Any updates about RiscOS on the Raspberry Pi?

This adds some of the GPIO SWI’s for the Pi.

I’ll try and give this a go tonight and see if I can get RISCOS to flash some LEDs (ideally want to get this working to show off at the Cambridge Raspberry Jam Saturday).

On another note does anyone know if USB joysticks are supported in RISC OS 5? I’ve had a look at XAT’s HID app, but that tends to explode on a RPi (I assume its not ARMv6/ARMv7 compatible).

The Cambridge RaspberryJam looks like it’ll be a good one.
I’ve been asked to advertise it, and the one in Bristol, on RISCOScode so have done so.
If anyone gets an urge to write about it afterwards, I’d love to feature a “Jam” on the site.
Tweets & photos from Midlands Show should be up first thing tomorrow.
http://www.RISCOScode.com

asked to advertise [the Cambridge RaspberryJam], and the one in Bristol

I thought the Cambridge one had no tickets left, but now see that a few last minute ones have been made available.

For the Bristol one, I think we need more kids registering. This is what it’s all about after all, and will be important in terms of media reporting and subsequent smaller (localised?) events. I was planning to issue a press release early this week but may hold off (and in any case do a 2-stage release with an education one first) until I’ve contacted the local schools. Hobbyists and businesses are great to share ideas but the event is open to all ages.

Martin, if you could emphasise the lack of age restriction (assuming the Cambridge one is OK for kids too – it’s arguably at a more kid-friendly time) I think it’d be very worthwhile. Cheers.

A few members of ROUGOL will be attending the Cambridge Raspberry Jam and giving a presentation on RISC OS.

On the list of attendees is “Dave Walker” – what’s the likelihood that it is the Acorn DW? :-)

Not that likely, because he’s apparently based in Hampshire. Having said that, it’s on a weekend and he may have other reasons for visiting Cambridge. Do you think any of you guys will recognise him if it is?

I’ll be taking the Pi, running RISC OS, to the Bristol RISC OS User Group meeting at the Hope & Anchor, Jacobs Wells Road, Bristol 1930 on Wednesday 11th July.

This adds some of the GPIO SWI’s for the Pi.

Just given this a quick go and can make an LED flash on and on successfully, so I should be able to setup a bunch of LEDs and just have them strobe on and off (or similar).

Only issue I did see was that the first time I ran the GPIO module I got a ‘not a heap block’ or similar error, although it seemed to load and run okay. I tried again after a reboot and it all seemed to load fine, so not sure what caused that..

I’ve been running the 2012-07-08 RPi distro this evening. I’m astonished at what does already work. My congratulations to everybody who contributed!

This will be shown tomorrow at the Southampton Acorn Users group meetng.

Hi all,

I just got to test yesterday’s Distro from Chris. I’m blown away.

The first thing I noticed was the friendly ‘welcome’ page – this is pitched exactly right – loved it. Then I was extremely happy to realise that the screen is now full, no issues there. It makes a huge difference compared to the workaround. I don’t have time to test properly now but will be spending time on it tonight.

I intend also to try out Tank’s new GPIO release – thanks so much for this! I will be destruction testing later. I’d like a retro themed ‘Larsen scanner’ going in time for my next demo to the Oxford Raspberry Jam.
I am so impressed at the progress made by the entire RISC OS development community – I know it’s a small bunch of people and a lot rests on a few shoulders, people with the coding skills and commitment to the OS like Ben, Theo, Adrian Lees and more I don’t know yet. When I thanked Chris before for the distro, this is for taking all that ingenious work and packaging it sensibly for release – coming from a software testing, operational support and project management path I see a lot of value in that step in the chain because it keeps things moving! All I can contribute is user-level suggestions/feedback/[hell-raising?] and a lot of optimism for the future of the platform.
It’s really impressive that the port has moved on so much that I can now confidently show off an Alpha release with working internet, improved stability with SD cards and hopefully hardware interaction. A big thank-you to all who have contributed so far.

The first thing I noticed was the friendly ‘welcome’ page – this is pitched exactly right – loved it.

It’s still work in progress but thanks. I am working on the free and commercial software list at present and working out which free software should be included in the disc image (where the licence so permits AND it looks like something most users will want/need) and which left for the user to download.

Just a thought… how about a Netsurf bookmark file with links to various useful software sources, hints & tips, ROOL, etc.?

