Total Newbee

Chaps,
please excuse my ignorance, i arrived at a new Raspberry Pi, for a 50 something birthday present.
Had a fiddle with it, it’s pretty good, but to make it better it said i could load RISC OS as an alternative to Raspbian.
i downloaded the software to my laptop, unzipped it to a ‘FAT’ formatted Micro SD card, but the OS unzips as a ISO file?
on my contemptables, no problems, just use the mount as virtual drive, but for the new latest thing! i am totally lost.
any suggestions, gratefully received.

Jonah.

Hi Jonah
Nice to hear from you and welcome to the world of RISC OS.
I’m sure there will be plenty of people along to help you out. I don’t have a PI, so I don’t have the end-to-end process to help you out, but I assume you’ve downloaded the pi RC14 SD image from here https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi

It’s a large 100MB file, and after unpacking it should be copied to an empty SD card (I think).

There is a very easy to understand YouTube video by Rick Murray which may be helpful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Y51qf8-Yo (the download file you will use will be different to the one he uses in his video)

Ensure you have a quality power source for your pi and be prepared to try another sd card if initially unsuccessful. Not all sd cards work with RiscOS.

There are three ways to create a suitable SD card.
1. Download NOOBS from raspberrypi.org and follow the instructions for installing RISC OS
2. Download the card image from this site and copy the image on to an SD card using win32diskimager or equivalent.
Or more versatile but not free:
3. Buy !systemdisc http://piccolosystems.com/disctools/systemdisc and copy the relevant files onto the two partions. You will need another suitable RISC OS computer to format the card.

I can’t see instructions for option 2 on this site! Am I being my usual blind self?

Option 1 is I believe well documented so maybe your best bet.

Thank you for your kind responses.
I spent last night trying them out.
Alan, yes I did use the RC14 ad image, that’s what gave me an ISO image, and started my quest!
Chris I downloaded NOOBS, the latest version of which, does not have RISC OS on it.
Peter I intend watching the video tonight, so update tomorrow.
I really do appreciate your help, if you ever need assistance planning a maintenance shutdown of a nuclear reactor, believe me it’s easy compared with this!
Cheers!

Alan, yes I did use the RC14 ad image, that’s what gave me an ISO image, and started my quest!

An ISO image needs to be written to the card. I put written in italics as it isn’t a file that just gets copied over, it much be low-level written to the card starting from the first block. If you have a Windows machine, Win32DiskImager (IIRC the name) can do that.
But check and double-check and check again that you are writing to the correct device (and not your boot drive!) as it will replace everything on that device with the ISO image. That’s pretty much the entire point, but it would be understandably bad to do this to the wrong device by mistake… [pro-tip – remove all other USB flash drives and harddiscs, media cards, etc prior to writing the SD card]

Chris I downloaded NOOBS, the latest version of which, does not have RISC OS on it.

Is doesn’t have RISC OS?!?! I thought it was there, but needed to be downloaded “on the fly”.

Peter I intend watching the video tonight, so update tomorrow.

If that’s my video, then you don’t get the RISC OS image from the Pi site. You get it from here: https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi
It explains how to write an SD image.
Enjoy the retro look and feel. ;-)

if you ever need assistance planning a maintenance shutdown of a nuclear reactor, believe me it’s easy compared with this!

I have highlighted the important word.
It’s the unscheduled shutdowns that are more fun. Especially if you find yourself in a Fukushima Paradox . . . namely, not only has every failsafe and backup just failed – but you’ve just undergone a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami so you’re pretty much on your own – and the reactor is still critical¹ – now what?
[Chernobyl, by comparison, was more like “let’s rev this thing a little harder and see what happens”]

Suffice to say, installing RISC OS might be harder, but it is less prone to spectacular failure.² ;-)

