Installing (from fresh) on SD card for Pinebook

Hi everybody! I am totally new¹ to RISC OS but I wanted to give it a go on my Pinebook (original, not pro).
Installed in the internal “disk” I have NetBSD (and I want to keep that).
I had a Manjaro Linux on an SD card but it updated itself into brokenness (black screen after login which became black screen all the time after more updates).

So I saw the announcement about RISC OS 5.30 and it seemed fun go give it a whirl. I found the wiki page https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Pine%20A64%20port but unfortunately it doesn’t actually contain any instructions.

Does anyone have any instructions around somewhere that I could have a look at? Remember, it would have to be “from scratch” with an “empty” SD card, and having NetBSD available to write to said card.

Thanks in advance!
-Olaf aka Rhialto

¹ well, back in the day, one of my friends showed me his Archimedes and I showed him my Amiga, and we were both a bit envious of some aspects of the other machine.

See https://www.riscository.com/2019/have-armbook-will-travel/ and contact Andrew Rawnsley at Rcomp.

At the moment, the Pinebook archives are missing the tools that are used to install the RISC OS ROM on the SD card, so they aren’t useful on their own at the moment. You’ll need to either build RISC OS from source or download the relevant files from GitLab and set them up by hand.

In addition, the tools only run on RISC OS, so it’s not currently useful unless you have another RISC OS machine with USB support (such as a Raspberry Pi) in order to set up the card.

Hi Olaf, welcome to the forum! To get RISC OS for the pinebook please e-mail info@riscoscomputers.co.uk saying you have an original pinebook and are interested in the DIY software scheme. Hope you have fun with it :-)

Thanks for the info! It seems more involved than I had anticipated :)

I believe you can download a small disc image from the Pine website – I certainly submitted one a few years ago. It should be enough to boot to a RISC OS desktop and get you started. Unfortunately I’m struggling to find the link, but it was definitely there a while back. I may have a copy somewhere which I could make available somehow (it was a bit large if I recall) although I can’t immediately think where.

Or, as others have said, a more comprehensive setup is available from R-Comp (me) although there would be a cost for that. The upside is you’d get a micro SD ready to go with all the tools and stuff.