Newbie software questions

I’ve just ordered a Pi with Riscos SD card. I’m really looking forward to it as I always had a grudging respect for Riscos from my school days (grudging because it was on a damn SCHOOL computer, whereas I was staunchly in the Atari ST / TOS camp at home – and still have an Atari TT030 which was and is an awesome system). Still, really looking forward to having a go with it, but have a few questions too.

• Is there a maximum limit for external drives? I read somewhere about a 2gb limit on the main system “drive” (the Riscos SD) – but does this apply to other ones too? If I were to format, say a 16gb USB stick or 20gb USN HD with FAT32, could I access all of it?

• I understand you can print on modern printers through Gutenprint. What is scanner support like? I have a Perfection V550 and Epson DX8400 (combi unit) I’d be interested in trying out.

• What is the status of LaTeX at the moment? I saw a few threads mentioning that old distributions exist, but nothing new. Has anyone had any joy on getting the old ones running on the Pi?

I’m sure I’ll have more questions when I get my clammy little hands on the machine itself, but in the meantime, respect to all who helped bring Riscos to the Pi – it’s going to be a great retro trip for sure :)

Can’t answer (2) and (3) (I use a PC for those purposes) but you’ve no problem with limits for external drives. I’ve got a 149 GB USB drive working fine on my Pi.

There may be a RPi-specific limit I’m now aware of as I don’t have one. RO can happily work with drives much bigger than 2GB. However there is a 2GB file size limit.

FWIW I’m currently using a PandaBoard with a 64GB main SD card (SDFS) and various external memory devices, inc USB hard discs bigger than 100 GB. I’d guess you can do much the same with an RPi, but as I say, I can’t be sure as I don’t have one.

For scanner support info, search out the sainted Pilling. :-) I’m using two different Epson scanners. (1660 and 4870 I think.) Dunno about LaTeX. I stopped using that decades ago when TechWriter appeared. No contest so far as I’m concerned. See MW Software for TechWriter if you want to write a lot of technical documents.

Jim

TeX and LaTeX work on the RPi. Get it from
http://www.flypig.co.uk/?page=armtex&dnload=armtex
.

I use my RPi with a 32GB SD SystemDisc. I mean this is the limit (from RPi not from RISC OS). A 64GB not work with it but with my PandaES.
Filcore (ADFS) device (USB HD, Pendrive) size limit is 256GB. I mean the file size limit in 5.21 is 4GB (also the limit of DosFS). My biggest Fat32 Device is 320GB and it works with Fat32FS.
Scanner: Maybe David Pilling but not sure if he supported USB Scanner. I have a SCSI Epson on my Risc PC. This works fine.
My wife has a Epson combi unit. We safe the scanfiles to a SDCard and read the files via USB from it. The Printer is also working as a cardreader.
Gutenprint is working fine with our Epson Printers.
I use also Techwriter (since 1992). In my eyes one of the best RISC OS Software.

Scanner: Maybe David Pilling but not sure if he supported USB Scanner.

Yes – I have been using a usb Epson scanner for many years on the Iyo. David has converted the TWAIN drivers to be ARMv7 compatible (certainly the Epson ones) – I think you just ask him for an upgrade.

Thanks for all the info, and that heads up on David Pilling’s work. I did have a quick check of his site just now and he does mention some USB support with Epson scanners, so when I’ve got my board set up I’ll drop him an Email :) Fingers crossed – I’d love to get the Perfection running on Riscos, if only to say it can.

One more question – is the Nut Pi software pack worth the money? Having looked at the cost of EasiWriter and Messenger alone it does seem a good deal, but a second opinion would be nice.

We stock Dave Pillings TWAIN drivers. He only has support for some Epson Perfections: See the list at:http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/individual/newprodpages/prodinfo.php?prodcode=PIL-TWNEPESB

They work on Iyonix, RaspberryRO & PandaRO!

