Any updates about RiscOS on the Raspberry Pi?

The elinux.org troubleshooting guide has a paragraph about this unpredictable behavior. I do know from my own experience with this that compared to NGW100 (AVR32), BeagleBoard, BeagleBone and Pandaboards, the RPi has been very difficult to get up and running. The aforementioned boards all “just worked”, the RPi doesn’t — I realize it’s early days, but still, the BeagleBone is pretty new too and that hasn’t had these issues. Of course, Broadcom’s proprietary drivers aren’t helping … just leaves everyone wondering what is going on without the ability to look at the sources, fix, update & modify (as I’ve done with u-boot on the NGW100).

Hi Chris, your recent distro amendments deal with my whole wish list after yesterday’s demo – nice one. Is there a link to your latest version?

Same link – different contents.

The aforementioned boards all “just worked”, the RPi doesn’t

Hmm, I’ve not really had an issue with either of my RPi’s starting up, regardless which of my random collection of SD cards I use. My USB 3 HDD controller does occasionally cause RISC OS to get stuck loading the desktop until its unplugged, but that happens after RISC OS has successfully been loaded.

I’ve had plenty of issues with RISC OS itself locking up some point after booting (Normally when doing heavy read/write to a USB HDD) but that’s pretty much what I would expect from its current pre-alpha state.

The SD card seems to be the critical part.

This is being posted from my Raspberry Pi <— which after last night is a result! :-)

I’ve produced an image using the ‘two partition’ method. Which basically means provided you’ve got a compatible SD card will boot straight into the desktop off the SD card’s filecore partition.
It looks like if you can successfully boot into the desktop then writes should be OK too. Any changes you make will be saved over reboots.

You can download it here. The zip file is about 15MiB containing a 240MiB image. It contains the default !Boot folder with DHCP enabled.

As well as being able to boot up a Raspberry Pi it will also boot up a Beagleboard Xm.

I’ve been having power issues which caused various sorts of boot failures (mostly booting, but then USB up and down like a yoyo – eg Linux reporting the USB hub device detected/unplugged/detected/unplugged/etc, light on the mouse flashing on and off.

After a bit of probing with a scope and multimeter it turned out to be the micro USB cable. I had 4 cables to hand – two had voltage drops of 0.6V, which puts the USB way out of spec. Another had a voltage drop of 0.3V but seemed to be letting mains ripple through down to 3.8V – Linux would display a screenful of text then reboot in a loop. The one that worked had a drop of 0.3V and was stable (USB at 4.85V which is in spec). The working one was from Poundland, the others were two Poundlands and a Nokia… so it doesn’t seem to be correlated to brand.

I’ve produced an image using the ‘two partition’ method. Which basically means provided you’ve got a compatible SD card will boot straight into the desktop off the SD card’s filecore partition.

Looks good – would be interested in how you did this. It doesn’t seem to make any difference to whether a particular SD card will work or not – either they will work with both your method and mine or they won’t.

Rather clever to include both sets of start up in FAT partition – this can then just be ‘the RISC OS SD card’ for Beagleboard or Raspberry Pi!

Have updated my image (it is now 25Mbytes) to use the two partition method – this gives 200Mbytes for RISC OS on the SD card and it boots up into the RISC OS desktop in 19 seconds from power on – the time will vary (presumably) with the speed of the SD card.

And a video of it here

I’ll have to update the Help file now!
Edit: Distro now updated and Help file edited, see above.
0730 21 June 2012

Hi Chris, could I bother you to shrink your latest image just slightly more please? I have a couple of 2gig cards which I can easily load up with the 1.81 Gb Debian image, but not your 1.89 GB version!! There’s just a few sectors in it :(

Like the video -fine choice of Dell monitor there :)

Hi Chris, could I bother you to shrink your latest image just slightly more please?

Zipped it is 24Mbytes and unzipped the image is now just 244Mbytes.

One thought occurs to me. If the principal reason for SDFS being alpha is its limited number of SD cards with which it will operate successfully then whilst a downloadable image is fraught with difficulties there is a commercial opportunity for ROOL to sell SD cards for the Pi – i.e. cards that are known to work – with a boot partition on it. Also an opportunity to sell software in this form – i.e. a boot structure plus a major app like Artworks for example.

RS-Online are selling, as an accessory to the Raspberry-Pi, an SD card with linux on. RS-Online or Raspberry-Pi foundation, presumably, realise that this will sell. So, go for it ROOL, make some money and make it trivial to get RISC OS going on the Raspberry-Pi.

My Pi arrived yesterday, and after trying out Debian, I had a go with RISC OS.

Attempting to make my own bootable SD card by using the latest Debian installation downloaded from the Pi web site and copying the RISC OS ROM to it didn’t work. I followed the instructions attached to the Pi RISC OS ROM on this site. On one occasion, I got a weird green display on my monitor, and nothing else.

Both the images from Chris Hall and Chris Gransden do actually boot some of the time. Sometimes I get the coloured rectangle of death (CROD?); other times, it just gets stuck (the “OK” light on the board isn’t lit). When it does actually boot, it gets as far as running something that I think is called !+Resources and then it stops. The hourglass animates and I can move the mouse and toggle CAPS LOCK on and off, but other than that, it’s completely unresponsive. If I bash ESCAPE repeatedly whilst it’s booting, I can get to a command prompt. If I then type *SCSI and *Desktop, it will boot into the desktop, but as !Boot hasn’t run, I can’t do very much. I can access the files on my SD card (a Transcend 4GB one), so that bit seems to work fine.

