RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi

That would be great! Feel free to create a wiki page and take it from there…

Re: User documentation/videos/etc

A (children’s) manual is in preparation. Has anyone contacted them, asking if there will be a relevant section where some notes on RISC OS can be included? If not, are there any volunteers, or should I send them a polite email myself?

[Edit: It seems that Andrew Hague is one of the people working on this.]

build a list of apps and programming tools to be included

Some suggestions for discussion/expansion/strikethrough

• read only SparkFS
• ARMv7-safe ‘unzip’ (so people can use the command line) – also probably useful to have ARMv7-safe ‘zip’
• PDF/printing apps (I’ve not yet really experimented with setting these up myself)
• StrongED
• Zap
• BeebIt
• Some mangeably-sized well-commented open source games – anyone know of any?
• AWViewer
• Png2Spr
• SwiftJPEG
• NetSurf
• AppBasic
• extASM
• GCC
• DoubleTake
• StrongHelp
• CDFaker

Sorry, not had much time. I’ve made a start on a page to flesh out the disc image proposals

(Can you link it appropriately to your page on the project as a whole, Theo?)

If someone with more experience of the wiki could give the tables nice bold headings and the cells borders (like the Cortex A8 compatibility list) that would be great! I have not got very far with entering software into the list. I started working down the Cortex A8 list picking out the stuff which I use myself or know others use, but I have not gone through all of the categories. I’ve also tried to add a few other ideas, such as RiscLua, which don’t appear on the compatibility list and would need to be checked out.

Just my opinion, but if we can keep the number of 3rd party GUI-tweakers down that would be good. Trevor lists DoubleTake. I think we want to give people a fairly standard RISC OS experience out of the box. (And DoubleTake’s functionality is part of 5.16 isn’t it?)

Would it be most profitable to build up the list on the Wiki page, including links to the downloads, and discuss in this thread anything which provokes disagreement?

I have a ROOL USB boot stick on order, which should help with the basic image as I hope some apps are already set up. That could (assuming ROOL are happy) become the basis for the RPi distro.

I’ve linked your list from the ROOL RPi wiki page. Sounds sensible building the list up on that page, and then having comments here. I’d also suggest another column for ‘licence’ – good to know what’s open source (what licence?), what’s freely distributable closed source, and any unusual licence conditions (quite common on early software). For the wiki syntax, have a look here (it’s the same syntax as the forum).

I don’t have any contacts with the Computing at School group, so if you know who to talk to go ahead. Did you have a particular angle in mind (on how RISC OS would be interesting for children?). But it would still be worth making contact.

Random Q1: are there any free 32-bit games available these days?

Random Q2: are there any good programming guides that we can get the rights to distribute? I’m thinking the sorts of series published in Acorn User, Archive, etc, and maybe collate into HTML or PDF format.

On the subject of programming guides, how about something like ‘Introduction to programming RISC OS ’… there are existing tutorials on programming the Wimp or using C or modules or…, but nothing that explains what all the different levels are and why you might choose one route over another (maybe then linking to other tutorials). Something else that would be good to describe is modern RISC OS programming… we’re not just restricted to BASIC, C and assembler any more, we have C++ and Perl and Python and Lua and Ada and PHP and… Plus it would be good to encourage use of modern and free tools (like GCC) over older commercial tools like Norcroft or EasyC. And (not quite so school-targeted) perhaps a guide on how to get started programming RISC OS for people familiar with other platforms? Just some more random ideas…

I’ve just added RiscPkg to the ideas wiki page… it might be feasible to use it as a way of advertising new software to RasPis which are already shipped – with a sort of Spotify ‘find new software’ role rather than just an easy way to install it. (One thing I found out when I started with Android was I had no idea what any of the apps were called, so I couldn’t search for them)

What about !charm it seems to work fine on my xM but not had time to fully test it the link is http://risc-charm.yolasite.com it’s GPL and has some good demo’s checkout the website.
Added it to the Wiki

I sent Andrew Hague a note two days ago but haven’t heard anything from him so far. Guess he doesn’t check his inbox on the R-Pi forum. By all means feel free to send him or Chris Beale an email.
+1 For the package idea. Sourcing software can be an absolute pain on RISC OS with its defunct websites and dead links!

How well do the Python and Perl ports work? Python looked a bit abandoned and slightly out of date so might compare unfavourably to the Linux version. Personally I could well imagine RiscLua taking centre stage as beginner’s language. It’s probably the most up to date easy language we can offer and very well documented. Cheers to Gavin! No idea whatsoever concerning charm, it claims to use very little resources though so why not?
Games? Uhm Sokoban, Mahjong etc

PS: seem to remember the PostScript driver being broken when I first tried creating PDFs on the BBxM. Switching to the commercial PS3 driver solved that but might not be an option for others @40 ukp if you think of the R-Pi’s price.

I’ve just added RiscPkg to the ideas wiki page

A package manager is a great idea, but I think PackMan would be a better bet, since it is being regularly updated (and uses the same repositiories). Kids will be used to app stores and perhaps it should be presented as such.

If it is included, then perhaps any apps on the image would be best installed as though they had been put there by the packager (so they will update)

I think it would be good to have terminal programs such as Nettle and RDP.