¹ Small side note – “going critical” is the expression used to mean, well, that it is a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. It always makes me giggle when these low budget action movies have the characters running around screaming about the reactor “going critical”. I’m sorry, exactly how excited am I supposed to be about a reactor that is operating normally?!?
Oh, wait, you mean it is going to blow up and kill everybody in a five billion mile radius? Well, then that’s not the phrase you want. But don’t worry, you’re a character in an action movie – you’ll be saved by the square jawed hero going into the fuel rod containment chamber in normal clothes and moving the rods away from each other with his bare hands so they can cool down automatically. Oh, and hero will be just fine. He might even make up with his estranged wife and annoying-as-hell teenage daughter…

² Nuclear power is fairly safe, and I think the deaths from nuclear related reasons would be tiddly compared to the deaths related to activities such as coal extraction. However, when nuclear goes wrong, it does so in style. I see the TV news recently did this whole “OH NO!” article on Fukushima radiation being detected in…what was it? Seattle? This from the country that performed 928 nuclear tests in Nevada, with the mushroom clouds being tourist attractions in Las Vegas (!) and the fallout of the above-ground tests (about 100) generally dumping itself on southern Utah (and spreading northeast to eventually cover the majority of the US (!!!)).. Oh, and the Americans, always ready to “do it bigger and better” devised “Operation Plowshare” which was designed to use nuclear explosions to perform tasks such as making canals and artificial bays, though it never went further than a few tests. No, seriously. Go Wiki it. There’s not enough WTF in the world to express disbelief that this idea was actually taken seriously in the first place. It’s like “sure, we can make you a beautiful big lagoon, but it will be uninhabitable for the next … oh… couple of years, give or take a few tens of thousands.”
And today they’re worried about Fukishima. Phweeeeeeee…

Cheers Rick, i know what you mean about the whole ‘going critical thing’
fixing things and staying within ‘Tech Specs’ is our challenge,
but when we say ‘Nuclear Safety is our overriding priority’ you better believe it.
i do maintenance, refuelling and forced outage planning, so on the unplanned stuff it’s walk in the next morning and map a safe route back to clean carbon free generation.
i would never want a Fukishima event in the UK, we should never forget, the learning we have had from their pain, is immense and the bravery and dedication of their staff should never be underestimated.
But, back on topic :)
i understand what you say about the image file needing to be expanded to a memory card, but cannot find a tool to carry it out. disk imager wants to write to a DVD, with no option to change the destination.
double checked the NOOBS download, raspbian or scratch is all that is available on unpacking to the Pi?
i just read the ? bit on the ‘14’ image link doh!
give it ago later thanks!

NOOBS now only contains Raspian in the initial download but it has options to download RISC OS and/or the various other OS’s that used to be included in the larger NOOBS image.
Hence my
1. Download NOOBS from raspberrypi.org and follow the instructions for installing RISC OS

if you ever need assistance planning a maintenance shutdown of a nuclear reactor….

You can never have too many friends who know how to shutdown a nuclear reactor. So handy.

I am not worthy to join such an elite group!!
I mastered, or at least managed to get by with Ferantti FIDSABC "an obscure 24 bit code’
I could keep up in 6800 or Z80 machine code
But at 53 I’m admitting defeat.
Downloaded NOOBS from the Ras.org site, not a sign of RISC OS!
Today I threaded my way through the requirements for a back up supplies board outage, piece of piss, compared to this!
I’m going to swap some folding, for an Sd card pre-loaded.
Good night Peeps!

Reading the Pi Forums it seems installing RISC OS via NOOBS isn’t as straightforward as I thought it was.
It is though explained in this thread
Scroll down to:by idontlikelinux » Mon Dec 29, 2014 1:00 am

Anyone found authoritative documentation for NOOBS that explains installing other OS’s?

What a pain in the posterior quarters.
Better to get some sort of direct SD writer and dump an image on it.

I think one problem is that people are used to copying files onto other media, but they are NOT used to putting an image onto another medium – and that’s what they have to do.

I thought it was easy – NOOBS just downloads it and installs it on the card. NOOBS offers the installed OS’s but also offers selection of the OS’s not on the card and just fetches them.

I think it might only offer to download extra’s OS’s if you are already online.