Broken RO6

Help!

I’ve just re-installed the RO6 system on to a cleaned HDD, and now when the RiscPC boots it’s saying “Softload image not found or invalid” and booting back to RO4.

I’ve tried the install again, with the same result.

It’s on a RiscPC, RO4.03

I do have a backup of the old !Boot, but can’t find where the RO6 image ‘lives’. Any suggestions, please? Anyone?

Cheers,
Ruth

Not wishing to be unkind, but this is not the place to ask about RO6, the abandoned product of another company, the commercial RISC OS Limited who caused schism in the RISC OS world by petty infighting (IMHO).

This site and its lists are to do with the open-sourced RISCOS 5 from Castle Technology which is continuing to be developed by an active community.

Perhaps the Comp.Sys.Acorn newsgroups might be a more relevant place, where there are people who have invested heavily in ROL products and still care.

On the other hand, upgrading to RO5 might be a possibility. Versions of RO5 exist for the RPC and Iyonix as well as the later machines. Look here

RO6 is a dead end, a ‘cul de sac’, and is therefore only of historical interest.

Have I been too unkind?

Have I been too unkind?

Yes, John, you have. You are perpetuating the schism.

I think we’d all be better off if we let bygones be bygones, and look at what we can gain through cooperation.

Not wishing to be unkind, but this is not the place to ask about RO6,

I’d modify that statement and say that although some people here (not me) have experience of RO6 this isn’t the best place to ask. I’d recommend a question in the comp.sys.acorn.misc newsgroup.

However, it does sound as though Ruth totally wiped the hard disc of her RPC hence the complaint from the system about not finding the softloadable “ROM” that was part of the installation on the original RO6 install media.

Ruth, if you’ve lost that media then you’re on a hiding to nothing trying to re-install unless you contact Aaron Timbrell – see the RO6 pages

I’d agree with Dave, kicking at the users of RO6 hardly facilitates any move to this version.

Ruth, you might care to buy a Raspberry Pi2 and install RO5. It’s a small investment in new hardware and you might find you like what the developing OS is and can do.
There are features RO6 has that aren’t yet replicated in RO5.2x but then there are features that RO5.2x has that RO6 will never have.

Thanks, Steve for the voice of reason ;-)

Yes, I appreciate this isn’t the /best/ place to ask, but there are knowledgeable people here . . .

The reason I was re-installing RO6 was that I’ve sold the RiscPC and wanted to ensure the !Boot was nice and clean for the new owner. Only polite :-)

And yes – I’ve already got a Raspberry Pi2 up and running with RO5. It’s very nice, and the NutPi collection is fantastic! :-)

Moving-on, I resorted to installing a clean RO4 !Boot, then installing RO6 over that. It worked! (Well, after I configured it to softload. Surely it should have done this automatically?!? Maybe this is one of the reasons I gave-up on RO6!)

Nice to be back in the RO world – but let’s try to keep it positive eh?! We all know about the history of RO4/5/6 and the messy rivalries and fall-outs. The emergence of Raspberry Pis, Pandaboards, Wandboards etc. is potentially a fresh start for RISC OS :-)

Yes, I appreciate this isn’t the /best/ place to ask, but there are knowledgeable people here . . .

Indeed there are, I’ve met some of them in real life.

Moving-on, I resorted to installing a clean RO4 !Boot, then installing RO6 over that. It worked! (Well, after I configured it to softload. Surely it should have done this automatically?!? Maybe this is one of the reasons I gave-up on RO6!)

Or perhaps that it was only of use on old hardware and had no development for years and no prospects of any in the future?
The former will be more and more significant as time goes on and the old hardware dies.

I do have a backup of the old !Boot, but can’t find where the RO6 image ‘lives’.

