RC4 - heading towards the finish line

RC4 has landed

Expected as the penultimate trial run before RISC OS 5.30 proper

RC4 download

As previously there are no Pi or Titanium ROMs due to their respective red and yellow status. Only green ROMs are provided.

ROM modules are updated to the current beta versions, so for the Titanium and RPi it is sufficient to continue with the nightly builds.

The advice I have received is that you should use a daily rom for the Pi to test RC4 on the Pi.

It is important that testing of RC4 on the Pi should start (the bug in Menu has been fixed now) but you will need to state which daily rom you are using as well as whether you are using the ROD or the ROOL network stack.

Feedback of any bugs is important as it will help the development of RISC OS 5.30 for the Pi.

I’m both very excited and groaning at the idea of having to upgrade my system!

I’m both very excited and groaning at the idea of having to upgrade my system!

There’s an obey file provided which does the hard work inside !Boot. You can run that right now even if you hold off from changing roms.
My Panda is running RC 4 now as linked to by David.

> he advice I have received is that you should use a daily rom for the Pi to test RC4 on the Pi.

Does this support the newer Pi 400?

Does this support the newer Pi 400?

A fix to the Pi beta ROMs to enable ethernet for the latest revision, 1.1, of the RPi400 is still pending. So ‘not yet’ is the answer.

My RPi400 revision 1.0 is fine.

> So ‘not yet’ is the answer.

Thanks, I guess I’ll not be testing it yet.

There is an RPi400 rev 1.1 test ROM here that was reported as working but may have now been superseded. The current merge request is here

ROOL really like to keep the work and the testing for RCs as secret as possible – no mention on the home page, not in the news…and the version in downloads says “5.31”, and the link goes to a “news” article from September 2022. “Stable Release Status” and “Stable Common Release Status” are also a bit under-promoted and not linked from prominent places.

If it wasn’t for the forum, it would be really hard to find the details.

> There is an RPi400 rev 1.1 test ROM here

And it works. I am typing this from my new version Pi 400. (And booting off USB, too).

Thanks

ROOL really like to keep the work and the testing for RCs as secret as possible – no mention on the home page, not in the news…

The run up was previously on the home page in the news section, but enough other news has happened that it’s now fallen off the bottom. That’s a good state of affairs isn’t it? Too much being announced.

If it wasn’t for the forum, it would be really hard to find the details.

Are we surfing the same internet here Steffen? It’s literally the first thing in bold at the top of the downloads page:

Are we surfing the same internet here Steffen? It’s literally the first thing in bold at the top of the downloads page:

Not exactly obvious, maybe changing the title as "Working towards the next stable release (updated on xx/xx with RCx) would help.

Also posting an announce for each RC on the news page or in the Annoucements section of the Forum would help. Like most people I rarely check the Downloads page and without kind souls like David I would not be aware of the release.

Also posting an announce for each RC on the news page or in the Annoucements section of the Forum would help. Like most people I rarely check the Downloads page and without kind souls like David I would not be aware of the release.

#MeToo

I am finding myself agreeing with Steffen and Sprow! ;)

I would never have opened the ‘Download’ page (I’ve not known it to change that often), and I was wondering where these ‘RCs’ came from. Once you see that page though, you cannot unseen it, and I admit it’s very clear.

Does anyone know how RC4 compares to what’s in ‘main’ in gitlab? Is there a reference somewhere to the most recent commit or whatever? As main moves on (unless it won’t?), it might become tricky to work out what’s being tested.

I tend to download a daily ROM+HardDisc4 every so often and just use those.

I’m using a RasPi 3B+. Yesterday I did a backup of !Boot. Today I did the RC4 update of !Boot, and installed the latest RasPi beta ROM (2023-09-05). Everything I’ve tried so far appears to work, although I haven’t tried much yet. I’m glad to see that the beta ROM has fixed the notorious “Menu bug”.

So far, so good…

I gave RC4 (03-Oct-23) a spin, and almost everything is as expected- I upgraded my Raspberry Pi 4 (5.28 stable).

An observation: I didn’t expect full path filenames to appear on the boot-up screen, which I don’t think looks as neat and visually succinct as the previous styling- “Boot:choices.boot”.

Although the Boot folder is part of my system’s identity, I like that you can hide it. :)

Is the trajectory for Boot and its sub-folders still consolidation? Acorn likely placed the system folders inside the Boot directory to ease migration and declutter the Filer.

An observation that is not RC4 specific. Here on my Pi4, whilst testing the upgrade, I observed that a quick restart, compared to a power-off, surfaced a quirk with the system setting its network time. The quick restart, more often than not, failed to get the network time. On inspection of the “Time and Date” settings, next to the “Try” button, a status of “not connected” is displayed- despite the machine having been allocated an IP address. A power off, and everything is fine.

It’s great to see things coming together. :)

The quick restart, more often than not, failed to get the network time.

I often get that when I first switch on. Networking is good, I can ping the Livebox and my site, but NetTime resolutely won’t budge. It’s quite annoying that *NetTime_Kick doesn’t override and “just bloody well do it”, meaning I often have to do a soft reset and then it works (which means that right now neither system is reliable unattended for any power loss more than a couple of minutes).

Just as a guess, it might take the network hardware a few moments to get itself set up (it’s static IP, not DHCP, so RISC OS whizzes through the boot sequence) and in the meantime NetTime has started, decided the network isn’t running, and then sulks.

Pi3B+ (since I need to get a new battery for the RTC!)
Pi 2B ARMv7 (depends upon NetTime).

I had a go, love the menu for soft-loading. Look forward to seeing people
using the abort trapping.