New User Experience ...
Marten Feldtmann (1811) 13 posts |
… please be not too angry with me. I read about the Raspberry Pi – then I read about Tim Roledge work to port Squeak to Risc OS again and then – over Christmas – I played several hours with RISC OS. I have never worked with it before and I am a totally new user. I have checked both available systems on the Pi: the Linux distribution and RISC OS. When playing around with Pi and Linux I noticed, that the machine is actually underpowered for Linux and a X-based GUI. The system does not feel snappy – BUT from the programmers with: you have everything, it looks pretty smart and is well known. E-Mail, Browsing – all the well known tools are available out of the box. Then I created a RISC OS image and started this one. The system itselfs feels much more snappier than Linux – actually I would say, that RISC OS is a very suitable OS for this machine. But then its getting difficult and I just want to summarize the points I noticed – not to smash any program, programmers – but just to tell, what the points are I noticed when working with this system.
These are just some points I have noticed, when playing two days with RISC OS. And to repeat myself. I get the feeling, that RISC OS could be the correct system for the Pi – but I get also the impression, that the people behind RISC OS (this can also be the complete “original” community) are more or less surprised about the success of the Pi and perhaps can not deliver a good answer to these questions. And again: No offense to any programmer or program. It just the personal feeling from a person working with RISC OS for the first time … |
Kevin (224) 322 posts |
You can delete the whole URL in NetSurf by using the CTRL key and U. F12 gets you to the command line, or Shift and F12 gets your a task window. You can get directly into BASIC by hitting F12 then typing *basic followed by the Returm key. |
Steve Fryatt (216) 2105 posts |
Time’s limited, so only some quick pointers (sorry)…
Ctrl-U will clear the text from any writable field on the desktop.
The cost of email clients pays for development, sadly. Messenger comes bundled with NutPi for £42, however: that’s not bad given what else you’re getting.
Ctrl-F12, or just F12 if you want the non-multitasking but more capable one. *Help will help you a bit; hitting Return at the prompt will get back to the desktop from the F12 shell. All shell commands start with a *, which is implied at the (Ctrl-)F12 prompt. eg. *Cat will list the contents of the current directory; *Dir
RemotePrinterFS, from Stefan Bellon I’m afraid that installation is a bit seat of the pants if you don’t like what you’ve found so far, but it does work.
LanManFS, which should be somewhere around the disc image (it’s part of RISC OS 5).
The copy of SparkFS that comes with RISC OS 5 and reads Zip files is read only AFAIK. There is a full R/W version, but it’s commercial.
Use a text editor (eg. StrongED, that comes with the Pi image IIRC) and save the file with a type of BASIC. Then just double-click to run it.
It’s a wee bit out of date (RISC OS on the Pi is still referred to as “experimental” in several places, for example), but WROCC have some info In particular there’s some info on versions history and hardware other than the Pi Comments on that stuff is welcome, as I’m one of the authors and will gladly try to make it more helpful/clearer/etc.
The ROOL (former Acorn) Norcroft C compiler, and the ARM GCC compiler. Each has its fan base: Norcroft is easiest for working on ROOL’s sources, as that’s what they’re set up for; GCC can be run on RISC OS or even on an x86-based Linux system to create RISC OS code.
However you like! Some people create a directory structure inside $.Public; some don’t. It’s up to you: maybe more so than on other systems.
Maybe more that the RISC OS community is small and mostly providing help “for fun” in our spare time. Feel free to ask questions, but please don’t be offended if it takes time to get answers. I haven’t got time to do your questions justice now, for example! |
Steve Pampling (1551) 8170 posts |
We totally agree the documentation is limited – the problem is the low number of people available to document anything. Some does exist: The top of every page on the forum has a tab/menu item labelled Documents, you could click on it :-) |
Raik (463) 2061 posts |
You can also use the old 3.7 manual. http://acorn.riscos.com/riscos3/37/37DiscArchive/manuals.zip Use a Browser. Netsurf and Phoenix works. Because the viewing applikation inside is not 32bit. |
Rick Murray (539) 13840 posts |
Yes. Linux is hardcore and needs hardware with oomph to run it.