I see the matter is now sorted but for completeness the softload OS6 ROM image lives in !Boot.Softload in the OS6 !Boot, or !Boot.SelectBoot.Softload if running in OS4.

the softload OS6 ROM image lives in !Boot.Softload in the OS6 !Boot

akin to the softload setup for RO5 ROMs for IOMD

Been out in the garden. http://youtu.be/v_44nbCDMpo

Not wishing to be unkind, but this is not the place to ask about RO6,

No, this isn’t really the place to ask – but it doesn’t hurt to attempt to help if the answer is known. While there are differences, there are also similarities.

the abandoned product of another company,

Indeed. Technically, any issue to do with RISC OS 4/Select/Adjust/etc is nothing to do with us.
Untechnically, the person leaving behind the dead OS and the dying hardware may be a potential future RISC OS 5 user. Or not.

who caused schism in the RISC OS world by petty infighting (IMHO).

I’m sure the supporters of the other side of the argument would say the exact same thing in reverse. Everybody acted like a bunch of spoilt toddlers. Maybe it is time to just get the hell over it.
For better, worse, or something in between – the two companies took very divergent paths. ROLtd concentrated on RISC OS in its current form on 26 bit hardware, while Castle by necessity took RISC OS into the 32 bit realm. ROLtd would surely have been turning over cash sooner and with less effort, but the long term effect of staying in the 26 bit world is now fairly clear. The one 32 bit version was never finished and the entire branch is effectively dead.
Whether one likes Castle or not, the dual decisions of going 32 bit and opening up the source are why RISC OS is available today on current hardware. When the older machines lose their digital ghosts, RISC OS 5 is the only choice that remains short of buying a reconditioned machine from CJE and deferring the inevitable for a while longer.

Really…

Get over it and work towards enhancing RISC OS 5. At this exact moment in time, it’s the only one we have.

On the other hand, upgrading to RO5 might be a possibility.

Or, in years to come, perhaps a necessity to stay in the RISC OS world?

Don’t get me wrong, Gerph’s rambles make depressing-as-hell reading. So much work. So many ideas. But, alas, all in a closed branch that has reached the end of the line, save for emulation. It is a tragically sad end, but that’s just how it is.

Have I been too unkind?

That you bookend your message with these words suggests that, maybe, yes. The time to suggest this, perhaps, is when a RISC OS 4/6 user is asking many really esoteric questions regarding that platform – as I recently suggested to ivelegacy ron why !PC won’t work on RISC OS 4.mumble – show me the source, I could try to see why the serial port isn’t working…otherwise it is just guesswork.

Perhaps it might be gentler to say that given the dumb history (the schism), there is a real possibility that some of the primary people here that might be able to help do not actually own any machine with RISC OS 4 (etc) [me, for example, I went from 3.70 to 5.19] and as such, the person asking the question may find better answers at <blah blah newsgroup mailing list etc>.
Something gentler that you don’t need to feel the need to tentatively apologise for. Twice.

akin to the softload setup for RO5 ROMs for IOMD

$.!Boot.Choices.Boot.PreDesk.!!Softload is where RISC OS 5 lives.

$.!Softload is where RISC OS 5 lives.

Really? Have you looked in a downloaded zip file of the IOMD ROM?

The Tungsten archive is laid out as you describe. :P

Really? Have you looked in a downloaded zip file of the IOMD ROM?

I thought it was from my (failed) attempts to get RO5 working on RedSquirrel. However, to be certain, prior to writing that I
downloaded IOMDHALDev.5.23 file and extracted it with EasyFTP (iPad). Following the directory structure is what gave me the above path.

BTW, interesting history lesson here → http://www.riscos.com/the_faqs/index.htm
Um. Yeah. Hic. Sure?

Um. Yeah. Hic. Sure?

I was looking at the IOMD-soft.5.20.zip

On looking I note that the 5.22 follows the same pattern as the v5.21 and 5.23 dev archives.

History?
You know how they say history is written by the winners? It isn’t true.¹ Clearly what happens is only the winners version lives on for any great length of time is what they really mean. Of course these days anyone can put total tosh on line²
“That’s the brief story of RISC OS, it’s not complete, not everyone gets a namecheck but it’s all true and (mainly) in the right order.”
Right order? right order? Jeez, where’s the incontinence pants? All true? Whoa! Call the crash team the laughing may be fatal.