The other problem I have is that the display is very hard to read. The resolution seems very poor, both during the boot sequence for the ROM (when it says “Init …” for all the modules. The desktop is stuck at 1024×768 – is there an MDF file it’s supposed to be reading? My monitor is a 30" NEC one (2560 × 1600), connected to the Pi using an HDMI to DVI-D lead. The lead works fine with Debian, and I get a full screen display. I also tried it on my Sony TV (720p), using a normal HDMI to HDMI lead that I use to connect my Blu Ray player. It exhibited the same symptoms as booting from the monitor – poor quality display, hanging when loading the desktop.

All in all, promising yet rather frustrating at the same time.

I can access the files on my SD card (a Transcend 4GB one), so that bit seems to work fine.

All your symptoms suggest that the SD card you are using is not fully compatible with the current build of RISC OS. Try a different brand or larger sizes.

The other problem I have is that the display is very hard to read.

You may want to remove the hdmi_mode=16 bit from the config.txt file as it forces the output to XGA when running on hdmi_group=2 (That apparently defaults to 1, but may have changed in the latest bootloader)

The RISCOS build always outputs at 1920×1080, and the Broadcom chip seems to handle downscaling the output correctly if your monitor supports less than that (Assuming the monitor reports the correct info of course).

I can recommend an SD card that works: the SanDisk 2G Ultra card from Jessops at £12.95 works fine. Cards from other manufacturers that I have tried, which are cheaper, do not currently work under RISC OS.

I followed the instructions attached to the Pi RISC OS ROM on this site.

These instructions are not designed to get a bootable SD card. They are designed to provide what is needed on the SD card (any SD card as it won’t get read under RISC OS) to get RISC OS to the supervisor prompt. They then explain what to do if you have a RISC OS formatted pen drive with the boot structure on it to get it to boot from that (but not actually how to prepare the pen drive).

The longer term plan is to have an SD card image that will just boot into RISC OS. At the moment RISC OS is extremely fussy over which SD cards it will accept – two images are currently available to download but on most cheap cards these will fail, either with an explicit disc error or just a freeze (which sometimes times out after several minutes).

The images are therefore described as ‘pre-alpha’.

If you have the unit switched off on first power up you’ll get the coloured rectangle. A simple power cycle will then start the boot.

I had this last night whilst starting my presentation right in front of a group of people at the London Raspberry Jam – so no pressure then! :-)

Also there is another thing that people need to be aware of:

The mouse and keyboard you are using!

If the Pi refuses to boot or is incredibly slow to load the ROM these are symptoms I have seen of this.

Again this isn’t limited to RISC OS

I did put together a script that will convert a ‘Linux’ RPi to a RISC OS Rpi but haven’t had the the time to finish it off (What with the ROUGOL demo and Raspberry Jam events this week). However I’ve now put up a copy at

http://www.mybigideas.co.uk/files/GetRISCOSForRPI.sh

Which is a variation of the one I showed at ROUGOL (But with more error checking!).

I’d recommend trying to run RISCOS from a USB flash drive first (As it seems most reliable) so on a RPi running Linux you should be able to do something like

wget "http://www.mybigideas.co.uk/files/GetRISCOSForRPI.sh"
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

sudo bash GetRISCOSForRPI.sh /boot /mnt

and if all runs okay you can then reboot and at the ‘supervisor’ prompt type

scsi
drive 0
Exec ExecMe

These instructions are not designed to get a bootable SD card.

By “bootable”, I meant one that just loads the operating system, not running the !Boot sequence. I seem to remember that RISC OS doesn’t (or didn’t) strictly need one of those (is this still the case?). My initial attempts not using the images that Chris Gransden and others made available didn’t even have a !Boot structure, but it didn’t even get as far as loading the ROM (it just sat there), with the “OK” light inactive.

I am aware of the “pre-alpha” nature of these images, thank you.

Chris G/Leo – thanks for the advice. I have some more SD cards on order, so I’ll try those once they arrive, and I’ll edit the config.txt as well.

Hi gang finally got the move over to Perth out of the way, I just tried the SD card versions on the Pi, had to set the network up to manual ip to get it to work, This is not a problem with the build it’s because my router is connected by wireless to a wireless extender then into a 4 port switch to get wired internet to computers & printers.
I copied some software over to try no problems so far Fireworks pro, ovation pro, netsurf etc, started to run out of space on the sd card.
put the card into the card reader on windows 7 & Used Minitools partition wizard to move the fat partition.
This also gave on problems and resulted in a larger partition for Risc OS.
Keep up the good work.

By the way is there going to be a sd card software for the panda board???

I second rob andrews petition…

By the way is there going to be a sd card software for the panda board???

See comment no. 4 here. So hopefully it won’t be too much longer.

By the way is there going to be a sd card software for the panda board???

There is already a ROM for the pandaboard ES on the downloads page and some comments in another thread about where to get the other files for the SD card (posted April 17th here). There is also a support scheme ‘PandaLand’ run by R-Comp for a small charge if you need more help. No SDFS for the OMAP4 port yet though (if that’s what you meant).

Thanks Chris, I tried Escape just as it’s going into the desktop to try and get a * promot, but it wasn’t responding to it.