Upgrading !Boot on Raspberry Pi

I am currently running RC8 on the Pi. I have had a lot of problems trying to bring everything up to current releases, necessitating a lot of cloning of sd cards when things went belly up.

First things first. I thought the simplest thing would be to bring !Boot up to date. I have tried several methods, including using Boot-Configure-Merge, install clean !Boot, use Chris Hall’s obey files to deal with new, spurious and changed files. In all cases I end up with what can only be described as psychedelic window furniture, together with other problems such as loss of sensible screen settings. Can the !Boot structure not be brought up to date in the same way as for the Iyo or BB?

I also at one point used !Packman to upgrade the various OS bits of the RPi – that left me with a completely unbootable machine.

Regularly upgrading !Boot and the OS on the BB and Iyonix has never given any problems. Why is the RPi so different?

Can the !Boot structure not be brought up to date [on the Pi] in the same way as for the Iyo or BB?

Lots of extra (over and above the standard HardDisc4) things are included inside !Boot on the Pi. However most users will have added such things on BBXM and Iyo.

I have tested my method on an RC8 image and it did work correctly (insofar as I couldn’t find any problems). The new 520 disc structure should work on 5.19 as well.

Another way is simply to add the RO520Hook directory from the new HardDisc4 and to delete the contents of the !Boot.Choices.Boot directory and then to put in the 5.2x ROM image and then boot from it (which will populate !Boot.Choices.Boot from scratch (so you will have to add any PreDesk, Tasks and Desktop:Look at;Run;AddtoApps items).

Lots of extra (over and above the standard HardDisc4) things are included inside !Boot on the Pi.

I have just done a compare of !Boot on my Iyonix and !Boot on the RPi using the compare facility of !SyncDiscs and there is nothing of any significance on the Pi (RC8) that isn’t on the Iyonix. What are all these new things required for a new !Boot to work?

I will try your ‘another way’ tomorrow. What I don’t understand is why the desktop colours (tool sprites) for the window furniture becomes completely scrambled.

I am currently running RC8 on the Pi […] In all cases I end up with what can only be described as psychedelic window furniture

The Pi is unique in being the only thing to use the ‘Steel’ window tools in the Raspberry theme. They’re a bit more demanding than the normal mottled grey, so previously were carefully included in only the Pi ROM and only in 1 resolution, pending work to make them generally available.

The new disc image now includes a full set in all resolutions, but requires the updated Window Manager to know how to render them. That’s OK, there’s a softloading Wimp for pre RISC OS 5, and the only thing that would ever haved loaded them is a Pi.

And there’s your problem: you now have disc loading set of tools that RC8 doesn’t understand. So you should either update the ROM too, or temporarily rename Boot/Resources/ThemeDefs/Raspberry/Tools out of the way.

The new 520 disc structure should work on 5.19 as well [using the above method to update it].

Provided that you EITHER upgrade to the 5.2x ROM OR delete the directory !Boot.Choices.Boot and its contents and boot into the 5.1x ROM (to populate !Boot.Choices.Boot appropriately). [I tried to think of all contingencies!]

What are all these new things required for a new !Boot to work?

None of them is required.

Some things have been added to RO520Hook since the 9 July HardDisc4 image was created:

!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.PreDesk.Alarm 
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.PreDesk.CPUSetup
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.PreDesk.Fat32FS 
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.PreDesk.Fat32FS.!Run 
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.PreDesk.Fat32FS.Fat32Fs
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.PreDesk.PrintPDF
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.Tasks.FlrSetup
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.Tasks.LoadSFX 
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.Tasks.Pinboard 
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.Tasks.ScrnSetup 
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.Tasks.TimeSetup 
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.Tasks.Welcome
!Boot.RO520Hook.ResetCMOS

Other things added since NOOBS/RC8 are:

!Boot.Loader.FIXUP/DAT
Documents.Images.StrongED-KeyMap
Utilities.!Manuals.Root.TemplEd
Utilities.!Manuals.Root.VCache 
Utilities.!WinMenu.*

Other things changed include:

