New User Experience ...

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.

Welcome Marko,

As a new user what would you say your first five, ten and twenty questions were/are?

The answers would be the basis of a wiki FAQ.

Note: Even though many people round here have been using RISC OS since it first appeared there are still things we learn about some little corner of the OS.

Well, at first you should urge every newbie to read the above mentioned starters guide.

Without that you will not be able to handle RISC OS at all if you come from a PC/MAC. ;-)

Questions I had:

Q: How do I browse the web?
A: Start up “!NetSurf”, RISC OS default browser. If it was launched you will have the blue NetSurf Icon in the Icon Bar at the bottom left of your screen. Double click it to open a new window.

Q: How do I send email from RISC OS?
A: The easiest way is to use the web interface of your Email provider (GMail, GMX, …) using !NetSurf.
A2: There is a commercial Email Program called !Messenger which allows sending and receiving POP3/IMAP Email from within RISC OS.

Others in short:
- How do I change the Screen Resolution? (The PI launched in 16:9 full HD resolution and I have a 4:3 1280×1024 screen.)
- How can I customize the look and feel (Tell us something about tool sprites, backdrops (wallpapers), icon sets, Desktop fonts, Window & Menutextures etc.)
- Can I change the mouse cursor? (I’d like to use more modern one…)
- How do I connect to my [Windows/MAC/Linux] computer? (Omni / Samba / FTPc / Sunfish)
- Which file systems does RISC OS support (FAT32, NTFS, …?)
- How do I remove my thumb drive safely?
- How can I format my thumb drive, so that RISC OS is able to read it from within RISC OS?
- How do I compress something?
- What is SparkFS? Why read only? And how to use it? (Side note: I’d like to see the full version included. Really great thing! Bounty?)
- How do I make screenshots? (Side note: You should distribute the newest “!Snapper” 1.20 with RISC OS PI as this one can save JPEG. The one currently distributed only saves Sprites.)
- How do I convert Image Format X to [JPEG/TIFF/PNG/etc]
- What are Sprites? / What is the native RISC OS image Format?
- How can I change the network setup?
- I have a spare USB hard disk. How do I connect and use this on the PI/BEAGLE/RISC OS box?
- I want program !XYZ to execute on startup! (Eg. !WinSnap, !Alarm)
- How do I get a clock down the icon bar and how do I set this to run every time I boot the RISC OS box?
- I want to program! How do I get started? (Point us to the two good example books provided with the RPI distro.)

Just to name a few. I was able to answer all these on my own with a lot of searching.
But a central place would be pretty neat!

If you supply the WIKI I would contribute some questions and the known answers ;)

If you supply the WIKI I would contribute some questions and the known answers ;)

If you are logged in to post then:
https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/HomePage

The ROOL guys already have that one sorted, what they don’t have sorted is enthusiastic wiki writing manpower.

The edit link is at the bottom of the page. I think most people would agree that a FAQ should drop into the “RISC OS user documentation” section.

Two short additions to your info:
mail via Netsurf: May not work if the webmail portal requires javascript (see Netsurf test builds etc for Javascript development status.) http://www.netsurf-browser.org/downloads/riscos/
test builds link plus one hop: http://ci.netsurf-browser.org/builds/riscos/
Latest as of writing is: NetSurf-gcc-json-756.zip 01-Jan-2013 01:06

File compression: SparkFS is commercial (although David Pilling probably hasn’t made a great deal) there is also http://www.starfighter.acornarcade.com/mysite/utilities.htm#infozip.

Side note: You should distribute the newest “!Snapper” 1.20 with RISC OS PI as this one can save JPEG. The one currently distributed only saves Sprites.

Probably because 1.17 was the most recent when the Pi image was being set up. I am afraid I got a little sidetracked with a ‘non-existent’ bug, so only announced v. 1.20 a little before the festive season.

How do I convert Image Format X to [JPEG/TIFF/PNG/etc]

Watch this space. Snapper 1.20 already includes a command line utility to interconvert sprite/png/jpeg, although it is not documented. My next task is to put a wimp front end on to it. Is there much call to produce TIFF format? That might also be possible.

Guys, I gave my Wiki editing skills a little boost and set up the initial page.
Feel free to contribute ;-)

https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/RISC%20OS%20Beginners%20FAQ

I’ve linked it as Steve suggested.

@Chris: Not knowing your undocumented feature I was writing that with !ChangeFSI in mind ;-)
TIFF is a format that many (‘old skool’) graphics gurus use. Beware that TIFF itself is only a container.

Most of them are really good and worth the money. Others aren’t.

<grin>

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.