Ah, the thing here is that Linux is the co-ordinated effort of thousands of people, plus various companies pouring resources (money, manpower, and expertise) into the system. You don’t think Unity was developed by some guy in his bedroom, do you? RISC OS, on the other hand, is a much smaller concern, with people adding what they can, a lot of it unpaid and in spare time. We’d all like to offer a polished “just does everything out of the box” solution, but that isn’t currently viable. You are, if you are a programmer, welcome to join in and cotribute!
…in a manner of speaking. We’re still lagging badly when it comes to scripting and Flash and the like. On the other hand, most of the usual attack vectors fall flat on their faces when confronted with RISC OS. :-)
Firstly, as others have pointed out, there is Our cut’n’paste protocol is currently different to that used by Windows and Linux; though I hope this will change in time as I find it jarring to switch between the two.
I’ll pass on this – my Pi is not connected to the router, so it has no networking stuff running.
Have you tried the command line ftp?
Free email requires somebody to write, support, and maintain free email. Sad reality is most people don’t. I have a sort-of email program that I wrote (and used myself) back circa Y2K when I was still living in the UK; however it may well fail on modern emails as it handled marked up email by throwing away the markup and keeping the text portion (I feel quite strongly about this), but I notice these days that some damn things (smartphones are BIG offenders) that emails sent out, even emails with plain ASCII, are base64 encoded.
The shell is per-machine, and does not really support the Unixy pipe thing. However coming from a Beeb/RISC OS background, I find the idea of daisy-chaining programs to get a task done to be a little weird. For a single-tasking shell, press
Did you not try the menus? The little Pi logo on the lower right, for instance?
…pass on this too, not set up a printer. Mine’s a Brother DCP-165C and I only print via Windows. I gave up on setting up a Linux printer driver when the instructions told me I’d be removing the entire print subsystem and installing something else, with something like ten pages of information. Life’s too short… [of course, it helps greatly that I use OvationPro on both RISC OS and Windows, so documents I write can be viewed, edited, and printed from either system as necessary]
LanManFS? Though, given my Pi isn’t networked, I just dump files onto a USB memory stick and move that between machines.
Yes. RISC OS has only recently seen the joys of packaged files. That is because for 90+% of applications, there’s no point having an installer. Installation details take a lot of words, but for most stuff, it goes like this:
Things don’t need to hardwire themselves into the system. Once the filer has “seen” an application (each time you power up), it is known to RISC OS. If this sounds like a bother, consider two things:
Yes, another subtle difference in metaphor. At least (unlike Windows), you will find RISC OS is consistent in whether a file is copied or moved.
One of the features of RISC OS – image files, where a file can behave as a directory. However, the version of SparkFS supplied is read-only (the read/write one is commercial) so the program was probably trying to save something into itself and failing.
The most bare-bones method possible: Press
Press
When you’ve seen enough, press It’s much nicer using an editor in the UI. Didn’t you look in the documents directory? There’s something like “first steps in programming” or somesuch there, that might be worth a read.
How do you mean “showing me results” ? Could you not load it, or did it not work, or what?
Crash course:
The disparity is because ROL (RISC OS Ltd) and Castle took RISC OS in two different directions in the post-Acorn years. ROL (one ‘O’) is responsible for RISC OS 4/Select/Adjust which was arguably RISC OS 3.7 with all the wishlist features added. Castle made RISC OS 5 which is a 32 bit version of RISC OS. It is much plainer than ROL’s, but works on 32 bit (newer) hardware. When Castle stopped making the Iyonix, the work on RISC OS eventually passed over to ROOL (RISC OS Open; two ’O’s).
I mention this (briefly) in the video I made today. Basically, if you don’t understand what that stuff means, leave well alone. However, to explain briefly – it is to do with how to handle loading from addresses that are not word aligned. Old ARMs had a consistantly eccentric behaviour. New ARMs actually do manage it. Or you can throw an exception. Frankly, I think unaligned loading was, is, and always will be a crazy way to synthesise a 16 bit value. We have a lot of pain today because somebody way-back-when was a smart-ass and taught the compiler how to do unaligned loads…
Yup. But this is global. You don’t want to know how many things I have looked at that spells out in detail the GPL, gives intructions on how to build it on a dozen different platforms, then omits the most vital of information – how to use the program!
NetSurf – didn’t the Welcome Guide load when you first started the Pi?
Not out of the box.
