!Boot in ResourceFS

Now for my suggestion. We need a “hidden” directory […] that contains at least HForm and internet bits

You’re in luck! Since RISC OS 5.00 there’s Resources:$.Resources.Internet where you should find arp; ifconfig; ping; pong; checkmem; newfiler; sysctl which is a small enough set of emergency utils to get you locally networking.

No HForm admittedly, but I think if the ROM booted that far it should always be possible to get HForm onto the machine via FAT formatted USB stick (or floppy disc for pre-USB systems). If WAN was needed you’d need ‘route’ too, and you’d need WAN for your update over the internet wizard.

I’m surprised HOn and HOff are not built into BootUtils these days

You’re in luck again (or were too lazy to check!), the Hourglass module provides these. However, remember that this is a universal boot, so the disc copies must still be provided for earlier systems. Also, the disc based HOff is functionally different to the command of the same name – it waits until the desktop is idle before turning off the hourglass.

I installed completely clean boots on all my machines when required for 5.20.

The jump from 5.1x to 5.2x was always going to need surgery, and the opportunity was taken to chuck out an awful lot of rubbish that had collected since 1997 when UniBoot came out. Having made that clean break it means that in future (5.22 etc etc) it’ll be possible to offer a !Boot patch to upgrade automatically from one stable release to the next.

However, after that, every month or so, I did a ‘boot merge’ with the latest !Boot at the time. At some point something changed, or something was then left in !Boot that shouldn’t have been, because I was driven crazy with a number of apps suddenly failing to run

Yes, boot merge (unless a merge script is made by hand) doesn’t remove anything so it’s reasonably risky to just keep piling more and more copies on top of it. In the absence of a dedicated team of full time staff the bleeding edge does draw blood occasionally – be sure to have a backup strategy in place as the nightly builds have zero testing done on them.

We put the entire disc image into ResourceFS once – take a look at the OMAP3Live build here, and here.

Well, I’ve taken a look and just don’t understand what is going on. I was expecting it to be easy to add a directory ‘!Boot’ to ResourceFS at build time, just by holding what I wanted in a directory ‘!Boot’ and copying it somewhere into the source tree, perhaps adding a line to something to say it was there, and then just making the ROM. Possibly, even, sneaking it into wherever ResourceFS is being put togehter during build time (while the source is being cruched so that the builder doesn’t notice) so that when it makes the rom, there’s the bit I want in ResourceFS as well.

Unfortunately I haven’t found yet where ResourceFS is held while it is being built up to be able to sneak anything into there…

Any ideas please?

Also is there any limit on ROM size? I should be able to keep it below 20Mbytes.

We put the entire disc image into ResourceFS once – take a look at the OMAP3Live build here, and here.

Well, I’ve taken a look and just don’t understand what is going on.

Part of the problem there is that the OMAP3Live build relies on the LiveDisc component to inject a copy of the disc image into ResourceFS – but as that component was a bit of a hack I don’t think it was ever added to CVS.

Unfortunately I haven’t found yet where ResourceFS is held while it is being built up to be able to sneak anything into there…

castle.RiscOS.Sources.Internat.Messages.Processed, if memory serves.

Also is there any limit on ROM size? I should be able to keep it below 20Mbytes.

32MB is the hard limit. But you’ll also have to tweak the appropriate Env file (Env.ROOL.*) to set an appropriate ImageSize value (matching one of the available ones from castle.RiscOS.Sources.Programmer.HdrSrc.hdr.ImageSize – or creating your own if necessary). Note that you’ll need to do an export headers phase afterwards.

Since RISC OS 5 there’s Resources:$.Resources.Internet

Thanks for that – somehow it passed me by. I must get out a bit more and explore. This should definitely be in the User Guide.