Any updates about RiscOS on the Raspberry Pi?

Chris, can I just check how your latest distro with 2 partitions works from within RISCOS?

Ah! I am standing on the shoulders of giants here. RISC OS is the first partition (because it only knows about unpartioned drives) but someone has found a way of making the RISC OS partition look like a valid partition to other systems so that it looks at the next partition, which is FAT. The necessary data is outside the area RISC OS writes to and so does not get corrupted.

I have kept the image size small (240Mbytes) for two reasons. It thus fits many SD cards and I don’t know how to change it anyway!

Latest distro has a fledgling disc catalogue programme showing a tree view.

Jonathan,

Clearly all USB sticks are not born equal.

My ARM926 based PVR runs Debian in around 34Mb (rest taken for DSP stuff).

Some USB sticks are okay with doschk (dosfchk?) and return sensible results.

Some USB sticks crash the checker with a malloc fail. Using verbose, it seems to have a gazillion 4Kb sectors (imagine 16Gb worth).

Thus I must concur, whatever the underlying technology is, some USB devices are laid out in a damn freaky way!

[doesn’t really help you much, but sometimes looking at how the device is laid out can be interestingfrightening.

I’ll stick with “interesting” rather than “frightening”.

Massive thanks to Chris Hall for the latest distro package – and thanks too to Tank for the tip above – this post is coming from my Raspberry Pi running RISC OS :) This worked absolutely first time on an SD card I had issues with before. Totally plug and play as far as running a Google search.

Please keep in mind that it’s actually Ben Avison that’s been doing all of the hard work on SD support, with some help from Theo Markettos and some support from Willi Theiss on the Panadaboard port. There are lots of people working on this stuff – the unofficial distro package is just the last step in the chain.

To be fair, Chris has clearly stated a couple of times¹ that he’s “standing on the shoulders of giants”.

¹ 1, 2

the unofficial distro package is just the last step in the chain.

Absolutely – I am only standing on the shoulders of giants here! My contribution is quite limited compared to the huge amount of work getting it to here.

To be fair, Chris has clearly stated a couple of times1 that he’s “standing on the shoulders of giants”

and

Absolutely – I am only standing on the shoulders of giants here! My contribution is quite limited compared to the huge amount of work getting it to here.

Well, you’re doing great work – I just didn’t want poor old Ben to not get the credit he deserves!

poor old Ben

Ah yes, the Pied Piper of Cambridge. I think I can hear a littlegreat piccolo solo of appreciation ;-)

Chris, so I guess my next question is (sorry, can’t help myself!) is how do I add more disks, and why doesn’t the main SDFS partition/raw area show up under Resources.Disks? I was hunting around for where Netsurf stored downloaded files and this flummoxed me.

Once I get a decent USB stick I’m assuming that will appear under Resources.Disks once I’ve run !Hform on it. !Hform is slightly (read completely) terrifying as it’s not clear to see which disk it’s about to format. What is Disk 0 versus disk 1!

Once I get a decent USB stick I’m assuming that

a FAT formatted USB stick up to 2G in size will appear as a drive if you just plug it in. If you plug in a pen drive (whether larger than 2Gb or not) you can format it under RISC OS using the ‘Utilities.Caution.!HForm’ so that it appears as a RISC OS formatted drive (bootable). FAT formatted pen drives larger than 2Gb will not work correctly (unless you load fat32fs).

Resources:$.Discs shows RISC OS shared discs on other computers connected to your network.

If you plug in a USB hard disc (rather than a pen drive) it will appear with a similar icon to the Resources:Discs icon.

Ah, the tell-tale cry of one coming to RISC OS from a Unix background. Resources.Disks has nothing to do with anything you’re trying to do. RISC OS doesn’t have the ‘everything is a file, including the disk drives’ ethos. (If you’re interested, it’s used by ShareFS, a proprietary protocol which enables you to access disk drives connected to other RISC OS computers on your network. If you don’t have any other RISC OS computers, it’s useless. By the way, this also explains what the “Public” and “Private” options in the Filer’s “Access” submenu are for.)

The answer to the question about adding more disks is, simply, “plug them in”. (There is, for historical reasons, a section in Configure marked “Discs”, but it applies only to discs connected over IDE or SCSI connections – neither of which, AFAIK, the Pi has – and as such is also completely useless to you.) When you plug a USB stick into the Pi, a new icon should appear on the icon bar (which will probably confusingly resemble a Zip disk, for historical reasons), which will report as “SCSI Drive 0” (also for historical reasons!). If you plug a USB hard drive in, it may show up as “SCSI Drive 4” instead, to indicate RISC OS’s now fairly arbitrary distinction between removable and non-removable media, but then again it may not – there doesn’t seem to be much logic to it.