David certainly does drivers for the Perfection 1600 and 2400. I have a 2400 and I am pretty sure there is an ARMv7 version for that, although I still use mine on the Iyo at the moment.

Yes, I use the Perfection 2400 on a ARMiniX. Works beautifully.

Concerning LaTex, I can only repeat Raiks recommendation: spend the money and use TechWriter.

Concerning printing, if you happen to have a postscript compatible printer, you won’t need Gutenprint. Instead, buy the PS3 driver, also from Martin Würthner, and enjoy fast, excellent and completely reliable printing! (More reliable than from Windows, from my experience.)

(More reliable than from Windows, from my experience.)

I don’t think that’s fair … damning it with faint praise like that…

Well… what I intended to say (perhaps I just failed to understand your irony) is that printing from my Windows7 laptop may give unpredictable results, particularly when printing PDFs, or web pages in Firefox. Even today: I tried to print a PDF that contained just a number of scans of a pianoscore. While Windows for some reason produced pages at 1/16 of the intended size, with the default settings, the RISC OS PS3 driver did a perfect job.

I have yet to comprehend the whys and wherefores of when Windows printing works and when it doesn’t. It’s bonkers.

I have yet to comprehend the whys and wherefores of when Windows printing works and when it doesn’t. It’s bonkers.

It depends upon your tool. Let me quote Paul:

may give unpredictable results, particularly when printing PDFs, or web pages in Firefox. […] the RISC OS PS3 driver did a perfect job.

Pray tell – did you print those PDFs from NetSurf? Or did you use !PDF?

I have rarely (as in almost never) encountered a problem printing PDFs. I always use Adobe Reader. Never via any browser plug-in.

Learn to switch Firefox to print preview mode. It can render output quite differently, sometimes down to each part of a table on a different page, or bits of frames all squished together. For the former, you can look to see what pages actually need printing – and if it is a badly designed site, a table content may run off the page and refuse to print otherwise – you’re SOL unless you don’t mind saving the HTML and hacking out the appalling¹ HTML muck. It is worth print-previewing table’d sites just to check it isn’t going to do something awful like print the last page with a solid black background or something (you can turn off printing background colours).
For the latter, you can tell it "this frame, all frames one by one, or “as seen on screen”.

It’s called learning to use your software.

Note, also, that sites can (and often do) use stylesheets to send different output to a printer than is visible on-screen. Example from my own blog – in print mode it will discard the right hand column (indexes and stuff – not relevant to a printout) and include the written URL of the content at the bottom.

Put some cheap paper in your printer, switch the driver to draft mode, find a few websites of varying degrees of complexity, and print out stuff while playing with the settings. Once you’ve done a few, you’ll get to see what works and what doesn’t.

¹ Sites like that tend to be generated with markup that requires brain bleach afterwards. Trust me, if you are the sort of person that writes websites by hand, you’ll need nappies and vomit bags and a shoulder to cry on. Yes, some markup is really that bad. Example? http://www.heyrick.co.uk/frobnicate/ – testing an automated tool. It was so bad I never used that software again, I’m surprised the browser renders it mostly-correctly. It utterly fails validation, in several serious ways.

I have yet to comprehend the whys and wherefores of when Windows printing works and when it doesn’t. It’s bonkers.

A standing joke at work: “Printing just works”
Always ignored by the project team, always needs work to produce anything that works reliably.
We like reliable, it doesn’t cause bleeps to go off in the middle of the night…

It’s called learning to use your software.

Don’t be so patronizing. I know my software very well. Sometimes the hardware does what it’s told, and sometimes it doesn’t.

What it’s really called is making do somehow with a random pile of discarded old stuff. It’s not really fair to blame Windows – although it would be nice if Windows coped better. With RiscOS it’s a lot easier to hack things to work somehow, even if the hack isn’t particularly kosher, although again, that might be just a matter of familiarity.