And what about including a Doom sourceport in the distro? Like the one here: http://jeffd.drobe.co.uk
With the freely-distributable Doom1 shareware WAD and the required MIDI player for music.

People love seeing Doom in attract mode when they see a great OS coming back to life on elegant hardware as the Rpi :D

I’ve been using the pre-alpha and now alpha distro’s for quite a while now and I’ve got to congratulate everyone involved with the great progress you’re all making. It’s nice to see the RISC OS desktop using the full screen as of today on my 40" screen too :D Great work!

My post does have an ulterior motive though…

I do have an issue with DHCP that I’m not sure whether is a bug with the distribution or with the DHCP client in general or whether it’s a compatability issue with my DHCP server (Windows 2000 DHCP for my sins). Being Windows 2000, you can probably work out, it’s been running for the best part of 10 years now and the Pi/RISC OS combination is the first device I’ve come across that has this issue with the network config.

The issue is that the RISC OS DHCP client requests and receives an IP address successfully but the gateway and DNS servers and all the other domain information that is being sent by the DHCP server is being ignored so with every distro, I have to manually set the gateway and DNS data before I can access the network. Once that’s done, the Pi can access both the local network and Internet fully and can even use ShareFS to access other RISC OS machines I have. I know it’s a one time config change for me but ideally, I shouldn’t have to do it as DHCP should just work.

I’ve searched the forums for DHCP issues and I can’t find anything that resembles this problem hence I’m posting here. Any instructions as to where to look etc. will be duly followed and reported on :D

Paul

I have updated the ‘Welcome’ page (and thus yet another distro is now uploaded) that appears when the Pi is started up. Although it is not yet complete, I would welcome comments on this and it may be viewed here – it is intended to be viwed in Netsurf and thus has no Javascript.

NetSurf doesn’t support CSS hover attributes, so your fancy navigation menu won’t look right.

Also, you really shouldn’t have converted all those application icons to JPEGs – quite apart from the fact they look terrible, NetSurf has support for displaying the RISC OS sprite format!

In fact, avoid JPEGs in general – they’re lossy and completely unsuited to desktop screenshots. PNGs will look much better. If you want to preserve cross-platform compatibility, PNGs (unlike JPEGs) also have support for transparency, which will fix those messy glitches on the Edit and Paint icons.

The final paragraph of the front page invites me to “double-click ober !Boot”, shortly followed by “eithe rbe”.

Further comments from the Bristol RISC OS User Group meeting this evening:
- Show example of anti-aliasing and CloseUp
- Mention fonts CD from EFF
- Say how user can print (I don’t know what the plan is – !Printers to PDF ? )
- Add SVG<>Draw utility (as Draw doesn’t saveas SVG)
- Mention ‘no keyboard present’ will disappear
- Mention ADJUST button (RH)
- Note menus context not drop down/title bar
- mention drag & drop/ save into another app
- mention filetypes explicitly specified & association controlled by app
- mention active window vs. input focus and not necessarily on top
- mention command line commands can be shortened by ‘.’
- mention BBC BASIC with built in assembler, ease of use with error recovery
- mention RAMFS
- mention memory management and task display
- develop !Cat to offer ‘Find’ function for names, ‘Launch’ option for displayed file, save dialogue for stored draw file
- mention Vince’s software

then our comments became less coherent in proportion to beer consumed. Hic!

Thanks, Chris :-)

Blimey, you didn’t waste any time putting that list on the forum. Though I thought it was longer than that. Perhaps the discussion of some things made it seem that way.

BTW: I wasn’t being entirely serious about my software – its insignificance knows no bounds compared to stuff like ArtWorks. (And it only works on the Pi in theory anyway).

And my comments were unaffected by the copious amounts of beer you lot consumed :p

Copious? Well, if 1.0=8.blah, perhaps you have a point!

