Using open source libraries on GitHub to support RISC OS in Wifi, USB etc.

Never had a Linux kernel panic?

I don’t use Linux, but I routinely have Windows get its knickers in a twist (symptoms are Firefox and Chrome both reporting “your tab just crashed” requiring a reboot. And recently a full-blown blue-screen on Windows 10.

Since Windows XP, I never have a single pure software crash under Windows, appart coming from bad drivers or hardware problems (RAM or overheat). The same for Linux, since… ever. RISC OS, hum, a day without crash is a good day :)

apart from bad drivers

Which is the same issue with any other OS, including RISC OS – write a bad driver and bad stuff will happen.

GUIs most people use today are mainly windowsless ones?

Yeah. Damn things can’t even multitask in any meaningful way. Switch away from your browser for more than about thirty seconds, it’ll probably have to reload everything when you switch back…

but IA.

<Deity$Name> help us.

And all GUI will become irrevelant here

I hope not.
But, then, I guess there’s an employment opportunity for minimum wage lackeys to parse through all the bullshit that AI has vomited out to try to make it some sort of presentable result.

And us humans will be left with our eyes pinging to the left and to the right like in a tennis match as we try to understand how we arrived at a situation where AI creates stacks on meaningless documents that are then interpreted and evaluated by other AIs, leading us to ask “what exactly is the point”.

This isn’t how we achieve carbon neutral, net zero, etc etc.

RISC OS, hum, a day without crash is a good day :)

;)

write a bad driver and bad stuff will happen.

Hmm, wasn’t part of the design of Minix aimed at trying to make the system resilient against bad drivers?

software crash under Windows

Blue screens happen fairly frequently here, and when they do, I have to put up with MS telling my machine to dump a whole load of data about the crash on them, so the restart can take up to 5 minutes (but gives the laptop a chance to cool down :-o). At least with RISC OS, Ctrl-Break or toggling the power switch gets your desktop back in roughly half a minute. As for losing work, /don’t/ put important stuff in RAM, and hit Save every few minutes (or set up autosave).

I have to put up with MS telling my machine to dump a whole load of data about the crash on them, so the restart can take up to 5 minutes

That’s nonsense.

No, not you. That Microsoft still ships Windows configured to do that, which wastes space on most people’s harddiscs and their time.

You can fix this. But you must be logged in as an administrator.

This isn’t hard, it’s just a bloody faff to explain. Ready?

Go into Settings (I think that’s Win+I on new versions). This desciption is for Windows 11.

Click “System”, and somewhere on the other side it’ll say “About”. Click that.

In the bit that appears, look for “Advanced system settings” and click it.

A new window should open. One of the tabs across the top should say “Advanced”. Click it.

Now sort of two thirds down the window, it’ll say “Startup and Recovery”. Click on “Settings”.

Now play with the settings under “System failure”. You might prefer it not to automatically restart? Tick the box accordingly.
Now, under “Write debugging information”, select “(none)” and it won’t waste your time.

Click on OK.

You might see a message saying you need to restart. Because it’s Windows. ;)

Click “OK” on the window that you clicked to get to the startup and recovery settings.

Finally, click on “Restart now” if the option appears.

If you’re using something older, like XP/2000, it’s sort of similar.

Right-click on “My Computer” and then choose “Properties” or go into the boringly long list of configuration options and double-click on “System”.

In the double-row of tabs, click on “Advanced”.

Click on “Settings” at the part at the bottom of the window labelled “Startup and Recovery”.

In the “Write debugging information”, select “(none)”, and maybe turn off “Automatically restart”.

Blue screens happen fairly frequently here

That’s not normal. What are you doing to trigger the BSOD? What does the gibberish on the screen say?

On my XP box, there are two guaranteed ways to slaughter the machine.

The first results in a BSOD, and that’s the use of a knock-off PL2303 (IIRC?) serial dongle. Either the driver is bugged, or the clone responds slightly differently and that’s upsetting the driver. Either way, BSOD assured within about two minutes.
Fix? That’s the USB to serial adaptor that I use on RISC OS to talk to my weather station. Colin’s driver isn’t a piece of crap (unlike the XP one!).

The second doesn’t get as far as a BSOD, it’s an instant freeze. If I am using the USB WiFi dongle and I plug in the video grabber, or if I’m using the video grabber and I plug in the WiFi dongle, instant freeze. Somebody here (Steve?) suggested that it may be crappy devices (<cough> yes! </cough>) that have the same VID/PID and that confuses everything. I’ve not checked, but it’s an intriguing theory.
Fix? The PC is now connected to a mini-switch which shares the Vonets WiFi with it and the Pi3.

