RISC OS Build On Touchbook

...or ROBOT for short!

With my Touchbook about to arrive this thread is to discuss attempts to get RISC OS running on it.

So what will be needed to get started:

- an SD card. Am I correct that this is only for booting from at the moment, as RO can’t use it for storage (yet)? So any size would do? Might as well get 8GB to match the supplied card.

- A USB stick for storage. Does this need to be RO formatted or will FAT do? Should it be <2gb>

- A serial connection? Hopefully not as looking on the AI wiki the only way to do that is to solder a cable onto the motherboard. Not something I fancy trying with my lack of soldering skills.

- Do I need a RO build environment to create my own ROMS/patches, or just rely on ones downloaded from here? I have an old copy of the Castle/Acorn C compiler, not been used for ages (never got on with C).

- Once RO is running (being optimistic here!) a supported USB ethernet adapter. Which ones are suitable? Of course, a driver for the supplied USB WiFI would be even better!

I have a laptop with Ubuntu if that helps with creating appropriately formatted SD cards and USB sticks. I don’t have a Windows :-)

There was a comment from Jeffrey about needing a screen driver for the Touchbook. Is that only needed so it can be used at different resolutions? I.e. if RO is set to use the native res and just treat it as a dumb framebuffer, will it work?

I think that’s enough questions to be going on with!

Thanks to everyone who has worked on the Beagleboard port so far. Hopefully I can start to help a bit with things now.

Bryan.

an SD card. Am I correct that this is only for booting from at the moment, as RO can’t use it for storage (yet)? So any size would do? Might as well get 8GB to match the supplied card.

Correct. Obviously there’s no need to go with an 8GB card at the moment, but once the drivers are finished you’ll probably appreciate having the space available for storage (unless you go out and buy another new card)

A USB stick for storage. Does this need to be RO formatted or will FAT do? Should it be <2gb>

Formatting it for RISC OS with !SCSIForm would be a good idea, because until the SD card drivers are finished you’ll be using it to store your !Boot sequence and all your files. And if it’s RISC OS formatted, there won’t be any 2GB size limit.

A serial connection?

Luckily, a serial connection won’t be required.

Do I need a RO build environment to create my own ROMS/patches, or just rely on ones downloaded from here?

The plan is that you should be able to just download a ROM and go.

Once RO is running (being optimistic here!) a supported USB ethernet adapter. Which ones are suitable?

Any device supported by EtherUSB

There was a comment from Jeffrey about needing a screen driver for the Touchbook. Is that only needed so it can be used at different resolutions? I.e. if RO is set to use the native res and just treat it as a dumb framebuffer, will it work?

If you’re lucky you may find that it will work if given an appropriate MDF. But chances are you’ll just be unlucky and will be stuck with a blank (or corrupt) screen. Even testing a potentially suitable MDF would be tricky, since you won’t be able to see the commands you’re typing to try and load it.

I’m hoping to get the sound drivers finished this week, so that I can begin working on the new video driver.

One word of advice about trying RISC OS on your Touch Book: Judging by the quick bit of research I did last night, it looks like all you need to do is follow the “easy way” steps that are listed for the beagleboard setup. Updating u-boot or x-loader should not be required, and attempting to do so is highly inadvisable (partly because the wiki generally links to beagleboard-specific versions of the files, and partly because there’s no serial port for you to use to fix stuff if it goes wrong!)

Jeffrey, the link to James page gives a “Forbidden – You don’t have permission to access /index.html on this server. Apache/2.2.12 (Ubuntu) Server at jamesp.drobe.co.uk Port 80” message for me (maybe because I am not a drobe user?)

Uwe

“Forbidden – You don’t have permission to access /index.html on this server. Apache/2.2.12 (Ubuntu) Server at jamesp.drobe.co.uk Port 80”

Same here but the URL’s correct .

Yeah, I guess Drobe/James have broken something with the website.

Is James available for questions concerning EtherUSB? I got stuck with my DM9601 adaption…

He should be available, yes… I’ve just mailed you his email address. Mentioning that his website is broken might be a good idea as well :)

Yes, drobe won’t let me in to alter the pages either and my email to them bounced. So I’ve given up and actually paid for some webspace. Avalanche, EtherUSB and other odds and ends now available from:

http://effarig.co.uk/riscos/

Formatting it for RISC OS with !SCSIForm would be a good idea

Ah, that would be an Iyonix thing? Don’t have one! Is there a way to RISC OS format it under Ubuntu?

Is there a way to RISC OS format it under Ubuntu?

There might be – for the past year or so Ubuntu has come with support for ADFS. But I’m not sure if it supports formatting of discs.

Of course, you can run !SCSIForm on the Touch Book (once you have a suitable video driver, of course!). But the hard part there is extracting !SCSIForm, since last time I checked there weren’t any ARMv7-compatible zipfile extractors. A few weeks ago when someone was faced with the same problem I did fixup the ‘unzip’ source code and compile an ARMv7-safe version, but I haven’t got around to checking over my changes and sending them back to the InfoZip people. I guess I’d better do this soon!

Which brings me to my next point – what would really be useful would be if some of the core components (HForm, SCSIForm, the HardDisk4 disc image) could be supplied as self-extracting archives. But I’m not sure what the easiest/best/most sensible way of doing this is – In the end there’s not much argument for having a self-extracting archive vs. just having a suitably friendly unzip tool that’s self-contained in one file. There’s also the problem that we’d have to be careful over how large self-extracting archives get, because RISC OS would simply refuse to open it if it’s too big to fit in RAM.

Is the self extracting (BASIC) version of SparkPlug ARMv7 compatible? Maybe David Pilling can be persuaded to update it if it isn’t.