The Welcome page – is there some duplication of effort there with the guys working on the updated Welcome Guide? Launching into application directories so soon seems a little premature to me – that’s a topic for people who are ready to start writing their own applications. I would have thought that someone new to RISC OS would need at least some of the basics, such as:

• use of the mouse buttons (e.g. context-sensitive menus are middle button, not right button)
• icon bar indicates which programs are running, you can close all an application’s windows and it’s still there, every icon on the icon bar has a menu, etc
• making multiple selections from a menu using Adjust
• the back tool on windows (I’m continually amazed no other OS has picked up that idea yet) and adjust-dragging windows, tied in with the fact that the window with the input focus doesn’t pop to the front of the stack
• the whole data-transfer model – you need the destination directory already available in a Filer window before you attempt to save any file – but equally you can save directly from one application to another
• dialogue boxes hanging off menus (in general)
• filetypes
• image files (e.g. SparkFS)
• path names use ‘.’ as a directory separator, so we tend to transpose ‘.’ and ‘/’ from their Unix use
• files can be referenced either by the drive it’s in or by the name of the disc it’s on, and discs remain mounted (Filer windows open etc) even after they have been physically removed

and probably lots more I’ve overlooked. Perhaps worth a skim through the Style Guide to pick up other things which would seem strange to people familiar with other OSes.

A couple of minor points:

• icon bar filers always open Filer windows by disc name not drive number, so your CDFS::0 example is probably not a good one
• you missed out \ which is the previously-selected directory
• typo: “slected”

The RISCOScode Midlands Show Report is online.
Tried to cover most of what went on although, inevitably, a few things missed out.
Definitely a lot of recent Raspberry Pi + RISC OS developments covered.
Great to see Jim Nagel (archive) and John Cartmell (Qercus) there who’ve both had a difficult time recently.
Have also spoken with Robin Edwards (Serious Statistical Software) who had to pull out unexpectedly: the “Medical Emergency” turned out not to be anything serious. He’s treasurer, and tells me the show made a good profit of around £250.
If anything in the write up is factually incorrect, please let me know, and I’ll correct it.
Oh, and there’s also a rather good picture of ROOL’s Ben Avison in there.
Contributions for RISCOScode are always welcome – It’s now got over 350 followers on twitter, so it does get read!
With best wishes,
Martin Hansen (Editor)

http://www.riscoscode.com/Pages/Item0120.html

A really, really basic question. Please bear with me.

I have the previous distro on an SD card right now. I updated from one of the previous ones the other day, and not surprisingly it overwrote everything on the card. I am following the instructions here:
http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup#Copying_an_image_to_the_SD_Card_in_Mac_OS_X

I then had to go and restore settings in RISC OS – things like reinstalling a themes manager (because, really, RISC OS should not look like it’s fallen out of the 1990s any more – and the default background texture is horrific). Now, I know it’s Alpha, but it seems to me here that people are updating to the latest build and carrying on, rather than having to start from scratch again.

How do you do this? Note that I’m using Macs here, so instructions that can be followed on one of those would be helpful. Thanks.

And, yes – I have a USB thumb drive with more important stuff on it. :-)

“Now, I know it’s Alpha, but it seems to me here that people are updating to the latest build and carrying on, rather than having to start from scratch again.”

Chris W in another thread reported yesterday that he’s working hard on getting the RISC OS theme manager sorted this week. Hopefully this’ll then get pushed into Chris Hall’s distro because, I agree with you, it’s a pain having to reinstall the existing theme manager each time you rewrite the SD Card. I also agree with you that the 1990s look is now an embarrassment. In ten years time it’ll be cool again but not right now!

I think this is part of the joy of working with the rapidly developing alpha version. Someone smarter than I am, may come along in a minute and explain how you could write an *Obey file that’ll do what you want…

Here’s the link to the post about progress this week with the new Theme Manager….
http://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/2/topics/209?page=8#posts-13439

Just thought I’d sign up to commend people on the work done so far – had a play with this last night with the latest build and it’s looking awesome (I last used RISCOS with any regularity doing autosketch work on A3000s and an A310 somewhere around 1991).

One minor thing though (I know I’ve seen a fix for the overscan issue somewhere else, so I’ll go find that) – if I try to boot the pi with no network cable attached, it hangs at the DHCP stage – hourglass timer on a black screen (though the hourglass moves with the mouse) and debug messages down the side. This didn’t seem to resolve itself no matter how long I left it until I went and worked out how to share network connections on an ancient old XP laptop I found and rebooted with the network cable attached, at which point it was impressively fast.

Is there something I can set to limit the time DHCP waits for a response, or a way of skipping the stage? Would be nice to be able to boot without a network connection. Or have I done something wrong?

One minor thing though (I know I’ve seen a fix for the overscan issue somewhere else, so I’ll go find that) – if I try to boot the pi with no network cable attached, it hangs at the DHCP stage

Similar topic in the Network Pi thread in Community Support.