First post from my Pi Zero!

All I see is a static image with a slightly incorrect quote from Aliens.

That’s what I get on the iPad.
Kind of defies belief that somebody would register a domain just to provide a nuke picture….and then get the quote wrong.

Vince, thanks for the read. I didn’t know about that page. I still can’t grasp why an old version of !PackMan and the most recent version both have a fairly similar Paths file yet the new version puts everything in the Apps subdirectory. Is there something I’m overlooking?

Remember my recent rant about the USB power cables with the switch that I purchased. I decided to keep using them anyway, just not for the Pi 3. Both behave in interesting yet different ways now. The one connected to my Pi Zero no longer turns off. Remember these cables are essentially (Chinese) lamp cables with a USB A on one end and a USB Micro on the other. The other one… well I just don’t know. When it’s plugged into my modified switched hub that I use for power the associated LED glows faintly even with the switch off. This is something I can’t quite grasp and therefore choose to ignore until the magic smoke escapes from something.

I just tried an ssh session in !Nettle and it worked fine. When did this happen?!?

Where did you get your copy of putty tools from?
It was nice to troubleshoot the NAS from RISC OS instead of messing about with another computer too just for ssh.

I have just got a Pi zero.

It will boot into Linux fine, so isn’t broken.

But my latest download ROM (curiously still dated 26-Oct-16, tho’ actually 11-Nov-16) with the firmware I am using successfully on my RPi 2 with a setting arm_freq=1000 does not boot, but flashes the LED 7 times then gives a longer dwell on time 8.

Any clues?

The card works fine on the RPi 2.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=58151

This has the Error ACT LED patterns. It could either be 7 flashes with ??? going on after or 8 flashes.

7: kernel.img not found.
8: SDRAM not recognised. Newer bootcode.bin / start.elf needed or bad RAM.

So I guess first comment out the arm_freq line. It shouldn’t be needed.

So the RISC OS image boots on the Pi 2 but not the Zero? If you haven’t done it, go to the GitHub page for the Raspberry Pi firmware to download and copy the latest versions of the firmware files. If you are using one of the stock RISC OS images with just a new ROM it probably won’t boot on a Zero becase the RPi firmware is too old to support the Zero.

I didn’t think anyone had seen this post!

I have now had it working! The problem was in the config file as you suggest, and then the load of the keyboard and mouse, which I had hanging off a small unpowered hub, was too great and I was left with a part-booted m/c with a non-working mouse and kbd.

All finally solved by connecting to a powered hub like I normally use – so I’ve ordered 3 more.

The frequency now happily switches between 700 and 1000 MHz according to CPUFreq.

Now I just have to find which parts of my existing boot sequence are causing the stalls, but I’ve shelved that for the moment, as my two new Arm 7 Pi2 Bs have arrived – a reserve stock as they’re now discontinued and I’m so happy with my present one!

Thanks for the help.

When I saw it I replied. I haven’t been around much lately. On the subject of hubs. The Raspberry Pi, especially the Zero is really picky about what hub it uses. I struggled for ages, and discovered that certain combinations of chipsets, high and low speed USB devices cause issues that can’t be dealt with. Not sure if it’s the USB OTG chipset or access to information on it which is at the heart of the issue.

I was using a USB card reader / 3 port hub for ages on my Zero because it was the only thing that I had that worked with it properly. Now I’m using that Ethernet / 3 port hub I mentioned at the start of this thread which works fine too on my Zero. I actually don’t have external power to it either and it still works fine.

I wish I knew what was going on over there. I found the Zero works fine now with just recent Pi firmware, RISC OS ROM, and ZeroPain.
Looking at my config.txt there is very little of interest. Just some display config stuff and these:

ramfsfile=CMOS
ramfsaddr=0x508000

For my Pi Zero, I just used a generic powered USB hub. One port powered the PiZ, one port powered the SD card reader, and the HDMI to VGA adaptor was self powered. I run OSMC on it, for when I can’t justify a 200W draw to watch videos.
One day I’ll get myself an MPEG-2 licence so I can plug in my DVD writer and watch DVDs.

To make the initial CMOS file, which lives in the “Loader” file
you need to use the following -

*SaveCMOS !Boot.Loader.CMOS

for loading onto the in use SD card

Or if you are attacking a card in a plug-in reader then -

*SaveCMOS SCSI:!Boot.Loader.CMOS

To make life simler for myself, ‘cos I keep poking around,
I have these two commands in ’Obey’ files that can just
be clicked on instead of having to open the command line
or a ‘Task’ window.

To make life simpler for myself, ‘cos I keep poking around, I have these two commands in ’Obey’ files that can just be clicked on instead of having to open the command line or a ‘Task’ window.

I have one in my RISC OS root directory called !OpenLoader:

| Open FAT partition
Filer_OpenDir <Boot$Dir>.Loader

I also have an obey file in the Loader directory so that I can just drop in the latest ROM called riscos directly from the archive and have it replace RISCOS/IMG, renaming that first to RISCOS/IMGold in case I need to revert. I call that file “UpGrade”.

Saves a bit of messing about!

That’s a good idea.

I’m just dealing with some of the aftermath of being sick. I couldn’t work out why the PC has been so messed up. Apparently I changed the architecture for “apt” to armhf. Undid all of that, removed some weird repositories and did an update and it seems to be working a bit better now. Moral is I shouldn’t touch things when sick.
As usual, typed using the Pi Zero in RISC OS.