Ah, but there is no “one solution suits all”. I will give you two examples.

1. First up is the automatic initial sign-in. This is the part where you give your email address and the password, and the email client attempts to parse this to configure itself accordingly. Some services want my full email address as my signin name, some want only the part before the “@”, and my private email I sign in as something else entirely. Thunderbird gets the POP right half the time, but fails on contacting the SMTP server (Orange blocks all outbound, you must use the Orange server) so replies that “there was a problem” and gives up.
   Android… Hasn’t worked yet. Seems rather found of “no POP we can use, let’s just assume there is an IMAP” and messing that up (my personal server doesn’t even have IMAP!).
2. Now the big bugbear on Android. The system is obviously designed for rich people with near-unlimited bandwidth on a fast internet connection.
   My Motorola DEFY can with a “low bandwidth” option that turned off unnecessary things (like the RSS reader). It wouldn’t, however, disable fetching large emails. So if my friend sent me a few megabytes of pictures as an attachment, the mail reader would attempt to fetch this, in the background, on an EDGE network. It would often fail due to signal interruptions, so it would just try again. One night while I was at work, my phone burned through 70Mb of my 500Mb/month allocation without me touching anything. And no, the photos were not retrieved. When I found out, I stuck the thing in airplane mode until I went home and could pick ‘em up on WiFi.
   My Xperia Mini Pro is smarter. It won’t download attachments (any attachments) until you view the message. However, even so, there is no indication whether the missing element is a 4K marked up message, or a 20Mb photo.

The RISC OS method may seem somewhat less integrated, but it allows you to choose the best tool for the job. With my !Emily mail client, I first used !POP (for !POPStar was too heavyweight for what I wanted); and I later wrote and used my own fetcher/sender so I could have all the options I wanted. For instance, I would be happy if my phone would:

• Fetch anything under 80K; hold off on anything else.
• Tell me the size of messages that were not fetched. To retrieve a couple of hundred kilobytes on a slow network is a different proposition to retrieving dozens of megabytes.

Thankfully I find Thunderbird’s options are sufficient for my needs, so that integrated solution works well enough; but I will point out that my netbook’s configuration DOES come a cropper when I roam – for as I mentioned all of my outgoing goes via mail.orange.fr; only this is bounced if the network I am on is not orange!

I see no use in writing a ‘new and free’ email client at all. Reasons are the same why Mozilla is dropping Thunderbird.

That’s a shame if correct; for webmail is something I use only as a convenience.
My mother is stuck resolutely to Yahoo! Mail – I think she thinks that is what email is – and it keeps getting worse and worse with each new version. I mean, sure, they’ve added sexy cool icons and stuff, but it still can’t do something as simple as set itself up for the dimensions of a 1024×600 display (surely a dab of script would cater for that?). I myself have refused all requests to use the all-new yahoo mail so I get the old template. I wonder how long it’ll last for? Likewise, my access to Yahoo! is POP3, I wonder how long that will carry on for?

For email I use the (GMail, GMX) web client.

I must say, GMail’s Android app is possibly one of the most appallingly laid out apps Google has ever made. The whole metaphor makes no sense, it is a pain to try to work out what is going on half the time, I try to avoid it.

- How do I change the Screen Resolution? (The PI launched in 16:9 full HD resolution and I have a 4:3 1280×1024 screen.)

Temporarily, the little screen-thingy second icon from the right on the iconbar.
Permenantely (mental block on how to spell that word!), run the configuration utility, go to “Screen” and set it up there.

Watch my YouTube video on setting up RISC OS on a Pi. I cover how to get something working for those with TVs (where upon boot up, the full HD is unreadable gibberish). While you won’t want 800×600, the basic procedure is the same.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Y51qf8-Yo&feature=player_detailpage#t=295s

- How can I customize the look and feel (Tell us something about tool sprites, backdrops (wallpapers), icon sets, Desktop fonts, Window & Menutextures etc.)

Look around Configure. Specifically “Pinboard” and “Screen” and “Windows”.

- Can I change the mouse cursor? (I’d like to use more modern one…)

If you write a module to provide RISC OS with a new pointer…

- Which file systems does RISC OS support (FAT32, NTFS, …?)

Its own, and FAT. There’s an add-on for FAT32 support.
As far as I am aware, nothing (yet) for NTFS or extfs, etc.

- How do I remove my thumb drive safely?

Click MENU on the drive icon and dismount.
I do this twice. Not sure if you still need to, it was something to do with a bug on FAT floppies in RISC OS 3.10; that’s just stuck as a habit.

Though I notice RISC OS does not do a full dismount – when I “safely eject” a drive with an internal LED on the PC, the LED goes out when it is safe to remove the device; on RISC OS the LED stays on.

