Software testing help wanted for Raspberry Pi

RECYCLER
I may be missing it but neither Theo or Chris’s list seem to include a file Recycler. I would have thought that it would be very good to include one and have it active by default!
Do any of them trap for ‘filer’ file deletes?
CLIPBOARD
Also I don’t see IcnClipBrd in the list http://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/software/clipboard/
n.b. Not having the global clipboard supported in !Edit is one of the main reasons I haven’t yet moved to a RISC OS 5 machine as my main computer!

For those wondering about Andre’s comment about WAV files from MusicMan, I’d just add that this is connected to embedding track info in WAVs, and is the method employed by (spit) Windows Media Player (amongst others). Essentially various companies have adapted the more flexible elements of the WAV spec to add additional stuff, and we now support this, but many players assume a rigid WAV format, which prevents them from handling WMP-format WAVs. MusicMan can optionally use several different embedding formats in the WAV, but they all utilise the flexible “chunk” format of WAV files. As such, I’d definately wait for Andre’s updated version, as it means it’ll play a whole lot more WAV files, regardless of platform.

Also I don’t see IcnClipBrd in the list http://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/software/clipboard/

To avoid anyone having to do anything as complex as reading the documentation that comes with IcnClipBrd, Thomas put it into the public domain and so AFAIK it can be freely copied, distributed or whatever. I’d have no objection to it going into the distro and, unless anyone knows better, 0.16 is OK on modern hardware.

To clarify, the URL posted in the first post is not a wish list. It’s a set of instructions to the packaging system (namely PackMan, though RiscPkg should work too) as to what software is available and where it can find it. That software is in a specific format for PackMan to understand – it isn’t psychic, it can’t read the README installation instructions! Once software is in the form PackMan understands, it will take care of installing it automatically and remembering which files can from what package. This software is mostly offered for installation after the distro is released, though a few things will be shipped already installed and managed (mostly core modules that other things depend on).

I’ll happily accept other software into the repository to offer in this way, but it needs to be packaged. For simple apps it’s a case of taking PackIt (or install via the package manager!), dropping the app onto the PackIt icon, and filling in the boxes. For what the boxes mean, read the PackMan help or, if that’s unclear, the policy manual (see also Drobe articles here and here )

I don’t currently have an easy means for people to upload packages into the system, so for the moment if you package something it’s best to post it on a website and give me the URL. If you have a URL that won’t change when you update the package (ie packagename.zip not packagename0.12.zip) that’s best. (If your webserver allows symbolic links the best thing is for packagename.zip to be a symlink to packagename0.12.zip, then you can have both methods).

I’ve been packaging a few things, but currently there’s a back catalogue of broken packages (not ARMv7 etc) that I should probably fix first. So help packaging new things would be appreciated!

The deadline for shipping things with the distro itself is today, so anything you want to get in needs to get to ROOL asap.

The deadline for shipping things with the distro itself is today, so anything you want to get in needs to get to ROOL asap.

However, presumably this only applies to the contents of the disk. Packages can be updated at any time.

Yes, that’s right, packages can be updated at any time, though the new package list will only go out to people who do ‘update lists’ in PackMan* Indeed that’s the main interest in the packaging system – to provide ongoing support for distributions that are already shipped.

• One for the todo list, have PackMan say ‘your package list is XX days old, would you like to update?’

I’d add to that a wish for PackMan to flag newly added packages otherwise you don’t know what’s new and available to install.

Fillets-Ng doesn’t have dependencies for Fillets-Ng-Data and you can’t install them together due to conflicts between the packages.
Just installing Fillets-Ng and running it does nothing, which I suppose because the data isn’t there

The deadline was yesterday! Too late probably but here are the packages for the current version of DigitalCD and the related modules.

DigitalCD
DigitalCDModules

Flobopuyo – On install says !Sprites not found – works ok
Freeciv – Server Loads OK, Client on new game freezes
Fuse – OK (No roms to test)
Gemdropx – ok
glhack – starts splash screen then crashes
grep – ok
heroes – ok (small screen!)
home filer – ? not sure how it works yet
icebreaker – ok
infozip – ok
iperf – ok

The deadline was yesterday! Too late probably but here are the packages for the current version of DigitalCD and the related modules.

Personally, I think the default image should be as small as possible, with everything else managed by packman, so that’s not a bad thing in my opinion.

It would be nice if packman could have state save files, all the installed packages, which could be loaded to replace or merge with the current selection.

It would also be good if software authors when allowing an item to be packaged chose whether pre-loading it by the packager and duplication on a distro was covered or not.

(if version control were the priority then an author would probably say yes, but if it were to vet what it was used for, then the author would require separate permission.)

I had some bad experiences after a few days of installing the sound update. Not sure whether it was sound related though. The first message I got was “Filecore in use” and I lost access to the SD and USB stick (both filecore format). Then everything became unstable and crashed, even after a reboot.
Digital CD wouldn’t work at all then.
Since then I’ve reinstalled, and after getting annoyed at having no sound have put the latest ROM image and sound files from the latest hard disc.
Also I’ve put the latest DRender on too.
So far it’s good again, but I’m going to stop testing the packages and concentrate on coding.
One thing that is strange is that although I’ve removed all my CD’s Digital CD is still complaining about CD 0 on startup, just says Can’t handle CD 0.
And I hope the keyboard/mouse problems get fixed (keys randomly stick on, not often – seems to be mostly in netsurf, and the mouse will stop responding for about 10 seconds and go sluggish)

One thing that is strange is that although I’ve removed all my CD’s Digital CD is still complaining about CD 0 on startup, just says Can’t handle CD 0.

