At last the penny has dropped!

I have just been swapping round the hardware on my desk. When I came to start up the Rpi4 with RISC OS I got an error

Machine startup has not completed successfully: ‘Route: add net default: gateway 192.168.1.254: File exists’

Naturally I started searching on the ROOL forum for what to do about this, and found stuff going back years. Eventually I discovered that what the error message really meant was In Configure > Internet > Interfaces > Configure > Obtain IP address you have selected ‘via DHCP’ but you have not left blank the Gateway field in Configure > Internet > Routing . This is obviously a very ancient piece of unfriendliness, judging by the Forum’s records.

Eventually I discovered that what the error message really meant was In Configure > Internet > Interfaces > Configure > Obtain IP address you have selected ‘via DHCP’ but you have not left blank the Gateway field in Configure > Internet > Routing. This is obviously a very ancient piece of unfriendliness, judging by the Forum’s records.

Based on the behaviour of other OS implementations, which involves blanking the gateway setting as soon as you select DHCP, I’d call it a long-standing mistake/bug

I’d call it a long-standing mistake/bug

What had me fooled was that once I had selected ‘via DHCP’ , the two fields, for IP address and gateway address, in the same window, were immediately blanked. It did not occur to me that there was another field to be blanked in another window. I was looking through the boot procedure for clues to what was going on. To add to my confusion, the little plastic tensioner, on the end of my ethernet cable to the Pi, had just snapped and for a while I thought that might be something to do with it. These things rarely come singly in my experience.

You may know the story of the man who consults his rabbi because at breakfast his buttered toast fell butter-side up. No my son, it merely means that you buttered the wrong side of your toast this morning .