RO5 that is an official build for the RPC (even in emulated form, never mind a ROM for the real thing)
Yes, I’ve mailed the contact address. No there was no change and the page on RO5 support is still massively (3 years?) out of date.

There was mention of a QEMU build, but that seemed to rely on hacking the RPi build to accommodate the problems in the emulator rather than anything else.

I dimly remember a discussion between Tom Walker, Peter Howkins and me a few years ago about the direction RPCEmu development could take. Both Tom and Peter made it very clear that their interest was in an emulator that faithfully emulates a Risc PC, i.e. to stay a “machine emulator” and not becoming a “system emulator”, i.e. getting optimized to run a special, emulation-tuned version of RISC OS.

To faithfully emulate a RaspPi would be extremely complicated, time consuming and in the end senseless if all you want to do is to run RISC OS. Now adding a different CPU model to RPCEmu (or a fork of it) might be a much better idea, because it could help developers to test their software in the new ARMv7 world. Not sure if an emulated ARMv7 CPU would perform better than an emulated StrongARM.

On the OP’s query “I compiled it under Fedora 15 (very helpful instructions) and have a working emulator, but it can’t find the host CD-ROM drive”, the answer is that IDE doesn’t work on RO 5 on RPCEmu yet: see http://www.riscos.info/pipermail/rpcemu/2013-December/002164.html

As to the machine emulator vs. system emulator question, I’m much in favour of the latter, especially as the commercially available emulators are unlikely to run RO5 or emulate more up-to-date hardware. But the developers are not being paid and should not be criticised for doing what they want!

But the developers are not being paid and should not be criticised for doing what they want!

We all know it’s unpaid, but when information that a specific item on a specific page can be changed to a more accurate statement the normal reaction is a brief thanks and a small bit of html editing.

I chip in with observations and amended text to a variety of people and most (virtually all) respond with a brief email of thanks and a check within days¹ shows the change. I just want the sites to show the best and quickest route to information for new users.

Convince me that the page http://www.marutan.net/rpcemuspoon/ro5.html is close to correct.

Pertinent to the original question this quote may be useful:
“Although the ROM now supports IDE, this has not yet been enabled on RPCEmu due to the presence of a data loss bug” (from the RPCEmu RO5 page)

¹ Sometimes hours

On the OP’s specific problem (installing Techwriter), I dare say an email to MW Software explaining the problem might well result in Martin emailing a zipped copy of the software. Of course this will require networking on the RPCEmu side to be set up, but reasonably clear instructions do exist for this (they must be reasonably clear otherwise I would not have been able to follow them!). It’s always worth trawling through RPCEmu Archives www.riscos.info/pipermail/rpcemu/ for useful advice as well.

RPCEmu is such a good piece of software – offering performance on a reasonably well-specced PC that is only exceeded by the very fastest native hardware, costing around £600-700 depending on vendor, and (IME) stability at least equal to my Iyonix running 5.16 – that it is indeed frustrating that the instructions for installing it are so out of date. But VRPC is there for people who want ‘the complete service’ and are prepared to pay for it: I’ve used RPCEmu now for nearly 18 months, starting with 0.8.8 and now on 0.8.11, entirely for free. However, if the developers could spare the time to bring the instructions up to date that would be excellent. As to RO5 support, the huge selling point of this on RPCEmu (apart from the being the only OS version that is under active development) is that it is measurably faster that RO4.XX, and being fully 32-bit is ideally suited to emulation, so I hope the developers support it. Just my ha’porth.

We all know it’s unpaid, but when information that a specific item on a specific page can be changed to a more accurate statement the normal reaction is a brief thanks and a small bit of html editing.

Yes, but…

I can’t speak for the RPCemu folks, but as another developer doing this for “fun”, I’ve got a long list of things that “just need doing”. It gets sorted in order of practical deadlines, so — for example — getting Wakefield Show adverts done in time for Archive’s print deadline (ha!) takes precedence over fixing errors in documentation. That’s why I’ll be doing the Wakefield Newsletter this weekend (due for print Monday/Tuesday because it has to be ready for an immovable meeting) instead of fixing bugs in NetSurf’s RISC OS code as per my original plan.

I know for a fact that a report of a minor error on my website would be met with (at best) a brief thanks and then a mental note to come back to it next Christmas if time permitted.

The real issue here is that the vast majority of RISC OS users seem content to sit back and leave everything — from software development, through writing documentation or magazine articles, to organizing the shows — to the same small group of people. Surely it would be better if everyone mucked in with the easy stuff, and left the developers to actually develop?

I know for a fact that a report of a minor error on my website would be met with (at best) a brief thanks and then a mental note to come back to it next Christmas if time permitted.

Which is why, if it’s a typo or two, I tend to send an updated block of text for inclusion.

The real issue here is that the vast majority of RISC OS users seem content to sit back and leave everything — from software development, through writing documentation or magazine articles, to organizing the shows — to the same small group of people. Surely it would be better if everyone mucked in with the easy stuff, and left the developers to actually develop?

I totally agree and where possible I amend typo’s etc¹. My comments recently about the PRM’s on line were to the effect that in many cases the people with the knowledge to update these things are frequently the ones who ought to be doing something else – like development. So the question is, is there a place for a web editor who would update the sites of various developers? Or proof read their draft documentation? Or one of a number of admin tasks?

