Raspberry Pi 4

Or perhaps just that any new developments will be directed to 5.29?

Could be. This Pi 4 runs nicely with the first download of 5.29.

One interesting quirk – I think it must have been a long session – the Beagleboard download page has links for both the 5.27 beta (2020-10-18) and the 5.29 beta (2020-10-20)
All other download pages have only the 5.29 beta link.

Cool :)

I think that Chris was pointing out that the source repository activity suggests v5.28 will be released as the new stable “imminently” as they say and so that part is “cast in stone” with all development now going into v5.29

It is the identical activity that accompanied 5.24 so that seems a valid conclusion. The entries in the repository also suggest that HForm 2.76 managed to dodge the doorman and get inside despite being a bit late.

One interesting quirk – I think it must have been a long session – the Beagleboard download page has links for both the 5.27 beta (2020-10-18) and the 5.29 beta (2020-10-20)
All other download pages have only the 5.29 beta link.

The Pi download page had links for both 5.27 and 5.29 when I downloaded 5.29 earlier this morning. (half past seven, maybe)

The Pi download page had links for both 5.27 and 5.29 when I downloaded 5.29 earlier this morning. (half past seven, maybe)

Ongoing work then. The Beagleboard page is now tidied too.
07:00-08:00 is largely taken up attending to the needs of the management (cats)

I might have to actually buy a Pi 4 at some point now!

There is now one sitting on my desk, along with the official power supply, which has the wall prongs on upside down. Hopefully that’s normal…

Edit: Apparently it is. Found a few complaints about it.

which has the wall prongs on upside down.

You live in New Zealand don’t you?

<cue tedious and predictable “uʍop ǝpᴉsdn” jokes>

Hey, I resemble resent that comment!

Seriously though, I thought I might’ve ended up with a knockoff.

<cue tedious and predictable “uʍop ǝpᴉsdn” jokes>

Shouldn’t your quote marks be inverted?

The logo’s sort of like a fat cute berry going for a waddle on the leaves, don’t you think? I’m sure the Japanese would make a cartoon series with it.

Shouldn’t your quote marks be inverted?

No, they’re part of the sentence, not part of the quote. Something Americans habitually get wrong when they shove commas inside quotes…

I’m sure the Japanese would make a cartoon series with it.

Would? I’d be surprised if they haven’t. But beware the mind screw. After all, Mawaru Penguindrum was just something with cute penguins in it, right? Uh…..

No, they’re part of the sentence, not part of the quote

But I thought the point was that they need to be upside down for us in the Northern Hemisphere so that they are the right way up down-under. :)

Whoa, it almost works with NetSurf. ;-)

More seriously, though, how does one tell if a power supply is real or fake if it’s designed to look like the real thing (and you can’t necessarily trust a label stuck to it ¹)?

¹ My little 12V mini UPS that powers the ADSL router has both CE and FCC markings, but given there’s no reference to any actual certification anywhere else, I’m guessing those labels are bollocks. Luckily there’s no high voltage parts inside, only a separate power brick (that I ought to see if I can examine).

What have I begun? :P

I’m sure the Japanese would make a cartoon series with it.

It reminds me of Kirby.
(>’’)>

how does one tell if a power supply is real or fake

No idea. I bought a replacement battery for a laptop a while ago which ended up being counterfeit. The font on the label was slightly different, but the real smoking gun was that the serial number on the label didn’t match the one reported by the OS.

My little 12V mini UPS that powers the ADSL router has both CE and FCC markings, but given there’s no reference to any actual certification anywhere else, I’m guessing those labels are bollocks.

Nothing wrong with putting a trademark¹ on something and one Chinese setup created a trademark that looks very like the CE mark…

I bought a replacement battery for a laptop a while ago which ended up being counterfeit.

We had a Cisco firewall with a serial number identical to one sold to someone in Hertfordshire. Ours was fine, the other was not.
It turns out there were a significant number of units like that, made after hours in the same factory using the same parts (and duplicating serial numbers)
Usually the units were in different countries but apparently with a bit of “grey” importing that sometimes went wrong.

¹ All just about believable in legal terms and if anyone went looking no doubt no one in the area would speak English, or understand your pronunciation of whichever Chinese language or a “thorough investigation” would, eventually², show it came from a North Korean protectorate in the Pacific.