Asides from those two issues… I’m not sure I’ve had any BSODs in the rest of the time I have used the machine.
There is a weird issue where after a while it just stops loading new applications/processes and sits there with the harddisc light on doing nothing, but this is after maybe a dozen hibernate cycles and numerous months temporally. Maybe it runs out of process IDs or something? I dunno. It happens, but not that often. And, besides, I should probably reboot a little more often than something measured in portions of years. ;)

For you, see if you can work out what’s triggering the BSODs, and exorcise it.

You can fix this. But you must be logged in as an administrator.

Ta. Saved me typing the sequence.

Either the driver is bugged, or the clone responds slightly differently and that’s upsetting the driver.

The official drivers for the official PL2303 serial kit are deliberately written to detect the knockoff devices and crash.

BTW. One of the most regular causes of BSOD is out-of-spec memory being pushed to/beyond its capability.
Find some decent spec memory and all is well. The interesting bit is that higher price doesn’t mean a better spec.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a Linux kernel panic (I’ve never tried writing drivers for it), but I have had it refuse to pay any attention to the keyboard, mouse, and me shouting swear words at it while it hammers a disc for hours on end. I doesn’t seem willing to admit when it can’t cope.

Using open source libraries to jazz up RISC OS 32-bit (and the Fata Morgana 64-bit version) re. USB, WiFi, etc. was the starting point of this topic.

You can use these open source libraries on top an OS which is fairly similar to Linux, xBSD or various embedded OS’s but you can’t use them on RISC OS without an extreme amount of modification, due to the arcane way RISC OS works, it is like literally nothing else that is still around. You have to go back as far as the 80s home computers to find anything similar, which is not surprising as apart from the WIMP it a basically the BBC Micro MOS ported to 32 bit.

Wonder what RISC OS would be now, if Acorn Computers Ltd. were still in business – can’t imagine they’d let RISC OS drift further and further apart from the Arm architectures they created (and for which they were killed) to the degree that the latest version doesn’t even support a 32-bit mode. The multi-core 64-bit Arm-world is a far cry from this architecture’s humble beginnings; 4 MIPS is peanuts to Arm CPU’s performance today.

Well seeing that they should have made the 26 to 32 bit transition when the Risc PC was launched with the 32 bit ARM610 chip, as it was obvious back than 26 bit was going to be chopped, but they didn’t. They got lucky that the first StrongARM 110 still supported 26 bit, none of the later versions had it, and Acorn still did nothing. It wasn’t until Acorn bit the dust that Pace did the work.

And their best GPU’s leave VIDC far behind, able to do realtime raytracing etc. – that’s what 32-bit RISC OS is missing out on, and much more.

VIDC being a dumb frame buffer isn’t hard to leave behind, but yes supporting a GPU will have all those Microsoft owned gaming houses falling over themselves to port their latest titles to RISC OS.

I seriously doubt that, since these games take advantage of modern CPU/GPU-features which RISC OS is blissfully unaware of. Maybe if you reduced the framerate until the game became utterly unplayable? Besides which RISC OS user base/market appeal appear to be in free fall nowadays. Only a radical modernization can possibly fix that, but the moneys to do this project is absent, we’re told.

Besides which RISC OS user base/market appeal appear to be in free fall nowadays. Only a radical modernization can possibly fix that

People said that about Windows Phone too, it amassed wider support in its short life than RISC OS has, and is now defunct.

will have all those Microsoft owned gaming houses falling over themselves

Ugh. I yearn for the days when a game came on “media” (floppy, CD, DVD…) and you inserted it and played it whenever, even decades later.
Now it’s a disc with a many gigabyte download, reliance on external servers, and all sorts of things that are out of your control and might not be there at some random undefined future date.

but the moneys to do this project is absent, we’re told.

Says the person who, just a few days ago, wrote “It’s said to take around 20 man-years to do a full 64-bit conversion, in C, total wages at around a million UKP/year. ”
So, yeah, the money is absent.
I mean, you have looked out of the window, right? Post-pandemic payback, mild depression, two new wars, inflation… The economy is a mess and the people who are supposed to be in charge couldn’t competently manage a kindergarten class, never mind a country.
So, yeah, the money is absent.