I think there’s a basic ftp client. Try typing
Norcroft/Acorn/Castle/ROOL’s DDE. It’s the official and (IMHO) most complete package – it’s the one used to build RISC OS itself, and it has a heritage right back to the dawn of ARM. There is also GCC that some people prefer. I have no experience with this (no point, I use the DDE).
Such as?
Yes and No. You are free to create directories and put your stuff in them. With the exception of system resources and settings that live within !Boot (don’t go poking around in there), RISC OS nor applications enforce NO arbitrary structure on where you save stuff. Feel free to create a directory called “MyStuff”, and inside that create “Documents” and “Pictures” and “CoolWebPages” and so on. Organise it as you would like it to be.
I think we’d need to get video playing sorted out first. When we can play MKVs and XviDs and the like, we’ll be on to something.
Hehe, you could be talking about the Pi Foundation themselves! I think they aimed at something like ten thousand units, and then waste products hit the ventilation devices when that lot sold out within mere seconds. But, guys, duh – a full ARM computer system to almost-rival the likes of the Beagle (etc) for only $35? Of course that would sell! ;-)
Part of the problem is a lack of resources. Sometimes I pose questions and get a little frustrated when the reply takes days, or never happens. But, on the other hand, I think I would rather the few experts that are around spend their time working on RISC OS instead of answering lots of questions. After all, time is limited, work on RISC OS stands to benefit us all. My question probably only benefits me.
That’s fine. It is useful to have an outsider’s view once in a while. Many of us are quite familiar with RISC OS (I’ve been using it since ’89 (or was it ’88?)) so it never really occurred to me that somebody might have trouble finding the command line. What I will leave you with is a note I want you to consider carefully: With that in mind – do not be afraid to click the middle mouse button all over the place. RISC OS does not pollute the screen with an always-visible menu bar. Instead, RISC OS offers you context-sensitive menus. Ones that change depending upon what you point at. So point at stuff, click the Menu (middle) mouse button, and see what’s there and what you can do. In fact, given that it is pretty simple to write the RISC OS image to an SD card… go wild, examine everything! Look around (but stay out of !Boot). Try stuff. The worst that can happen is you can trash some files or programs, so you just reimage the thing and… you know… don’t do whatever you did again. ;-) If you get stuck, or have more questions, post ‘em. Just be patient on replies. I know it is frustrating when you’re itching to progress, but we have real lives. Well… other people. I’m not so sure about me. My life seems to feel pretty unreal at times, but that’s a whole different topic! |
GavinWraith (26) 1563 posts |
Many browsers outside RISC OS combine http/https with ftp. The two protocols still need separate applications in RISC OS: NetSurf for http/https and FTPc for ftp. When it comes to the smtp protocol it is the same story. When people talk about “email” they are often conflating quite a few separate processes: 1) logging on to the email server and fetching what is ready to be fetched, 2) reading the messages into an application that will display them, save them in a database, let you respond or resend or whatever, 3) uploading prepared emails to the server for dispatch across the internet. I know each person has different ways of dealing with email, but maybe it would help if I described mine (on an Iyonix, but probably just the same on the Rpi). In other words, !POPstar does the fetching and uploading while !Messenger deals with the database (held by another application, !NewsDir, which you do not generally need to interact with) and the displaying and editing (and it does that by asking help from whatever text editor you have set up – in my case StrongED). My system may well be configured in a way that is quite different from how other people do things. The point is that my way nothing is automatic. If stuff is to be downloaded or uploaded then I do not want it sent until I give explicit permission. Having stuff like that happen behind my back makes me nervous. It is a similar story with news-servers. In that case an application !NewsHound plays the role of !POPstar. I know that software under Windows hides the background functioning of email and makes it appear simpler, but I appreciate being able to control those functions all separately. PS The applications mentioned were supplied free with my Iyonix just over a decade ago. I think they are freely available. |
Steve Fryatt (216) 2105 posts |
The Iyonix came with Messenger Lite, as a deal that Castle did with R-Comp to supply a cut-down version of the mail client. For the Pi, the closest is probably Messenger Pi, as part of the NutPi package. |
neil.r (1738) 66 posts |