- How can I format my thumb drive, so that RISC OS is able to read it from within RISC OS?

You mean in a RISC OS format? Yes, HForm did it for me on a Beagle, I’d assume it’d be the same on a Pi.
http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20120518

- How do I compress something?

Buy the commercial version of SparkFS; or muck around with command-line applications.

- What is SparkFS? Why read only? And how to use it?

SparkFS opens a variety of archives (zip and such) and lets you access the contents as if it was just a regular directory.

Read only because it is a demo, but also really useful.

(Side note: I’d like to see the full version included. Really great thing! Bounty?)

The full version is part of the NutPi.

- How do I convert Image Format X to [JPEG/TIFF/PNG/etc]

Open question: Does JK’s Translator run on later ARM machines?

For JPEG, !ChangeFSI. It’s a little clumsy to use but it will make reasonably good JPEGs.

- What are Sprites? / What is the native RISC OS image Format?

Simple answer: A sprite is to RISC OS what a BMP is to Windows.

The primary difference is that a spritefile can contain multiple sprites. And I don’t mean like the BMP multiple-resolutions-of-the-same-thing idea, I mean completely different sprites which can be different sizes, colour depths, and so on.

- How can I change the network setup?

For this you will need to punch out Cthulhu, ravage your own soul, and sacrifice a small furry creature.
Things are better – you can set up DHCP as well as static IP; but for anything more complex, it can be troublesome without experience and the right incantations…much like messing with the IP routing in Windows!

- I have a spare USB hard disk. How do I connect and use this on the PI/BEAGLE/RISC OS box?

First question: What format is it?

- I want program !XYZ to execute on startup! (Eg. !WinSnap, !Alarm)

For !Alarm, this is done in Configure (as it is a ROM application). For other stuff, a different part of Configure will allow you to add stuff to the startup.
Alternatively, open $.!Boot.Choices.Boot and look in the folder that is not PreDesk. I think it is called Tasks (useful memory, me!). Drop a copy of the application you want to auto-run in there.

- How do I get a clock down the icon bar and how do I set this to run every time I boot the RISC OS box?

Run !Alarm.

- I want to program! How do I get started? (Point us to the two good example books provided with the RPI distro.)

It’s right there on the boot device you made – $.Documents.Books if I remember correctly!

I was able to answer all these on my own with a lot of searching.

Haha… Should have read ahead! Hopefully, however, the answers may be useful to others. ;-)

It probably would be nice if TapirMail was upgraded to ARMv6/7 but yeah, the mail solutions suck a bit. I bought the entire thing, MPro and NetFetch but never really liked it. Dog slow and rather unreliable. Plus it feels a bit like a toy but that’s probably just me. Still waiting for MPro 7, which btw integrates fetching and mail handling and even supports unicode. Until then I’ll continue using Alpine via Nettle SSH connection. Archaic as it looks (and certainly not easy to configure) it has never let me down and doesn’t require RISC OS to handle large files.

I’m okay with Aqua Mail on Android but never found a half decent news reader (please don’t suggest Groundhog!).

P.S.: How about making your nice little MoreKeys proggy available through PackMan, Rick? I suggested its use to a chap on the RPi forum yesterday who was desperately looking for a way to use Romanian characters. Took me quite a while to google MoreKeys as I only remembered the rumours but not the name ;-)

- I want program !XYZ to execute on startup! (Eg. !WinSnap, !Alarm)
For !Alarm, this is done in Configure (as it is a ROM application). For other stuff, a different part of Configure will allow you to add stuff to the startup.
Alternatively, open $.!Boot.Choices.Boot and look in the folder that is not PreDesk. I think it is called Tasks (useful memory, me!). Drop a copy of the application you want to auto-run in there.

BAD Rick. Sit in the naughty corner…

Proper answer:
Menu click (middle button) on the switcher icon(righthandmost on the bar), use the Configure option and then click !Boot in the configure window, click !Run in the new window and drag the icon of the application you want to start at boot time into the Run at Startup window.

It doesn’t create a new (duplicate) copy of the application it adds a pointer to the only copy¹ to the startup list.

Someone didn’t look at what the desktop was doing after his Harinezumi utility had handed over to the desktop. :-P

¹ best to only have one and save confusion

BAD Rick. Sit in the naughty corner…

What, again? <pout>

Someone didn’t look at what the desktop was doing after his Harinezumi utility had handed over to the desktop. :-P

:-) Someone is used to tweaking the boot manually. It’s probably too long with automated systems that either go spectacularly wrong, or decide to extend beyond their remit. End result in either case – a lot of unrelated stuff gets messed up.