As long as your USB stick is less than 2GB in size (for historical reasons…), it initially won’t be necessary to run HForm, as RISC OS will be able to read it natively. (You won’t be able to boot off it, though.) But beware disks larger than 2GB, for awful things may happen.

>Ah, the tell-tale cry of one coming to RISC OS from a Unix background

Rumbled! Thanks for the pointer. It means I was looking in the right place after all.
One last question, if you can just read a hard disk natively, is there no initialization required at all? What if it’s already partitioned/formatted as something else? Does RISCOS just treat it as blank and let you fire away?

I ask this partly because my USB stick is formatted as 2K clusters, and RISCOS somehow knows this and won’t accept it. It’s only 1G in size, so I assumed I could just plug in and use…
Mind you, there is something odd with it because !Hform won’t format it as it doesn’t like something about the clusters, so maybe 2k is somehow hard coded in the device.

There’s a lot of hysterical raisins in RISC OS. :-)

Jonathan – unfortunately the term cluster is ambiguous. We in RISC OS prefer to think of things as sectors and tracks. To quote Wiki : “On a disk that uses 512-byte sectors, a 512-byte cluster contains one sector, whereas a 4-kibibyte (KiB) cluster contains eight sectors.”. I presume you might have meant sector, but it is possible that your USB stick is formatted oddly.

RISC OS does need devices to be initialised before first use. This is what HForm does – the name means “harddisc formatter”.

Subsequently, just plug them in. If RISC OS can recognise the device and the format (native format and FAT), it will mount it automatically. [usefully DOSFS will currently mount FAT devices over 2Gb, and then merrily screw up everything – so be aware of this]

As to why the device in question won’t work… sometimes they just don’t. I have a little lumpy 1Gb USB key with flashing red LED. If I plug it into my DVD player, the poor thing gets into an endless cycle of rebooting itself. The key in question works fine on all the PCs. Go figure…

Well, you’re doing great work – I just didn’t want poor old Ben to not get the credit he deserves!

Not wanting to speak for everyone (how very un-British) I would be surprised if there was an end user on here who doesn’t deeply appreciate the work that Ben, Jeffrey, Theo, yourself and others do. We don’t, I’m sure, see very much of what goes on behind the scenes, or what a labour of love this is. I read the CVS commits from time to time and even look at some of the diffs, and most of it goes straight over my head. “GraphicsV”? No idea what that is. I have no idea what the difference is between “OMAP3” and “OMAP4”, other than “1”.

Speaking for myself this time, I’ve been lurking for years, watching the progress of my all-time favourite operating system with great interest. I’m a programmer by profession, and what you guys do is on a whole other level to what I do, and makes it (Windows Forms/SQL Server programming using .NET) look like child’s play. I’d love to be able to help, but unfortunately that’s a bit beyond my level of skill. I can transfer an image to an SDHC card in no time at all and turn on a Raspberry Pi, but that’s about it.

Hi all. Sorry for Noob response. After this first post, I’ll try to keep them useful. Finally got my RasPi 5 days ago. I’ve had and still use a RISC PC 600 since Jan 1995. Upgraded over the years and still a joy to use. Managed to follow instructions to install onto RasPi and failed on the monitor requirements. After work today, bought 24" Bush TV from Argos (529-9366) for £140. Followed instructions. Used SDCard distro and bottom bar displays fine. Finally managed to get !Boot structure on 2G USB stick, boots up, but no bar at bottom, (I know it’s a known issue.) Slowly click on were bar should be from middle to left until window pops up. “Apps – !Close Up” Result!. Now from middle to right until “!Close Up” window pops up. Bottom bar shows up in zoom window. Might be a work around. Managed to copy my toolbar sprites I created 17 years ago and still prefer. If I knew where to host them, I’d make them available. Nothing special, just a round pipe effect. Many thanks to all those involved in keeping such a nice OS alive and looking forward to seeing it thrive again.

Joy!!
Great balls of fire! It works!
With some trepidation plus Chris Hall’s ‘distro’ on the SD card, I finally plucked up courage with fingers crossed, legs crossed, everything else crossed, to switch on the power. Bingo, within the shortest boot time I have seen since the Archimedes, RISC OS desktop!

Well done Ben Avison, Chris Hall and many others. I’m thrilled.
Now I don’t need to go to our next meeting of SAS.AUG (the military wing of AUG) empty handed.

See Tank’s sticky hands!

I downloaded this last night and there seems to already be some RPi related stuff in the source code, although the module in the archive seems to think my RPi is a BeagleBoard!

Unfortunately I couldn’t get it up and compiling on my system. I’m assuming its using OSLib, but I couldn’t get it to work with any of the OSLib versions I could find (The way it imports the header files seems to clash with the way the libraries I tried do).