I posted something similar over on the R-Pi forum a couple of weeks back, and had a few very helpful responses, which I’m very grateful for. Despite the initial frustrations I had, I decided to stick with RISC OS, and I’m really glad that I did. As a desktop operating system, it strikes me as being a perfect fit for the Pi with its small footprint and speed. Also, and I know this is a bit of an off-the-wall reason, but I also like the fact that it comes from Cambridge :) For an email client, !Messenger from the NutPi pack is very good. Fast, flexible, and easy to use. My only gripe with it is that it doesn’t support IMAP, but I know that I can buy an upgrade for this. Which I may well do when I’ve recovered from Christmas… !NetFetch does a good job as the MTA (actually it’s Hermes running behind the scenes, but !NetFetch isolates you from that to a large extent). I tried the RISC OS Thunderbird port, but didn’t have any luck with it. I should really give it another go and feed the errors back to the developers, else it’s never going to get any better. For programming, I’ve played with both gcc and the DDE. I’m more used to gcc, coming from a BSD background, but the RISC OS packaged version is quite a few years out of date now. I’ve been told that 4.7 can be built to run on RISC OS, but as the pi is my only machine at the moment, I dread to think how long it would take to cross-compile! I’ve played with the DDE, and to be fair, really need to get stuck in and try to familiarise myself with it further. It does several things very differently from gcc, and when presented with the learning curve I simply took the easy option and persevered with gcc instead. That said, I’ve also been thoroughly enjoying getting back into BASIC and using it for controlling the Pis GPIO pins thanks to the GPIO module. There is a bug in here where one of my boards is misidentified as a Rev 2 rather than Rev 1, which I really need to get to the bottom of. It doesn’t seem to affect anyone else, and the board in question is one of the very early ones, so it’s entirely possible that it’s the board misrepresenting itself. NetSurf is, well, OK. It works, for the most part. JavaScript is coming, I know. My big problem with with it crashing when trying to cut and paste text around in places like this. Hence for the most part I’ll borrow my children’s Win7 PC for any forms-based web stuff. It’s just less frustrating. For Samba shares, fire up !OmniClient – for me, it’s fantastically easy, and integrates nicely with the RISC OS desktop. I’m hoping one day for an update to Fat32FS that gives me a similar entry on the IconBar for any Fat32 file systems that are mounted. In short, I’m really happy that we have RISC OS on the Pi. And although I’m not much of a programmer (well, I can get Hello World running, which is a start) I’m keen to help out where I can with testing, documentation, or anything that doesn’t involve too much coding. Is there a list anywhere of things that need testing or requested user documentation? And again, thanks to everyone who has helped me with my questions so far. |
GavinWraith (26) 1563 posts |
If you are offering to provide feedback on the inadequacy of documentation, then as a newcomer to the OS with no axe to grind your comments could be very useful to me. For a long while now I have been peddling RiscLua, a dialect of the Lua programming language modified for RISC OS. You can download it, together with example programs, from http://www.wra1th.plus.com/lua/ . It has not so far been turned into a package. My intention is that it should be as easy to use as Basic, but should I be offering more tutorial material? |
Raik (463) 2061 posts |
I have try the lua-stuff. But I’m to stupid. It was a short test. I try the examples but RiscLua not work. I read the manual but not exactly. Because my bad english. I take a look inside because help not found the main.htm. I have seen that the !Runimage inside is a zero-byte-file. |
GavinWraith (26) 1563 posts |
The empty !RunImage file inside !lua is intentional. You need NetSurf to read the manual. Perhaps I should include a warning about that. !lua needs to be filer_booted (just doubleclick it) before you try any example programs – alternatively, if you put !lua in !Boot.Resource it will be filer_booted when you switch on. The quickest way of trying out a ‘print “hello world”’ after filer_booting !lua is to press CTRL-F12 to open a taskwindow, enter ‘lua’ at the * prompt, and then go ahead. |
Raik (463) 2061 posts |
Sorry. I have do so but I don’t know what the problem was yesterday. Is it possible I have to do a restart? |
Raik (463) 2061 posts |
Sorry. I have do so but I don’t know what the problem was yesterday. Is it possible I have to do a restart? |
Raik (463) 2061 posts |
Sorry. I have do so but I don’t know what the problem was yesterday. Is it possible I have to do a restart? |
GavinWraith (26) 1563 posts |
No. Especially useful is the Lua 5.2 reference manual which is all in one htnl file: !lua.doc.manual/html . |
Tim Rowledge (1742) 170 posts |