!Boot.Choices.Boot.Desktop
!Boot.Choices.Boot.PreDesk.Configure.Monitor 
!Boot.Choices.Boot.Tasks.FlrSetup
!Boot.Choices.Boot.Tasks.PinSetup 
!Boot.Choices.Crypto.CryptRand.Seed
!Boot.Loader.BOOTCODE/BIN 
!Boot.Loader.START/ELF 
!Boot.Resources.!System.310.Modules.DRenderer
!Boot.RO500Hook.Res.Configure.!CPUSetup.!RunImage 
!Boot.RO510Hook.Boot.Desktop 
!Boot.RO510Hook.Boot.Tasks.PinSetup 
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.Desktop 
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.PreDesk.Configure.Monitor
!Boot.RO520Hook.Boot.Tasks.PinSetup
Apps.!StrongED.!RunImage 
Sources.Routines-1_48/zip
Utilities.!7backup.!Help 
Utilities.!7backup.7backup
Utilities.!7backup.Desc
Utilities.Caution.!HForm.Messages 
Utilities.Caution.!ResetBoot.Themes.Ursula.!Sprites 
Utilities.Caution.!ResetBoot.Themes.Ursula.!Sprites22 

Thanks Sprow for the info – it’s becoming a bit clearer now.

With respect to the changes to !Boot listed by Chris, as far as I can see, the current public release of !Boot (9 Jul) does not have any of these extras in it, so where does one obtain these – build it all oneself?

There are also hardware specifics – eg START/ELF. Where do these come from? Looks like sticking with the bog standard RC8 is the thing to do.

With respect to the changes to !Boot listed by Chris, as far as I can see, the current public release of !Boot (9 Jul) does not have any of these extras in it, so where does one obtain these – build it all oneself?

The extras I list are things that are on the RC11 release of the ‘RISCOSPi’ SD card as currently available from ROOL (and at the show) but which are not yet included in ‘HardDisc4’ on the ‘software’ page and not yet available to download from the Raspberry Pi web site (as the RC11 Raspberry Pi SD card image) but should be available in a few days for download. Hence if you update RC8 using what is currently available to be downloaded, it will all work but with a few minor items missing.

There are also hardware specifics – eg START/ELF. Where do these come from? Looks like sticking with the bog standard RC8 is the thing to do.

The ‘bog standard’ RC11 will be available on the Raspberry Pi web site in a few days.

I have updated both !Boot and the ROM but I still need to hide the Raspberry theme to remove the odd colours.

I have tried both the beta ‘RC11’ ROM and the ‘development’ 5.21 ROM, downloaded today, yet they are still reporting themselves as 5.19, 18 Jan 2013. This seems odd to me. I am pretty sure the new ROM image has been copied into ‘Loader’ since I deleted the original ROM image each time.

Apart from that things appear to be OK.

Both the beta RC11 rom and the daily alpha rom should report themselves as 5.21. If they report themsleves as 5.19 then they are 5.19 and won’t display the ‘steel’ theme properly.

Tell me if I am going crazy – I have just downloaded the development image again, extracted the rom image – its date stamp is 04:39:50 15 Jul 2013. I renamed it RISCOS/IMG, went into Boot>loader, deleted the RISCOS/IMG file that was there, then copied the new ROM image into loader. A complete power cycle of the RPi, and the ROM reports as 5.19, 18 Jan 2013.

Does this mean the delete and then copy in of the new image hasn’t actually achieved anything? Is there some caching of the old ROM image? Probably not – I renamed the ROM image in loader, and then copied in the new one again. Shut down and powered off. Restart – still 5.19 ROM!

Hmm! I have just downloaded the 20/3 RC8 rom image and called it ‘riscos19’ and the 15/7 alpha Pi ROM and called it ‘riscos1507’. I then copy ‘riscos19’ as ‘RISCOS/IMG’ within !Boot.Loader, visibly overwriting the previous file,power off and it reboots in 5.19. I then copy ‘riscos1507’ as ‘RISCOS/IMG’ and power off and it boots as 5.21.

I confirm your 0439 datestamp.

Curiouser. I have just loaded the development ROM I downloaded yesterday into Zap, and a quick search reveals the string
‘RISC OS 5.21 (12 Jul 2013)’

Thus the ROM is the correct one. Doing the same search to the image that is in loader gives the same text string so it appears to be the new ROM. Yet when I reboot the version shown in the task manager is 5.19.

I must do some more tests.

Well, I am none the wiser. I tried everyway I could think of to upgrade the ROM image to 5.21 but the machine always booted in to 5.19. It was almost as if I was seeing one image file in loader, and the hardware was seeing an older image when the Pi booted.

Anyway I cut my losses – downloaded the RC8 image from the RPi site, cloned it on to the recalcitrant card using Ben Avison’s CloneDisc, upgraded the !Boot to this weeks, overwrote the RISCOS/IMG with this weeks 5.21, rebooted and lo and behold, the Pi was now running 5.21.

The cause of my original problem will forever remain a mystery.