I have kept the image size small (240Mbytes) for two reasons. It thus fits many SD cards and I don’t know how to change it anyway!

I have produced a 4Gbyte image size (for 4Gbyte SD cards!) with RISC OS having 3388Mbytes of free space and with the FAT partition (320 Mbytes) sitting on top of that. The downside is that the zipped image file is 87Mbytes (being mostly empty space it compresses well) which is rather large to upload. I’ll need to play around with the image to make sure that the unused areas don’t contain garbage so that it compresses better. That’s a job for next week.

I used Windows MiniTool Partition Wizard (free download) and !Hform version 2.61 but I found that I had to use the partition wizard first, then !HForm, then the partition wizard again (because HForm overwrote the partition info) so I can’t really describe what I did clearly enough to act as instructions for others.

Wow, a couple of days without internet and all hell breaks loose!!!

Tank – do you now have a Raspberry Pi to play with? Could you and Leo add the necessary lookup table details to the module etc please?

Yes, I do have one, but not really had time to mess with it yet.

I downloaded this last night and there seems to already be some RPi related stuff in the source code, although the module in the archive seems to think my RPi is a BeagleBoard!

The way the Pi accesses the GPIO hardware is different to the beagle.
The module at present falls back to Beagleboard if no other board type is found (Jeffrey/Andrew, maybe this could be added the same as the Pandora type has been recently?)

I may have a bit of time this weekend to have a go !!

a couple of days without internet

I thought maybe you’d gone on holiday!

a bit of time this weekend

Well, the weather forecast’s not great…

Well, the weather forecast’s not great…

Well, the programming progress forecast is good, then!

And neither forecast is reliable, due to unknowns. All the best with this anyway, Tank, whenever you manage to fit it in :-)

Hi all. We’ve moved the RPi build from ‘pre-alpha’ to ‘alpha’ status. It’s still a work-in-progress and we have no real idea just how stable it is but we’re happier now to have the braver (or more foolish!) users in the community give it a go and see what happens. If you’re interested in helping, please try Chris’s distro, which is now endorsed by ROOL as a prototype for the official distro.

Please help us by testing the current ‘alpha’ build. This will assist the ironing out of any issues which are lurking and may not be known about. The new Community Support forum would be a good place to report problems…

Known issues with current alpha build for the Pi:
Mouse pointer – whilst a hardware mouse pointer protocol is being developed, the mouse pointer appears not quite to reach the edge of the screen and will leave a trail behind itself whilst dragging things around the desktop.

Screen resolution – at present RISC OS will only operate in 1920×1080 at 16M colours and is downscaled by the GPU to match the monitor being used. If the monitor has a very different native resolution, the image may appear downgraded. Internal settings for display resolution are currently ignored.

Audio – sound support is not yet included. Applications that expect a working sound system will either work silently or degrade less gracefully.

Most configuration options may be set in the desktop and implemented on the next start up. Many of these have already been set up to suit the majority of Pi users – for example DHCP networking. A very few options need to be set ‘externally’ (in earlier models CMOS RAM was provided) – presently these are set to sensible defaults when RISC OS starts up. Mostly these will be appropriate (for example the filing system where !Boot is to be found is set to SDFS) but the ability to ‘UNPLUG’ selected modules in ROM is not yet available.

When shutting down RISC OS the option to ‘restart’ is currently ignored. A software reset is being worked on.

There is no hardware real time clock. RISC OS will set the time correctly once it finds a time server on the internet but the initial stages of the boot will be carried out with the date and time set to 1970. A more sensible initial date is being worked on – possibly restoring the last shutdown time (so that certification software is not confused) and/or asking the user to input or confirm the time and date if no network time server is found.

On a more arcane front, the distribution image on the SD card contains a RISC OS partition plus a FAT partition. On a Windows or Linux machine the FAT partition will be recognised but the RISC OS partition will be seen as empty space at the start of the card. This is not a problem unless you try to re-partition or format the card in which case the RISC OS data could be wiped without warning.

None of these issues (which should be solved in the next few weeks!) should affect testing as it is important that we find any other issues that might be found troublesome by users.

Following on from the above news……
This adds some of the GPIO SWI’s for the Pi.
GPIO_ReadData, GPIO_WriteData, GPIO_ReadOE, GPIO_WriteOE, GPIO_ReadMode and GPIO_WriteMode.
Note ReadOE and WriteOE work only if the mode is already GPIO in or out.
Also they are the opposite logic to the Beagle/Devkit setting (0=input, 1=output).
The !GPIOConfi app has NOT been changed yet so will not work.
A small BASIC program included (PiLED) will switch the file activity LED on/off with each keypress.
Any questions webmaster@tankstage.co.uk or here…