Actually that’s not entirely true, Rick. There is a cut/copy/paste protocol in RISC OS that is for inter-app editing and that works very like Windows/OS X/unix as well as (sometimes, if implemented properly) the drag/drop approach. The underlying api is extremely similar to that used by unix’s XWindows, as I found out when implementing it for Squeak. It involves a surprisingly complex negotiation between the requesting app (the place to paste to) and the source (the app with focus) and the Bank of England and, IIRC, a hot cup of tea kept at the Cambridge Computer Lab. The XWindows version is similar except for requiring a coffee at the MIT lab. |
Raik (463) 2061 posts |
@Gavin Wraith |
neil.r (1738) 66 posts |
Well, the good news is that as a newcomer to RISC OS and lua, it’s easy to get up and running. I’m currently doing my normal variants on Hello World and stuff, and all is well. The only problem I’m having is with absolua – at the moment I’m just getting an unrecognised file type error, and no standalone executable program. Although that’s probably just me doing something wrong, as I haven’t looked into it much. In terms of documentation, so far so good. Like I said, I’m only dabbling at the fringes right now, and haven’t found the documentation lacking so far. I’ll continue to hack around with it, and see if I get totally stuck at any point. |
Raik (463) 2061 posts |
Newcomer to RISC OS I’m not quite;-) My A5000 had this year 20. Anniversary. |
GavinWraith (26) 1563 posts |
Sorry about that. I had it too, and misinterpreted the problem. The updated version at http://www.wra1th.plus.com/lua/zip/absolua.zip should not give the unrecognized filetype error. However, it still only produces a file of filetype Data. You have to change that to Absolute by hand, at least until I find a way of doing it from within a wimp task. The error had been arising because the argument to the settype command did not yet exist. Filer commands are generally dodgy that way. Perhaps I should have made a simpler non-wimp tool. |
GavinWraith (26) 1563 posts |
New version on my website. It gets the filetype right and it first compiles the original into bytecodes. Its output’s pathname is just that of the input but with /exe appended. So, not so fancy, no toolbox stuff, but more robust, I hope. |
patric aristide (434) 418 posts |
Blimey, that was quick ;-) Personal New Year’s resolution: get to grips with Lua |
GavinWraith (26) 1563 posts |
Good for you. Do not forget, if you find explanations lacking or confusing come to me at once so that I can improve them. On the topic of the best way to get to grips with a new programming language, I have always believed in looking at small examples of runnable code and trying out minor modifications. That way suits my innate laziness because there is less text to be entered. It is a great shame that NetSurf does not yet support the CSS3 necessary for implementing tooltips on webpages. Being able to move the pointer over a particular word and have a bubble appear explaining the syntax can be a boon. In fact my RiscLua manual does have examples with tooltips, together with colour-coding to show which words are reserved, which are variable names that are up to you to choose, and so on. It would be very nice if StrongHelp had been given such a facility. |
Marko Oette (1828) 15 posts |
Took me some time to read trough all that… Most of the questions that Marten asked have been answered multiple times. Maybe there should be a wiki’ed FAQ for RISC OS beginners. I feel you will see more of them in the near future and they all will have similar questions. Well, I’m new to RISC OS too. I’ve read and seen alot of it on the net before. But with not having the hardware to run it, RISC OS was out of reach. I also ordered the NutPI from ROOL to see the “professional” software available. What stunned me most is that ‘Email’ discussion. Rick said: “It is useful to have an outsider’s view once in a while” and Neil, a newcomer as well perfectly explained how Email is working on RISC OS. Maybe I have used Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android etc. too much but I find that Email on RISC OS is more than cumbersome. You have to set up a mail fetcher and a mail sender and after that you have to set up the application (!Messenger) that actually uses those other two programs to get the mails in and out. That is like on UNIX 20 years ago. – Additionally the NetFetch supplied with the NutPI only supports POP3 (unsecured of course) and no IMAP. I have tried several (5) email providers to see if they still support unencrypted POP ending up with giving up on that topic. (I know that all these flaws shall have been addressed with the even more expansive Messenger version 7.) I see no use in writing a ‘new and free’ email client at all. Reasons are the same why Mozilla is dropping Thunderbird. For email I use the (GMail, GMX) web client. NetSurf runs it in plain HTML mode quite well and via HTTPS. SAMBA Access is quite important for newcomers coming from Windows. However: If RISC OS does good in running on the PI it will have a good chance in getting to new fame… |