Real life example from last month. I thought there may have been a rootkit on my machine due to some odd security audit logs (which might have been the antivirus – no clear answer here). After a variety of tests, I ran ComboFix to get it to scan my system. It did so.

• Along the way it screwed up something deep inside Windows so the machine took over two minutes between the desktop clearing and the logging you off message. This was fixed with UPHClean – but it says a lot about ComboFix that it made things worse.
• Random files were marked as has a “virus” and deleted. Thankfully they were quanantined so I could get various digital camera photos back easily.
• It completely broke the Avast! front-end. It was supposed to run at boot, but this either wasn’t happening or wasn’t working. In the end I uninstalled and reinstalled Avast!.
• I’ve only just got all my Firefox toolbar icons back. Ones like AdBlockPlus and so on. For some reason, ComboFix took it upon itself to delete a bunch of stuff within Firefox. Without asking. Or logging this behaviour so I could patch up what had happened.

I didn’t bother with System Restore, for a lot of the “I think I’ll delete this” stuff would not have been preserved.

So to for RISC OS. If I’m putting something small into the boot-up, I’d do it manually as a draggy-drop copy. If it was to have something larger, or more important, I’d make an Obey file to point to the software in its normal location.

BTW, I’d have given a better set of instructions if I had RISC OS in front of me. :-)

@Rick: Yeah reading ahead would have saved some time. But I’ll conserve your answers in the Wiki. :-)

Some questions I need community expertise for:
- Where do I find !FTPc?
- Do the “Format” menu points in the Contextmenu of a Thumb drive work? If yes: How?
- Mouse Cursor: MiscSetup has a “BigPointer” – If I modify that sprite I can at least change the shape of the cursor. How is that working in detail?
- Mouse Cursor: I understand that changing the colors is impossible right now. Correct?
- How do I change Icon themes? (I know the distro ships with several of them.)
- How do I change toolsprites? (I know the distro ships with several of them.)

Thanks!

Where do I find !FTPc?

http://www.ftpc.iconbar.com/

BTW: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=risc+os+ftpc top link

Themes work is “under construction”

Thanks Steve,
I thought FTPc was already included in the distro.

Any Forum posts or anything on “Themes”?

Any Forum posts or anything on “Themes”?

This should be the relevant one:
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/2/topics/209

Thanks Steve,
I thought FTPc was already included in the distro.

Possibly – I’ve been busy on a number of work items and haven’t set up the Pi as yet. The distro isn’t a routine item for beagleboards (which I do have set up). We all learn as we go :-)

FTPc is available via PackMan, sounds good enough to me

@Patric: For which distro? On the PI it is not available.

Oops didn’t know that, using a Beagleboard myself. The Pi has different packages?
PackMan lists it as being available from:
www.riscpkg.org/arm/FTPc/FTPc_1.44-0

In the regulary Version FTPc is inside from !Netfetch. I have not checked my NutPi.
You can also use the packages-files without the packagemanager.
Tapirmail works fine with ae off. It is good for a quick look and answer. It is a pop3 mailer with a “imap handling”. The problem is, it is only a demo version. The online shop for the registration is closed and the developer send no answers :-( 5-7£ is a good price. The free demo can only read mails.
Netfetch/Messenger is the more flexible package.

@Patric: Yes the PI seems to use different packaging URLs which at least makes sense for the CORE (“ROM”) files.

@Raik: I have installed the NetFetch from the NutPI. But I don’t see how I could launch FTPc.
I also had a look at the TapirMail website. Looks promising… Hope you get a reply.

In the “regular” Netfetch… klick (left MB) at the Iconbaricon and then Filetransfer and FTPc should start.
I have not try this on my RPi. On monday is this possible.
Tapimail: I hope since three years. I have sent more then one mail on various adresses :-(

Tapirmail:
This year begins perfect, I have a answer: :-)
…
I’ve just uploaded a version to the website that no longer needs a
registration key and has all of the ‘registered’ functionality:

http://www.flypig.co.uk/tapirmail/download.htm

…

NutPi / Netfech: FTPc is also inside…

@Raik: Yes I have FTP in my net fetch.
How is the FTPc related to net fetch? Looks like those two programs are written by two parties.

And: Yery good news for TapirMail. I’ll give it a try asap.

Tapirmail: Only works with alignment ecxeptions off!

FTPc…: Yes and you can use FTPc “stand alone”. E.g. copy this to a other place of your “HD” if you like. To found this in !Netfetch, [Shift] + doubleclick on the “HD-place” of !Netfetch and then in the apps I mean.