Mind you winding back up my text a little this is one where I don’t think there was a winner, except possibly us. Would Castle have open sourced without the RO wars?

¹ neither is that text, but we know that
² Like the suggestion that the ROL 32 bit version existed even partially when RO5 appeared. Is the ROL 32 bit complete even now?

You know how they say history is written by the winners? It isn’t true.

History is usually written by the survivors. Whether or not they call themselves winners is a different story.

Of course these days anyone can put total tosh on line

Mmm, yes. That reminds me. I ought to fire up the PC and update my blog. Had an… interesting… conversation yesterday.

That’s the brief story of RISC OS,

Well. Yes. “By 1987 the Archimedes hardware ready, but RISC OS had not been completed. Acorn could not wait so the first Archimedes machines shipped with a simplified operating system, called Arthur, based on the completed parts of RISC OS.” Does he even know about ARX? There’s a transcript of the Paul Fellows talk on the ROUGOL site. I nearly wet myself laughing that the early Arthur was having boot failures because the ARM was kept running by latent power stored in the rotation of the fan being fed back into the circuitry during a power cycle. Winning anecdote!

“The Arthur ‘desktop’ wasn’t written in Assembler or C, instead it was written in 32bit BBC BASIC.” – not quite. The “demo” of how to use the desktop environment was written in BASIC. The Desktop was a module written in assembler. Only, back then, it didn’t multitask so it was just a garishly coloured demonstration.
When I was many years younger, I extracted the BASIC code and took it apart. Yes, I was bored.

I’ve just noticed, the year is out by one. It was 2014/01/27!

“By today’s standards RISC OS 2 is ugly and primitive” – all versions of RISC OS suffer this. Mom knows when I’m using RISC OS because it is “the outdated looking one”. She means it hasn’t got rounded windows, transparency, and all that rubbish. ;-)

“However in the real world the expensive Kinetic didn’t provide much extra performance. Cheaper overclocked Revision T StrongARM chips running at 287 Mhz provided nearly the same performance at one third the cost.” – I think the truth is that the benefits depend greatly on what you are doing. The RiscPC’s memory bus is a pitiful 16MHz, the Kinetic used a 66MHz memory bus. On raw data transfers you’re looking at a speed increase of over 4x, and that’s CPU to memory, not via cache. The downside is the memory was disassociated from the system memory bus so podule access was slow and podule DMA didn’t work at all. The end result? I think it depends greatly on what you use the machine for.

“and finally Castle Technology all ceased trading.” – really? So who is licencing RISC OS 5?

“We own the exclusive rights to RISC OS versions 4.02 to RISC OS 6.20. We also have exclusive rights to develop these versions of RISC OS.” – I know I suffer from dyscalculia and my grasp of maths is somewhere between Sucks and Fail – but doesn’t 5 come between 4 and 6? That “to” implies an inclusive range. Has he claimed “exclusive” copyright on RISC OS 5?

I’m not going to comment on the timeline or the other…stuff. Call that homework. ;-) I have a bowl of tagliatelle in mind.

Would Castle have open sourced without the RO wars?

Yes, I believe so. As there is an interested community, it is a win-win for them. The OS is kept alive, ported to new hardware, meets new challenges, and is bugfixed along the way. It benefits RISC OS, it benefits Castle, it benefits us.
If one no longer plans to be directly involved in the management and upkeep of the software¹, then this leaves only three options:

1. Find somebody else to take it on.
2. Just abandon it. It’s history. It’s gone.
3. Release it to the world, hope the users carry it forward.

If you’d like examples, look no further than RISC OS 5 vs… well… any other incarnation. Don’t you think people used to Select on their RiscPC mightn’t enjoy having it on a Pi? Who is going to do that then? Oh, that’s right. Nobody. Well, there’s your answer then.

Funny thing is, if the source to Select was available (whole or partial) with a similar/compatible licence, I have a feeling that the logical end result would be a RISC OS 7 which would contain the best of both versions on new hardware. That is when we could say there was a winner – it would be all of us. For now, we might not have won so much as didn’t lose.