I updated my existing SD card to 5.28 on the Pi 3 and confirmed it was all working, then put it in my Pi 4 and booted RISC OS for the first time on that hardware. The ‘boot screen’ didn’t appear, and the first thing to appear was the desktop. Is that normal on a Pi 4?

By ‘boot screen’ I mean the text screen that tells you how much RAM you have, etc, when you have BootFX unplugged.

The ‘boot screen’ didn’t appear, and the first thing to appear was the desktop. Is that normal on a Pi 4?

Both the Titanium and RPi4 do that here, I concluded they are simply faster at starting up than the monitor is.

The RPi4 has another amusing little trick at startup. Alarm is configured to run at start, which it does but displaying time of the previous use. *time shows the correct time and Alarm catches up when it updates on the next minute increment. The RPi4 is too fast for itself, Alarm is on the iconbar before NetTime has done its stuff.

The RPi4 is too fast for itself, Alarm is on the iconbar before NetTime fas done its stuff.

I’m sure people would complain if the boot was held pending the NetTime completion, particularly if the machine had no internet connection at that time.

What about a RTC time source on the RPi4?
As I recall the machine at immediate boot uses RTC, Net, last used, default date/time in that order.

The ‘boot screen’ didn’t appear, and the first thing to appear was the desktop. Is that normal on a Pi 4?

The likely small, but important, difference between the nightly betas and stable releases (and, indeed Pi RC16) is there’s no mod init chatter scrolling past when the OS is initialising. That has 2 consequences:

• If your monitor needs a non-black image to sync off or guess the screen aspect ratio it’ll be disappointed, and so you may miss the pre-desktop image entirely if your monitor takes longer than ~2s to sync.
• If your keyboard is slow to enumerate, or at the far end of a tree of hubs, you get ~0.5s less to be recognised so may miss the 5s keyboard scan pre-desktop.

Those are the trades: an OS that’s fast to boot needs peripherals that can keep up.

Both the Titanium and RPi4 do that here, I concluded they are simply faster at starting up than the monitor is.

Sounds like that’s the case here too then!

The likely small, but important, difference between the nightly betas and stable releases (and, indeed Pi RC16) is there’s no mod init chatter scrolling past when the OS is initialising.

I get the boot text on the Pi 3 with 5.28 so it’s not related to mod init. It sounds like it’s just the Pi 4 being too fast :)

Edit: OK, yes, it’s speed-related. I hadn’t enabled the GENET interface at first. Now that I’ve done so, the boot takes a little longer due to DHCP and the boot text does indeed appear.

By ‘boot screen’ I mean the text screen that tells you how much RAM you have, etc, when you have BootFX unplugged.

Similar issue on my ARMX6 with a BENQ monitor that blanks for 10 seconds after a mode change. On 5.25 I never (or extremely rarely) got any output before the desktop. With 5.27 I now see the bit described above for about 20mSecs before it blanks again.

The ‘boot screen’ didn’t appear, and the first thing to appear was the desktop. Is that normal on a Pi 4?

hdmi_blanking=1 does a good job of blanking at start up thereby hiding the boot messages.

The ‘boot screen’ didn’t appear, and the first thing to appear was the desktop. Is that normal on a Pi 4?

That happens on my ARMX6. The monitor takes 10 seconds to respond to a mode change, and there seem to be several mode changes during the boot sequence.

There are two ways the Pi can output video signals.

The first way is like most other devices. You tell it you want a specific screen mode, it does it. While cathode rays were pretty quick to switch resolutions and lock into them, it seems that modern digital monitors need a few seconds between switches to detect the signal and figure out how to display it.

The second way is (possibly?) unique to the Pi. You tell it your monitor has ‘x’ resolution and it will always output that, and everything else is scaled to fit by the GPU (if not natively the same).
The importance of this is that the signal sent to the monitor doesn’t change, so there’s no pause for the monitor to lock into a new signal. Hence mode changes are instant and immediate. Additionally if you accidentally select an out of range mode (like my 1280×1024 won’t do FullHD), it will actually sort of work (GPU scaling) instead of popping up some sort of error message or the monitor just sticking itself into standby.