A standing joke at work: “Printing just works”

I used to suffer the curse of printing works until I ran off the final copy at 2am before going to bed. That final copy would be made of fail.
Then I stopped using Microsoft Office. I dunno what the hell Word managed to do, but it (Word 6, Word 97, and especially Word 2000) used to suffer real problems when it came to coherent printing, which is not funny when its job is basically to be a word processor.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was one too many moving files from one machine to another to watch word “reformat” a project because it thought the paper size (margin) was different. Doing that to a fifty page Quality Manual is guaranteed to annoy, especially when it would have fit within the margins in any case.

What it’s really called is making do somehow with a random pile of discarded old stuff.

That’s what most of my kit is. Discarded old stuff and things bought for a few euros in boot sales. I’m not intending to be patronising. It is “nice” that you can print PDFs directly from a browser preview. It would be nicer if it worked consistently. Is this the plug-in? Is it Firefox? Is it Windows? I put it down to having too many steps with conflicting requirements. This is part of “learning to use your software”. Not just in learning what works, but in knowing what (usually) doesn’t work.

With RiscOS it’s a lot easier to hack things to work somehow

I think this is because it is often easier to get low-level in RISC OS. There are things we can do with RISC OS that are either painful or near impossible without deep knowledge. I know more or less how the printing system under RISC OS works, even if I don’t know the specifics of every nuance. Under Windows? It’s a pile of DLLs and I still haven’t got my head around the amount of glue required to get GDI and GDI+ talking to each other! And that’s just for displaying stuff on-screen, never mind printing anything!

I think this is because it is often easier to get low-level in RISC OS.

Well, exactly. I don’t even try to get low-level in Windoze.

Not just in learning what works, but in knowing what (usually) doesn’t work…It would be nicer if it worked consistently…

That’s the key. Lots of things don’t work consistently in Windows. I don’t mind too much when it’s things like printing from browser windows, but when it’s printing from OpenOffice or XnView or Photoshop Elements I get more annoyed. Particularly since they usually DO work, but annoyingly often don’t.

And then there’s drivers. This issue is consistent and predictable at least, but annoying nonetheless. I’ve got a lovely little HP Deskjet 5850 (freecycle) that works beautifully from an old XP box. It works after a fashion using a Deskjet 5600 driver from a Windows 7 box, but the driver doesn’t know about the duplex unit, so double-sided can only be done manually! I’m keeping the XP box just to do that, but it does contribute to the general clutter…

HP Deskjet 5850 (freecycle) that works beautifully from an old XP box. It works after a fashion using a Deskjet 5600 driver from a Windows 7 box,

Now there’s the bite.

Here’s something I posted on The Register only this morning:

I’m running XP on a netbook. Have no intention of upgrading as I do not expect that small machine with its undersized SSDs would cope very well with Win8.x and there is the question of compatibility – I’m not dumb enough to think my ancient video capture USB device (that I use as a surrogate TV) will magically work with the new system. Probably the same for various software packages.

Maybe this is why Microsoft is worried? As an XP holdout, I didn’t feel the need to upgrade to every new version of Windows, and their removing XP support is not going to change the fact. Indeed, with little spare cash and a machine that works perfectly well, my options and choices – when upgrade time comes – extend far beyond Redmond.

In a way it is related to your problem. You are having to keep an older machine around to work with the older hardware. I, on the other hand, am still using that older machine ;-) but I think we both realise than when upgrade time comes, it is possible that the upheaval may be great enough that unless there is one killer-app reason to stick with a specific system, we are not tied to it. We can pick one that suits our budget, our hardware, our legacy devices, or a mixture of all of the options. I’m going to hang on to my XP box as it does what I want it to do. When I upgrade, I know that I can LiveCD boot into xubuntu to give it a test drive before buying/blagging/building a more modern PC. And if I like (even if it is slowish on the old machine), I won’t be tied to a specific operating system. I no longer really ‘program’ anything on the PC any more – don’t have the time or concentration – so I am moving to being more of an end-user. This is why I’m getting on well with my iPad. It’s pretty lousy for “creating” stuff (QuickOffice can’t handle deleting text at any reasonable speed; about the only things the iPad is good at creating are HD videos and lots of photos). I use it as a user. TED talks, browsing, videos, electronic books and PDFs, music, absentmindedly browsing Amazon, organising my life where the entries for “Japanese holidays written in English” (Google iCal) outnumber my own entries (!).