Parmesan and Messenger (free) would be good too, if they could be made to work.

seem to remember the PostScript driver being broken when I first tried creating PDFs on the BBxM

I think I fixed that, could you retest?

Random Q1: are there any free 32-bit games available these days?

Yes, loads of them ported from other platforms – most of them have been recompiled to work on the new machines as well.

See: http://www.riscos.info/packages/SectionIndex.html#Games

I think I fixed that, could you retest?

Good to hear. Unfortunately I can’t do any testing myself at the mo due to lack of suitable hardware!

On the subject of games, I can provide a couple – Hive, a space invaders type thing that’s written with the open source Popcorn toolkit. And I reckon this’d be a good time to open source the old favourite TANKS. Although there’s a fair amount of asm in there so it might take a bit of time to get it to work on new hardware.

give the tables nice bold headings and the cells borders

I’m drafting this now. Please feel free to continue to add stuff in the mean time – it’ll show as locked when I’m there.

I think that’s the lot for the moment – some tweaking is probably desirable. It’s basically just a copy of info from the ARMv7 software compatibility list. Please correct any dead links/other errors, and otherwise move stuff around.

Hi. Much of this thread coincides with thinking here at ROOL about expanding upon our disc image. We’d ideally like to control the disc image for the RPi at ROOL, simply so there’s just one image (e.g. the new Universal disc image for RISC OS). So keep sending in suggestions of third party apps that could be included (ideally ones that are ARMv7 safe!) and we can (probably all of us) work on contacting the authors to secure permission to bundle their software in the image.

For the record, we already did this for the following software in the image that we launched at the London Show:

• Andrew Hodgkinson for SwiftJPEG, SuperChain and backdrop images
• Chris Gransden for PDF
• Chris Johnson for 7bupstats and Snapper
• David Pilling for SparkFS
• Fred Graute for StrongED and StrongHelp
• Jeffrey Lee for lots of work on RISC OS and related bits
• Martin Wuerthner for AWViewer
• Steve Revill for Routines and 7backup

simply so there’s just one image

So any changes to !Boot (including possibly using the RAM disk to accelerate booting) would apply to all disc builds… even those used with a BeagleBoard, etc.? The size of the ROOL USB sticks may also need to be revisited if the programming tools and other example progs are too big. I bought the Emulator stick – what capacity are the Native ones?

already did this for the following software

Would the permissions be considered to cover the distribution of a ROOL disc image by third parties, i.e. the RaspberryPi Foundation in this case?

Have updated the URLs on the suggestions page for my software. I haven’t been an NTL (now Virgin) customer for years, yet I can’t get them to delete my old website. And of course, no longer being a customer, I can’t upload a redirection to my new site! Which, for the record, is http://www.btinternet.com/~rik.griffin

are there any free 32-bit games available these days?

Charm includes a game called Decapedes – nice music too, takes me back to Pengo!

There’s a massively souped-up clone of Asteroids (whose name temporarily escapes me) which was one of the first programs of any sort to be ported to 32-bit RISC OS… anyone know how to contact the author?

ITYM Spheres of Chaos

I have no idea what the size of default SD supplied with RPi will be, but I’d guess no less than 2GB. The LXDE/Debian image we’ve been messing about with is about 1.7GB, but I don’t know what size the default distro would be. I suppose it depends on what commodity cards are available.

(Looks like the pile of 150 spare SD card readers in my office will be the bulk RPi SD duplication system…)

ITYM Spheres of Chaos

Yeah, that’s the one I was thinking of!

So any changes to !Boot (including possibly using the RAM disk to accelerate booting) would apply to all disc builds… even those used with a BeagleBoard, etc.?

I think we need to be careful to avoid too much short-termist bodging to all sorts of bits of RISC OS. ROOL’s objective is to co-ordinate development so that the result benefits the longer-term goal, which primarily boils down to bringing the OS up-to-date.

So, yes, bodges like using RAMFS might address a short term need and could easily be created as an add-on (e.g. to Boot Merge) or an app or something. I get extremely nervous about thoughts of doing that sort of thing in the Kernel. Some things need to be thought through and alternatives properly considered.

The size of the ROOL USB sticks may also need to be revisited if the programming tools and other example progs are too big

That’s not a problem – more could be ordered at a larger size. But on the other hand, these 512MB images take approx 1 year for Filecore to finish mounting for whatever reason. It’d be nice to fix that particular issue… Or, we could find that someone finally implements a proper SDFS and we can (mostly) stop worrying about Filecore-formatted USB memory sticks.

RISC OS has precious few developers, I’m a big fan of trying to ensure that everyone agrees that people are putting time into both the stuff they enjoy and the stuff which provides the “correct answers” rather than temporary work-arounds.

But on the other hand, these 512MB images take approx 1 year for Filecore to finish mounting for whatever reason.

When FileCore mounts the device it seems to issue a large number of single-sector reads (reading the disc map perhaps?). I’m assuming this is just because SCSIFS doesn’t support background transfers, and the problem will magically go away once it does. But whatever the problem is, a task to fix it is buried somewhere in my todo list.

But whatever the problem is, a task to fix it is buried somewhere in my todo list.

Thanks for the background. I certainly wasn’t using “someone” as an alias for “Jeffrey”; conversely it was more of an appeal to developers out there to consider this as a worthy beneficiary of their attentions… :)