Is there a way to RISC OS format it under Ubuntu?

There might be – for the past year or so Ubuntu has come with support for ADFS. But I’m not sure if it supports formatting of discs.

No, this would be the mythical “Universal Formatter” that is in C and works under RISC OS and Linux. You’d probably base this upon acorn-fdisk, which understands RISC OS partitioning (such as it is).

There is a way to do it under Linux… it’s a bit messy.

1. Download and compile RPCEmu (follow the instructions on riscos.info is a good start)
2. Put HForm (not SCSIForm) onto RPCEmu somehow
3. Create a file of the appropriate size called hd4.hdf in the rpcemu/ directory: dd if=/dev/zero of=hd4.hdf bs=1M count=number_of_megabytes will do it
4. Run RPCEmu and format ADFS drive 4 with HForm
5. Shutdown RPCEmu
6. Insert your USB stick/SD card and find out which device comes under with ‘dmesg’ – device should be /dev/sdX where X is a letter.
7. Do: dd if=hd4.hdf of=/dev/sdX
8. You should now have a RISC OS formatted flash medium

It may also be possible to do similar with VRPC, but I haven’t tried it

I think the default disk images for RPCEmu contain HForm. But in any case, a gold star to Theo for overwrought solution of the month ;-)

The problem with the sizes of USB devices is that they can vary +/- a few KB from the advertised MB size (MiB notwithstanding), so in practice you need the dd the image off first, then format, then put back.

overwrought solution of the month

I did think of doing it this way after posting, so we must have similarly warped minds :-)

Another thought – if I took the SD card and USB stick from someone with a working Beagleboard RISC OS setup and put them in the Touchbook, would it work?

If so, would anyone care to bring their system along to next Monday’s ROUGOL meeting? (Keith, where are you!)

Typing this on my TouchBook :-)

I’ve had a quick go at booting RISC OS without much success. Trying the “easy” way just gives a blank screen, which leaves me wondering if it has failed to boot, or booted ok but can’t display anything. How can I tell?!?

Also tried taking a copy of the supplied SD card and putting the RISC OS uboot script and ROM image on there, but that just left me stuck on the AI logo.

Think I need to go and read up on uboot. Last time I played with Linux boot loaders, LILO was the hi-tech option!

LILO/Grub/syslinux are strictly x86 things, which work in concert with a BIOS, which is a thing that isn’t generally present on non-x86. u-boot is the default nowadays for most ARM and other non-x86 embedded, but there is other stuff kicking about, some of which was about when LILO was current.

I may be wildly off base here, but could the reason RISC OS won’t boot on the TouchBook with the BB U-Boot script on the SD card be to do with the boot script filename? Maybe the bootcmd environment variable is set up differently to on the BB? Perhaps the boot script needs to be named something different? Or perhaps U-Boot needs to be told something like this:

=> setenv bootcmd run boot.scr

I have virtually no experience with U-Boot, so this is a bit of a wild guess. Perhaps someone with more knowledge could confirm or deny this?

That might be correct, but I’ve no way to type any u-boot commands without soldering a serial connection to the TouchBook motherboard! That is not something I feel like taking on!

There are a few things you can try to check whether RISC OS is actually booting:

• Keyboard LED activity
• The startup beep – Rob Heaton uploaded a ROM image here with my recent sound support. I’m not sure if you’ll hear anything from the speakers, but if RISC OS boots then you should get something from the headphone socket.
• The USB OTG port – if you’ve got a USB A to mini-B cable (like you’d use to connect a phone, digital camera, PSP, etc. to a PC) then the touch book should (hopefully) appear as a “RISC OS computer” when connected to your laptop. I’ve never tried it under Linux though, so I’m not sure if it will accept my dodgy implementation of the peripheral-mode driver :)

I may be wildly off base here, but could the reason RISC OS won’t boot on the TouchBook with the BB U-Boot script on the SD card be to do with the boot script filename? Maybe the bootcmd environment variable is set up differently to on the BB? Perhaps the boot script needs to be named something different?

As far as I know the u-boot settings are correct. The AI wiki says that they use a boot.scr file to do the first-time setup of the u-boot settings, and that the same file can be used to reset the settings later on if a user’s corrupted them somehow. I’d have to check to make sure, but I’m fairly certain that u-boot will look for and load a boot.scr file whether the environment variables tell it to or not.

In a few days time I’m planning on sending you (Bryan) a specially hacked ROM image which will preserve the video output settings. It won’t be perfect, but it will allow you to see if RISC OS is booting properly, and if so, allow you to send me a dump of what display settings are actually being used (so I can check it against the settings I can pull out of their u-boot/kernel source).

Also, don’t forget that Ctrl-G should cause a beep, and Ctrl-break should reset the machine (it’ll be easy to spot if this works because it’ll be a hard reset – i.e. the AI logo will be displayed again). Although if you find that the keyboard LEDs aren’t responding then I doubt any other keyboard-related stuff will work.

Keyboard LED activity

There are no LED’s on the TouchBook!

I hadn’t thought to try the headphone’s, there certainly wasn’t a beep from the speaker.

The USB OTG port – if you’ve got a USB A to mini-B cable

I’ve got various USB cables, so I’ll give this a go.

In a few days time I’m planning on sending you (Bryan) a specially hacked ROM image

Great, I’ll look out for that.

There are no LED’s on the TouchBook!

He means an LED on your USB keyboard (e.g. wait a while for it to possibly boot up then press Caps Lock a few times to see if the LED goes on and off).

He means an LED on your USB keyboard

What USB keyboard :-)

The TouchBook keyboard has no LEDs. I suppose I should get a USB keyboard and mouse.

That’d be a good way to check.