RISC OS and NOOBS - bad

After several months of scarcely using either RISC OS or the Pi, I investigated NOOBS, which allows automatic installation, and mutliple boot options.

This would seem to be an ideal way to use the Pi. I would want the choice of media player, RISC OS and Linux desktop, and have it in my home entertainment system.

However, while the RaspBMC that it installs is a big improvement on the version I had tried previously, and both it and open elec look like they could replace my dedicated media player, the version of RISC OS supplied is absolute rubbish. It has faults that were eradicated a year ago in the normal disto. Also I tried to update using Riscpkg, this just trashed the sytem.

This version is so bad, it should be pulled, if replacing it with a proper version, or making riscpkg fix it isn’t possible.

Anyone new to RISC OS who tries this will likely be put off it for life.

(Is it possible to manually install the current version over the top, and if so, are the files available in a way that doesn’t involve an SD card?).

I would like to see RISC OS available in two forms by NOOBS.

option 1 would be the current idea but properly implemented.

option 2 would be a ROM only version (No ADFS on the SD card). This would have DHCP networking, a USB drive formatter, and riskpkg in ROM.

The formatter would give choices of whole disk (if less than 256GB) and 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128 and 256 GB and create a MBR partition table with an entry for this partition.

RISCPKG could then be used to download the latest disk image and install it to the ADFS partition on the USB drive.

(The rest of the disk could then be used with another operating system.)

This is bad, and was discussed last month in this thread – https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/2062

However there is the possibility of some extra publicity for RISC OS out of this, if the Pi foundation release a NOOBS 1.3.1 announcing that it contains an updated RISC OS.

But it does need to be done soon before too many people try the bad version :-(

the version of RISC OS supplied is absolute rubbish

I understand (from speaking to ROOL at the show) that the problem was that the partition layout on NOOBS is complex, discussed here and looks like this:



There was some difficulty in getting this sorted out and what was there represented the best that could be done in the time.

I understand (from speaking to ROOL at the show) that the problem was that the partition layout on NOOBS is complex

Dumb question perhaps, but can’t we just replace the RISC OS specific files with better RISC OS files?

Would it be possible to fix it with Packman? It is installed on the RO installation, but doing an update gives an unusable system.

It would be useful if the files were available in a non disk image form, to manually copy over a broken system.