There’s really nowhere to put this so here it goes.
Yesterday I purchased a 512MB Orange Pi Zero. I liked that it had the USB, Audio etc on a header because it could go in a custom case. However lacking the powers of observation I failed to notice it doesn’t have an HDMI port. Analog video can be connected via the header but that’s it. No big deal. It will get to be the NAS freeing up whatever other device is devoted to that duty.

The moral is: Never assume.

The Orange Pi Zero I ordered finally arrived. Setup with a daily build of Armbian with a current mainline kernel was painless. I got the USB HDD set up and SMB, NFS and DLNA set up with no issue.

I used RISC OS to test NFS. So far it seems more stable and waaaaaaay faster than on the Raspberry Pi. I can access my RISC OS projects again via network drive without it slowing to a crawl, or dropping out for no apparent reason. I actually haven’t been able to access it at all for the last couple of weeks for no apparent reason.

A nice surprise on the Orange Pi Zero I received is it has an SPI Flash ROM installed on it which is apparently an option. used for bootloaders.

The Orange Pi Zero I ordered finally arrived. Setup with a daily build of Armbian with a current mainline kernel was painless.

If you have a spare MicroSD card, have a look at the dietpi distro for it. It feels a lot faster to me.

I hadn’t heard of DietPi before. It looks interesting. I need to “audit” my *Pi MicroSD cards, because I’ve lost track of what’s what.
Armbian is working fine of the Orange Pi Zero. No issues. It only seems to be using 30 odd MB of RAM too while being a server. The reason for going for a mainline kernel instead of a legacy kernel is simply because it’s interesting and new. It worked better than the legacy kernel builds too, plus I have zero interest in the graphics chipset drivers because it’s headless.
It’s ticking along fine.

Happy New Year everyone.

The reason for going for a mainline kernel instead of a legacy kernel is simply because it’s interesting and new.

….and isn’t using legacy anything in a server these days pretty much asking for a kick in the you-know-what?

….and isn’t using legacy anything in a server these days pretty much asking for a kick in the you-know-what?

It is, but it’s only for a few network services around the home. For all the advances in compuing over the decades, one of the hardest things still is sharing a file!
Legacy proprietary code does nobody any favours. Sometimes it’s pretty unavoidable. I tried the mainline kernel on the Orange Pi PC. It was good for commandline only. It did however support the framebuffer and had a console at the right size in the native resolution for the monitor. It has been years since I’ve seen that. It was so nice.

The whole thing might seem a bit mundane. Perhaps it is. In the past I’ve spent more hours, days even fighting with SMB, NFS, DNS and DLNA than I want to remember. Everything actually worked first try as it should instead of not working for completely un-diagnosable reasons.

The xmas holidays are hell for me. No time for anything. This is the first time I’ve had RISC OS open long enough to do anything. I just tested compiling via NFS. It worked, and way, way faster than it has with any other *pi based server I’ve set up. I guess it doesn’t have that weird NFS issue I’ve been seeing where it slows down so badly that sometimes the service just fails.

Now I’ve got everything functional again, I’m going to find some time to remove somewhat salty comments from the rogpio code, shove a BSD license or something on it and upload it in it’s shaky state. I goofed something simple the last time I worked on the code. It compiles and runs without as much as a warning but something is a little flaky with it’s simple memory size based model detection.

While I’m rambling, is there any support for I2S DACs in RISC OS via a module or whatever? I’m guessing the answer is no. It’s just I still find it’s by far the easiest OS to access my music from via the network, and now I’ve messed around with the PiFi DAC+ on the RPi3, I think it’d be nice to get some kind of DAC board for the RPi Zero that I use for RISC OS.
Not going to lie, I was very pleasantly surprised by Volumio. It was a breeze to set up, although I think I overthought the DAC configuration and did it manually. I didn’t realise it had a configuration menu in the Web UI.

I’ve rambled enough for now. Things to do!

First post from my Pi Zero using a home built kernel!

Not really exciting, but it is for me. I’ve been trying for days to do it. The OMAP 3 and 4 kernels would build but not BCM2835. No matter what I did it would absolutely loseit about missing files or files it can’t open.
The solution ended up being to download a new tarball. The last one may have been in transition when it was generated or something.

I told myself I wouldn’t try progressing on a kernel port until I got the one for the RPi working. It’s done now.

Incidentally, since I started playing with building kernels, the restart button on the shutdown screen has started working properly for the first time ever instead of just locking with a low res “Cannot relocate memory” dialog. I cannot explain this. Not complaining.

Incidentally, since I started playing with building kernels, the restart button on the shutdown screen has started working properly for the first time ever instead of just locking with a low res “Cannot relocate memory” dialog. I cannot explain this. Not complaining.

I wish you (or anyone) could explain this! I have had it for some time, and it is a pest.

See the thread in October 2015 and many other posts!

“Cannot move memory” sorry. I just decided to reboot. It came up again. I hadn’t been fiddling with any toolchain stuff. I have to wonder if there’s a module that was getting loaded or something that was allowing the restart to work.

I found that having a CJE RTC board AND running !ScrHelp would bring this error repeatably. Either on its own did not.

I do have an CJE RTC board (which I have seen implicated before) but although I have !ScrHelp I only run it occasionally. And I get the error on every shutdown.

The only exotic thing !ScrHelp does is send messages to the GPU. It is possible that recent ROMS also do more in messaging. Or it is another app that does so. Only guesswork though…

Tristan: Do you have an RTC fitted when it errors?
Does it error ever without an RTC?