And for what? RISC OS, if translated into C for some other processor, it will need some serious architectural changes in order to better resemble a modern OS and not repeat the mistakes of the past.
And by that point, it won’t be RISC OS any more. It’ll be something else. Something that isn’t Linux or Windows or MacOS, something… new… that’s lacking in software (realistically, how much existing software d’you think is actually going to be ported?) plus lacking in resources due to having literally decades of system design, hardware, and development methodologies to catch up on.
And, you know what, the first things people will ask is “can I log into Facebook?”, “does it run Steam?”, and “can I watch Netflix on it?”. If the answer to any of those is no, then you have a problem…

By all means, have a crack at porting the OS to a new era. But please don’t be under any illusions that it’ll be anything other than a new incarnation of RISC OS.
It won’t compete against Windows. It isn’t the next best thing to run on your mobile phone. And it won’t bring about world peace.
But it might have a UI that sucks les than the others, so there’s that.

I think we’ve wasted enough time on this person. Call in the PLONK!

I think we’ve wasted enough time on this person.

It seems sometimes living under a bridge is a lifestyle choice, in this instance coming out from under far too often.

To waste time more productively… the being who lived under the bridge the Billy Goats Gruff wanted to cross was a distinctly non-typical member of his species. https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Fiction/Penny/Greg.html#Trolls

You can fix this.

Thanks for taking the time to explain how, Rick: I’ll give this a go.

That’s right – I’m 12 meters tall, have 3 heads, and a very bad disposition to Christians. One of these is right. (Grunpy before 1st morning coffee..).

That’s right – I’m 12 meters tall, have 3 heads, and a very bad disposition to Christians. One of these is right. (Grunpy before 1st morning coffee..).

That’s right – I’m 12 meters tall, have 3 heads, and a very bad disposition to Christians. One of these is right. (Grunpy before 1st morning coffee..).

a distinctly non-typical member of his species

My mind had wandered off to Pratchett quotes, and Detritus. Cuttlefish, line dancer…

Ah, now, I think Detritus was a good guy, wasn’t he?

Ah, now, I think Detritus was a good guy, wasn’t he?

Trolls. Not bad, just lacking in certain departments.

and a very bad disposition to Christians.

The hate for Christians may have been enshrined in the fairy tales due to them being seen as invaders from elsewhere who drove out the old ways and got rid of the old gods.

On a more scientific level, I’d love if somebody could explain how a troll is supposed to be able to smell the blood of a Christian. Human blood comes in various forms (A, B, AB, O with positive and negative options). You might, if you could detect by smell if a person is RhD neg, be able to tell basques from asians, but the idea of smelling a person’s religion is daft. Choosing a mystical sky fairy just doesn’t change a person’s blood.

It’s far easier to detect a stereotypical “Christian” than by smelling blood. Just look for the idiot waving a cross shaped piece of wood at an entity vastly more powerful than them while yelling old fashioned nonsense like “Get thee behind me for thou art an offence unto nature and thou smelleth mightily”.
;)

If you watch https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/caesars-messiah/ to the end you’ll learn that the Romans created Catholicism and hence its spin-off Christianity to serve their own ends – “Give to Rome what belongs to Rome”, indeed.

The “NT” depicts the Roman general Titus Flavius’ campaign against “The Jews” year 70 “A.D.”, the places and times of the campaign’s progress toward Jerusalem are really the motions of the Roman army, rewritten with other personages and events making up the “NT”.

Erk, made this fine thread even more off-topic there.. but it’s Winter-solstice soon so what hey? Belief isn’t knowledge nor wisdom.

The giant at the top of Jack’s beanstalk (surely a cannabis plant, not a bean), who said, “Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum” wasn’t a troll, and it wasn’t the blood of a Christian he claimed to smell, it was the blood of an Englishman (who, admittedly, probably was, by default, a Christian, but in Europe at that time that didn’t particularly imply Englishness); and “smelling the blood of an Englishman” was probably merely a euphemism for detecting the body odour. Which relates not primarily to blood but to culture: diet and lavatory and washing habits…or in the (improbable) case of fastidiously clean vegetarians, it might relate, again not to blood, but to histocompability. Which might just about credibly enable giants (but probably not trolls, who if Pratchett is to be believed, have silicon-based not carbon-based biochemistry) to detect Englishness, at least during times of relatively static populations.

As you were…where were we? Oh, yes…