Betrayed by PackMan

I got RISC OS running nicely on the RPi. Then, while using PackMan I inadvertently installed newer versions of the RaspberryPi-Firmware (1031.175826-1) and RaspberryPi-ROM (1101.234144-1), I think. Now when I switch on I get the message “Not enough stack to call filing system”. Clicking “Cancel” the boot process continues, but the filer is now slow.

I am pretty sure that it was this update that is responsible, and I presume that it is the contents of !Boot.Loader that it updated. How do I revert to the status quo ante without loosing all the work I have put in to get the system running as I want it?
Is there somwhere on the ROOL site whence I can download a clean !Boot.Loader directory? Or is there a way of extracting them from the ro519-rc6-1876M.img file on my Windows XP machine that I used with Win32DiskImager to write to the SD card when I first got RISC OS going on the RPi?

If you can see the RISC OS part of the SD card from your Windows XP machine and had previously installed the firmware from PackMan you may be able to extract the old version from !Boot.Resources.!Packages.Cache. I don’t have a RPi so this is all guesswork.

I have now done a clean reload of the RISCOS distro and to my amazement ShareFS is there. I can see the Iyonix icon on the RPi, but not the RPi on the Iyonix. I must have omitted something.

As a matter of interest, must !Boot.Loader be treated as readonly on the RPi? I discovered that putting in
the line “disable_overscan=1” got rid of the black border but I am not sure whether writing to !Boot.Loader.CONFIG/TXT might not have been responsible for the “not enough stack to start filer” message I kept getting.

SDFS::RISCOSpi.$.!Boot.Loader is actually a FAT32 partition, which should be visible from within Windows if you image another SD card or USB drive with the RC6 image.

I have now done a clean reload of the RISCOS distro and to my amazement ShareFS is there. I can see the Iyonix icon on the RPi, but not the RPi on the Iyonix. I must have omitted something.

You need to share the drive.
For a one off, open a task window and type “Share SDFS::RISCOSpi.$ Raspi” press return.
Raspi can be changed to whatever you wish, as long as its unique on the network.
The same command can be put into an Obey file, and if ShareFS is always enabled, saved to !Boot.Choices.Boot.Tasks so it runs at boot.

Thanks, that did the trick. In fact I now have three devices, Iyonix, RPi and VRPC on a notebook all communicating via Access. Very convenient.

Have made a couple of packages using !PackIt. This seems to have some bugs – it won’t accept a detailed description – dragging a text file onto this window seems to fail. Having created a couple of packages (which end up as binary files of type ‘text’ – slightly odd but it works) all you have to do is to drag them onto the !PackMan iconbar icon and they then appear as an option. This is very clever – the files are automatically uploaded. (I turned off the Pi and reloaded the catalogue from the server and the new packages (MakeDraw and CountDown) are there).

The places you can specify for the binary to be downloaded to are a bit limited. It would have been nice to have ‘$.Utilities’ as an option.

Well done whoever programmed this – the automatic uploading is brilliant!

Have made a couple of packages using !PackIt. This seems to have some bugs – it won’t accept a detailed description – dragging a text file onto this window seems to fail.

I think this is because the TextArea toolbox object from ROOL doesn’t support the automatic load flag. I set the flags in the code to allow this, and it worked when I used the free ROL toolbox download on RISC OS 4.0.2. I don’t suppose anyone has a list of what is and isn’t supported in the various toolbox modules.

It’s always worth sending me an email (address in PackIt Help) with any bugs or problems you find.

Well done whoever programmed this – the automatic uploading is brilliant!

I programmed it, but unfortunately it doesn’t do automatic uploading, it just caches the ones you dragged to the iconbar locally.

t’s always worth sending me an email (address in PackIt Help) with any bugs or problems you find.

I’ll do that.

Was the problem with the updates in the first post ever resolved? Is it safe to install the updates or not?

I did install them. All works as expected.