I’m not sure I will bother with programming at all with my next PC. If I have the urge to get personal with my compiler, there is RISC OS. So my next PC – the only two apps it needs to be able to run are PhotoImpact5 (an ageing photo editor that I find to be a lot friendlier than The Gimp or Photoshop and its clones) and OvationPro. I believe OP can run under WINE; I’d imagine PI5 ought to be able to as well as WINE is pretty capable these days. Other apps of importance – SMPlayer and VLC. Aren’t the Windows builds ports from the Linux world? WinSCP. I reckon there ought to be a Linux version. AverTV – pretty much won’t work on anything post XP, so I think I’ll probably say goodbye to this unless I keep the eeePC around for a little bit longer just for being a TV.

[if I were Microsoft, I’d read this and worry…]

If I have the urge to get personal with my compiler, there is RISC OS.

This exactly – although I have to admit to writing everything in BASIC, with critical routines in assembler. Never really got to grips with C – ARM sent me on a C++ course (I had to document a compiler once, a nightmare for me) which I passed with top marks, but still hadn’t and haven’t got to grips with it properly. Not my cup of tea at all.

The Deskjet 5850 (double sided A4 colour) is the only thing I’ve got that works better on the XP box – everything else (HP Colour Laserjet 5M, Epson Photo R2400 (A3 colour…), Epson Perfection 2400 Photo scanner, all freecycled with copious consumables!) works as well or better with the Windows 7 machine (hand-me-down from my son…). I’m sitting on the sofa with a Vista laptop on my knees at the moment, which is handy for Photoshop Elements, which is hopelessly slow on the XP machine, and is an old (bundled with my camera) issue that doesn’t work on Windows 7. I’m not shelling out £lots of my pension for a new copy. So I’m learning to use the Gimp on Windows 7. Loving the Gimp…

So many different systems. Like I say, freecycle is marvellous. But it does make for rather a lot of clutter…

Well, I finally got my Pi through today – and the seller hadn’t included a RiscOs card! Not to worry though, follow the instructions on the website, and got an image set up no problem at all. And since I’m writing this from my Pi, I can safely say it is working like a dream. I really must give my respects to the Open Riscos team (and the Raspberry Pi foundation) on doing a fantastic job. I am genuinely really, REALLY impressed :)

Regarding Rick Murray’s comment about the netbook (EeePC, perchance?) I have one of these, an EeePC 900. It’s the one with a 16GB SSD. I installed Windows XP on it. It was… painful. XP really does not like running from an SSD. (Technical explanation is to do with block sizes not lining up, plus TRIM support didn’t exist on XP, and apparently was broken on Vista.)

Having upgraded the RAM to 2GB, I took the plunge and installed the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate on it. It’s several orders of magnitude faster. Even if the graphics chip doesn’t support Aero effects (that’s fine, I’ll just switch it into Classic mode – I like the Aero Glass but Aero Basic looks klunky).

I’ve heard (but never tested) that the Atom processor in the EeePC will run EM64T, so it would run the 64-bit version of Windows 7. However given that the maximum RAM capacity is 2GB, this would be utterly pointless.

Back on topic, the EeePC with RPCemu is pretty funky. It almost looks like a RISC OS laptop!

I really must give my respects to the Open Riscos team (and the Raspberry Pi foundation) on doing a fantastic job. I am genuinely really, REALLY impressed :)

Fantastic! We’re glad you like it.

We all like it (but don’t say it enough) :)

Hear, hear!