I get that on the BB if there is a CD drive configured, but it is not attached/powered up when DigitalCD is run (I use DigitalCD primarily for mp3s so external CD drive is rarely powered up).

It looks like the crashing was related to my “Soak testing” of my socket code.
I’m reaching the saturation point easily of my network as it only goes up to about 5-8MB/sec (connected via a powerline), but it causes severe errors in the OS.
I modified it to allow larger and longer soak testing, which caused the dreamplug server on the other end to hang, and then the OS presented a “HardDisc0 Not found” dialogue box and then a power cycle is needed.
It’s a fairly brutal test, so it’s not a suprise it caused these kind of problems to surface.

One for the todo list, have PackMan say ‘your package list is XX days old, would you like to update?’
This sounds like a good idea – I’ll add it to the PackMan TODO list!

I’d add to that a wish for PackMan to flag newly added packages otherwise you don’t know what’s new and available to install.
I’ve already had a request for this and am considering how to do it. As the packages don’t have an uploaded date, it would work from when new packages appeared in your local system lists.

My email address is in the PackMan help, so please feel free to email your suggestions to me directly to ensure I see them.

I don’t think either of these things is likely to appear soon, but they are now on my TODO list so have a good chance of appearing at some time.

Deep breath time… I’d like help from brave people testing a means of upgrading ROMs and firmware using PackMan.

Do not do this on an SD card you care about. If it goes wrong, it could render your SD card needing to be reformatted.

1. So, take an SD card with a RISC OS image you don’t mind trashing. Do the steps above to set up PackMan as mentioned in the first post.
2. Start PackMan, click the iconbar menu, Advanced→Sources
3. Add http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~atm26/ephemeral/rpipackages/pkg/autobuilt
4. Make sure ‘refresh package lists’ is ticked, and Save
5. Now, use PackMan to install the package called PackMan (it’s on the list). This step is really important. If you aren’t using the new PackMan 0.6.1 you will trash your FAT partition and your SD card will become unbootable.
6. Quit PackMan
7. Copy $.Apps.Admin.!PackMan.Resources.Paths to $.! Boot.Resources.!Packages.Paths
8. Start the fresh version of PackMan 0.6.1 which installed in $.Apps.Admin.!PackMan, not the one that came on the distro in $.Apps.!PackMan (maybe rename that one to avoid confusion)
9. Meanwhile, create a directory $.! Boot.Loader.old and move $.! Boot.Loader.start/elf, loader/bin, bootcode/bin, riscos/img into that directory (to keep them safe for later, if it breaks you may be able to fix the FAT partition from another non-RISC OS machine by moving these back into place)
10. Now install the two packages RaspberryPi-ROM and RaspberryPi-Firmware
11. You should now see those for files appear back again in $.!Boot.Loader
12. Take a very deep breath and reboot…

The firmware and ROM images are being built at 10.30am every day, so should pick up that day’s ROM image and upgrades to that will work. The firmware is built at the same time from the latest version on github, however I haven’t put in anything to scrape useful version numbering out of git (git numbers each commit with essentially a random number, so they aren’t in sequence). Any reinstall of the firmware package after ‘update lists’ should get the latest but they’re all numbered with the same package version so upgrading won’t work for the moment.

I’d appreciate feedback, as it would be good to have this as tested as possible before going into the official distro. I’m shortly going to be away for a week and won’t be able to do any heavy coding, but I’ll be reading this thread. Thanks!

I’ve just replaced my Raspberry Pi’s RISC OS image with the new one from today. All I get is a graduated colour screen, but no further progress. Do I need to update more files?

I’ve just replaced my Raspberry Pi’s RISC OS image with the new one from today. All I get is a graduated colour screen, but no further progress. Do I need to update more files?

That sounds like you need to update to the latest start.elf and similar files.

You can get them from https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master/boot

ALL OK!

(last post edited…)

All I get is a graduated colour screen

Despite being careful (or so I thought), I hadn’t named the new image as RISCOS.IMG

Now OK. Apologies for the noise.

I think that’s the modern equivalent of putting your RiscPC back together and wondering why it doesn’t work, only to realise you’ve left the processor card out :-D

That’s the sort of thing that packaging designed to avoid :-P

There’s an issue in DOSFS that filenames it renames need to be in upper case otherwise they get a MICROS~1 style 8.3 filename which the Broadcom bootloader can’t see. So worth a look if you get bootability problems. The packages shouldn’t suffer from this.

I want to try and test RPi RiscOS sound via HDMI to my Atrix Lapdock. I see from recent forum entries that sound was included in the development build sometime around 23-Aug-2012. However, when I tried a more recent build (around 29-Aug-2012) everything booted up OK, but the sound didn’t appear to be working.

Q. Is sound currently enabled in the current development builds ?

If not, then any idea when sound will be available (my understand from previous posts was that sound was working a while ago but was held back awaiting ‘clearance’ for licensing etc.) ?

Ralph

ps. Thanks for all the hard development work guys. Us mere ‘users’ appreciate all your effort :-)

Sound is currently enabled, but you’ll need an updated disc image for it to work (the BSD-licensed VCHIQ code that we were waiting for hasn’t come through yet, so for the time being we’re going with a GPL-licensed version. For legal reasons this can’t be linked with the ROM, so it’s currently softloaded instead).

See here for a note on which bits you need to grab from the hard disc image. It’s probably wise to grab just those bits instead of updating your entire disc image, as the disc image is currently in a state of flux and may not be fully working on any particular day.

Is it available anywhere without needing the whole disk image?