BTW. It isn’t confined to RO, each year, repeated for the last 32 years, a fortnight of my time is spent working on another interest of mine. CAMRA has an event staffed by 1000 volunteers (of 157,114 at current count) many complain there should be more things done but don’t volunteer. Some just work at their local events, some just complain.

¹ It isn’t much but amending a PRM page or two for typo’s is within my ability, hence the recently revised documents page featuring my name here and there. As I said it isn’t much but where time and talent permits…

I know for a fact that a report of a minor error on my website would be met with (at best) a brief thanks and then a mental note to come back to it next Christmas if time permitted.
[…]
Surely it would be better if everyone mucked in with the easy stuff, and left the developers to actually develop?

Ummm… Would you trust other people to edit your website? ;-)

The problem is, as I see it, that the same small group of developers are the ones who are getting the work done. Ask yourself who is developing and extending RISC OS. You’ll find the same names (sadly not me…yet?) cropping up time and again. And while there are others who could help with the associated tasks (documentation), perhaps they don’t feel entirely confident to do this correctly?

I, for instance, think it would be a good idea to have documentation of BASIC on the wiki, but I’m not entirely certain how to begin a new section of the wiki (it will be an index, topics, and a page for each keyword). I have only ever really tweaked existing pages – plus I speak MediaWiki more than the eccentric language used by this half-wiki half-textile wiki. ;-)

[oh, and yes, I’m offering – but somebody else will need to fill in the more modern features, like COLOUR TO and the VFP assembly]

oh, and yes, I’m offering – but somebody else will need to fill in the more modern features, like COLOUR TO and the VFP assembly]

As previously commented – proof reading is on the cards. Might be able to persuade the lady of the household (trained proof reader) too.

I didn’t mean to be provoking when I posted the OP. I am grateful for all the advice and discussion that has followed. I have an Iyonix, networked to my linux box, a RaspberryPi, and other stuff. The copy of FTPc that was bundled with the Iyonix allows me to get Techwriter .pdf files to my Laserjet 4, so currently, apart from having to shift chairs, I am fully equipped for what I need, so the development status of RPCemu is of interest, but not vitally important to me.

I raised the OP because as I understood the on-line documentation the CD-ROM drive of the Linux host ought to have been accessible to the emulator. It was not, so I thought that I must have been doing something wrong. That’s why I made my inquiry. I wanted to find out what I was doing wrong, and it appears that I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

Naively I had assumed that I could take my Techwriter CD, open it under Linux, copy (cp or dd) the contents into hostfs on the emulator and everything would work, and of course I was mistaken. Linux found a lot of invisible files with names like 1_1, and lost the filetypes.

If that had worked I wouldn’t have needed the emulator’s connection to the Linux CD reader/writer.

What I would really like to do would be to install a version of RISCOS on my RaspberryPi to run natively and export the display to an X-Window on my Linux box but that is, I fear, Pi in the sky.

I didn’t mean to be provoking when I posted the OP. I am grateful for all the advice and discussion that has followed.

Useful discussion I think. I note that the most knowledgeable person with regard to installation of RPCEmu and RO5.2x (Tony Moore) hasn’t posted anything since August 14th and the post doesn’t perhaps leap out to everyone (although it should) as a good resource for these installs.

Perhaps an additional page linked from the Documentation homepage is in order? Looking at the requirements.

What I would really like to do would be to install a version of RISCOS on my RaspberryPi to run natively and export the display to an X-Window on my Linux box but that is, I fear, Pi in the sky.

VNC? I think the server available is(are) stable on the Pi, clients for Linux are available.
http://www.steve-potts.me.uk/software.html and
http://adrianl.drobe.co.uk/

Steffen Hubers CDFaker will happily present a proper ISO fila of your CD as a CD to RiscOS.
Take a look here: http://www.huber-net.de/cdfaker.html

Also Warm Silence Software’s CDROMFS will do, don’t know it that still for sale.

All you have to do is dd the entire CD to a file in your homefs directory.
Do NOT mount the cd, use the entrance in /dev to read the entire device.

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/home/$USER/hostfs/Techwriter_CD.iso bs=1024

If unsure about the proper entrance in /dev use cat /proc/partitions to find it, it will look like /dev/sr0 or so.

Also Warm Silence Software’s CDROMFS will do, don’t know it that still for sale.

In stock at:
http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/individual/newprodpages/prodinfo.php?prodcode=HUB-CDVDBRN

I downloaded CDFaker, unzipped it, changed its type to Module, copied it into HostFS:$.!Boot.Choices.Boot.PreDesk. On the host I dismounted /dev/cdrom and emitted the following (with appropriate adjustments to my own configuration).

$dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/home/$USER/hostfs/Techwriter_CD.iso bs=1024

and copied the iso image to HostFS and set the type to &DF6 as instructed. I restarted, clicked on the image, clicked on the CD icon on the toolbar, and the directory window opened showing the root directory structure as it is shown from the CD in my Iyonix; but when I opened a directory there were no files inside. So, once again, I am stuck. Any further advice or information will be gratefully received.

I don’t understand why you need to mount the CD. Can’t you just zip up the copy of Techwriter on your Iyonix and copy that across?

Zipping the disc on the Iyonix, ftping it to the Linux box, unzipping in rpcemu and bingo: the files are reconstituted and everything is just as it ought to be . . . except that module Universalkey is not 32 bit compatible and Techwriter won’t load. Curses! I’m going to have to buy an upgrade which, as a longtime Linux user, is something I haven’t had to do for 15 years or more.

Anyway, thanks for the advice and help: without it I would have been stuck.