That said, I asked a while back what features of Select people thought was missing from RISC OS 5. Did we get anywhere with that? I think somebody said Filer keyboard shortcuts. There was a bounty for that. It expired.
Was that the only thing or did I miss a post or two? I’ll ask this in a new topic.

¹ This applies to a lot of software, not just operating systems.

I’m not going to comment on the timeline or the other…stuff.

Some of which you already quoted. I thought I’d just summarise with the phrase " put total tosh on line"
Bear in mind that only one entity can make an official complaint about incorrect content and I’m not sure they care about inconsistent ramblings.

That said, I asked a while back what features of Select people thought was missing from RISC OS 5. Did we get anywhere with that? I think somebody said Filer keyboard shortcuts.

I seem to recall the discussion on that topic came to the conclusion that QuickFiler from Martin Avison did what people wanted and that Martin would be more than happy to have the feature built in and save a bit of maintenance effort.
Dave (only mildly grumpy) noted that QuickFiler on RO6 had a couple of clashes with the RO6 setup so a uniform key shortcut across all versions wasn’t possible at present.

I looked at the ROL version key shortcuts and they seem quirky and not overly intuitive so it would nice to help them out.

“and finally Castle Technology all ceased trading.” – really? So who is licencing RISC OS 5?

It’s in a section about hardware so presumably refers to the fact that Castle no longer sells the Iyonix etc. It’s not worded well, but I think that’s what it’s trying to say.

It’s not worded well, but I think that’s what it’s trying to say.

The cynic in me says it’s worded to mean many things with an opportunity to say you misinterpreted things if a dispute arises.
The casual uninformed reader always reads it as ROL were the only one left and have undisputed rights. I know, I’ve asked people to read it and explain.

Why it can’t be worded to state that there was a dispute and that by the end one party had open sourced the code and the other went bust and the remnant product of the second party was bought by 3QD to use in their emulated machine is beyond me.

Still, moving back to more relevant things:- perhaps someone with access to RO6 and RO5 could put together the comparison table I mentioned¹. If we can eliminate the historical feature differences then RO 5.2x is effectively 6 plus and people have no reason to remain with the old.

¹ In the other thread.

Still, moving back to more relevant things:- perhaps someone with access to RO6 and RO5 could put together the comparison table I mentioned1. If we can eliminate the historical feature differences then RO 5.2x is effectively 6 plus and people have no reason to remain with the old.

Two bounties are possible here:
1/ Massive update of toolbox, with a version that will work on all OSes.
2/ Many small improvements, as available on ROS 6.

ROS 5 focuses on important things. But smaller ‘non core’ updates could be fun too. It could be provided – for one year or two – as a commercial update (permitted by Castle’s licence). I would be very happy to pay for a feature pack. Made by ROOL ou ROL.

Ruth, ‘softload image not found’ suggests it is finding the softloader app, but not the ROM image. Can you check that you can find the ROM image somewhere near/inside the ! Softload app?

On the subject of 5 v 6, ROL had a page describing the RO 6 feature list, so that’s a useful starting point for comparison.

As far as the appropriateness of this forum for RO6 questions, I can think of the following places on the internet for RISC OS discussions:

Here
comp.sys.acorn.* newsgroups
iconbar.com
stardot.org.uk
raspberrypi forum

stardot is mostly ‘retro’, raspberrypi is mostly aimed at that platform (mostly newbies to RISC OS), newsgroups aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, which leaves here and Iconbar as available web forums. I have no particular opinion which is ‘better’, but suggest that there’s no reason for such questions to be off-topic here – they’re more on-topic than many of the other threads.

Thanks, Theo and everyone else who has helped.

The RiscPC in question has now found a new home. Its new carer has been using RISC OS for many years, but hasn’t kept-up with recent developments.

I showed him my Raspberry Pi and told him about ROOL. That’s potentially at least one more convert to the 32-bit world :-)

As for my RO plans – I am currently “Virtual” plus a Raspberry Pi, and have ‘loose’ plans for getting new, dedicated hardware soon…

… and if my lottery numbers come-up, maybe a large contribution to RO development :-)

TTFN!