RISC OS on Raspberry Pi

Great - I'm looking forward to seeing this soon. We perhaps need a pub with a LAN connection to really appreciate it!

Well one possibility is to set up a Pandaboard ES to act as a DHCP server (for the Pi) and WiFi connection (it has WiFi on board, to use the pub in question's free WiFi [I presume you mean the Hope & Anchor on 11th July]). Unfortunately, although I have the necessary hardware, that is beyond me as it would require knowledge of Linux.
If not then there's always a wireless portable if I can work out how to get it to act as a DHCP server for the Pi - is that easy under Windows XP?

[plugwash]

Windows has built in internet connection sharing which should do what you want and is pretty easy to setup.

The one caveat is it doesn't really like you changing the LAN side IP range (you can change it but if you do it disables dhcp) so that may be a problem if the range windows likes to use conflicts with the range the pub is using.

Just tried the Alpha 21Jun2012 on my spare Pi... ran okay except for the display being squashed vertically making everything small & fuzzy (this applies to the text-only boot screen as well as the GUI). I'm using a DVI-D monitor (native resolution 1920x1080) with an HDMI-DVI cable. The monitor says it's receiving a signal at 1024x768. Display fills the monitor horizontally but only takes up about 2/3 of the screen vertically. Anything I can do about this?

Just tried the Alpha 21Jun2012 on my spare Pi...

Try the latest Alpha distro (4 Jul 2012) and report back.

Tried that, same problem.

Just tried the Alpha 21Jun2012 on my spare Pi... ran okay except for the display being squashed vertically making everything small & fuzzy (this applies to the text-only boot screen as well as the GUI). I'm using a DVI-D monitor (native resolution 1920x1080) with an HDMI-DVI cable. The monitor says it's receiving a signal at 1024x768. Display fills the monitor horizontally but only takes up about 2/3 of the screen vertically. Anything I can do about this?

Have you tried setting the config.txt parameters as suggested by xChris?
For your setup these values may work:

hdmi_drive=2
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=82
framebuffer_width=1920
framebuffer_height=1080

I don't know if the framebuffer parameters are actually used by Risc OS but can't hurt to include them anyways.
For other hdmi_mode values please see http://elinux.org/RPi_config.txt.

I got my Dell 2408WFP to use the full 1920x1200 that way...

Cheers,

Boon

Turned out I was wrong about the monitor res (I was thinking of another monitor). It's actually 1680x1050. So I'm using (this from memory as I don't have it to hand right now):

hdmi_drive=1
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=59
framebuffer_width=1680
framebuffer_height=1050

and have commented-out the line:
disable_overscan=1

(I guess I could just set that to 0)

It's much better now in that it's considerably clearer. I'm left with lots of black space around the image, all sides. I suppose I could muck about with overscan_left etc but it's good enough to play around with for the time being, given that my requirement is simply to acquaint myself a little with RISC OS. It's usable - I'll worry about it being good when it's at least at Beta

Thanks for all the help.

Hello all. For those who haven't yet tried RISC OS on the raspberry-Pi, yesterday I tried the RISC OS 'distro' of 4th July on my Raspberry-Pi and it worked, booting up in a matter of seconds. Networking worked too. It couldn't be simpler. Just unzip the zipped distro from http://www.svrsig.org/RISCOS_Distro.zip use a disc imager to put it on an SD card, stick it in the Raspberry-Pi, make sure you have the essential hardware connected, power up all the hardware peripherals first and then power up the Raspberry-Pi. That's all. I used a powered USB hub, but no USB stick.

Yup, I just tried the image & have had no problems apart from a few non-erased trails on screen. Picked up internet connection happily / runs fast enough.
Great if only to have !Draw available.
I was an Acorn user / promoted it in school until supporting it became a kiss of death, with admin understanding no platform other than DOS PC. Happy days...

I used to love !Draw back in the days.

Inkscape comes pretty close to it http://inkscape.org/

[dom]

Just tried the 4th July image and it worked very well. Only issue was mouse trails. Keyboard/mouse/sdcard/network/display all fine.
Certainly brought back memories. I spent a lot of time with RISC OS many years ago.
Just need to get the 26-bit ARM emu stuff going, and get lander/Zarch running.

I used to love !Draw back in the days.

Inkscape comes pretty close to it http://inkscape.org/

Looking for a !Draw equivalent was how I ended up coding on inkscape, having got used to inkscape its amazing how primitive !Draw looks!
Amazing how good it felt to see a riscos desktop again tho, great to be able to hit F12 and type basic and get a basic prompt too

The RISC OS port (see here for Distro: http://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/1098) is now at official alpha status [as of yesterday] and we would welcome any user experiences. The distro should start up with working networking (if it finds a DHCP server) and a browser window explaining how to use RISC OS. It boots up in about 20 seconds and now works with most (if not all) SD cards.

Please note that there are still some (known) issues - in particular fixed screen resolution of 1920x1080, mouse leaves a trail when dragging/scrolling, no sound - these are well described in the welcome documentation and are being worked on. Please post experiences here or at the Community Support forum here: http://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11

[ukscone]

i just tried the 5th July RISCOS & it works well with a 4gig sandisk microsd in a fullsize adapter other than the known problems of no sound and fixed screen res.

but can i ask a stupid question?

WHY does the boot process incl. a dhcp request part and why does the boot process stop when it can't get an ip from dhcp?

the first time i booted i didn't have an ethernet cable plugged in (as the router is miles away) and it just sat there for about 4 mins before i got bored and plugged in an ethernet cable where it continued to just sit there until i got really bored and rebooted where it proceed to boot to the desktop in about 25 seconds.

is there any use of the GPU for acceleration yet as the desktop was really responsive and a joy to use even with the mouse trails

WHY does the boot process incl. a dhcp request part and why does the boot process stop when it can't get an ip from dhcp?

The intention was to have a configuration that would start up into working networking. If you press Escape and then disable networking all subsequent boots will not have networking. A tidier response to no DHCP server being found would be good but not yet implemented. With no Real Time Clock a network time server is quite useful - hence the default is DHCP.

is there any use of the GPU for acceleration yet as the desktop was really responsive and a joy to use even with the mouse trails

I think that is work in progress.

[ukscone]

The intention was to have a configuration that would start up into working networking. If you press Escape and then disable networking all subsequent boots will not have networking.

didn't think to try pressing the escape key as ctrl-c didn't work so i thought the keyboard probably wasn't working yet

will try that in future.

Under RiscOS, it seems it's safe to assume that the Escape key does what it's supposed to.

[ukscone]

Under RiscOS, it seems it's safe to assume that the Escape key does what it's supposed to.

yeah yeah i know i should have thought of it but my excuse is that i have been working on a system with a chorded keyboard recently and it doesn't have such fancy smantzy new fangled things like an escape key

The Raspberry Pi featured big time at last weekend's RISC OS Show.
Many recent #PiRO developments covered.
Tweets, photos and comment in the Show Report now online at RISCOScode.
With best wishes,
Martin Hansen (Editor)

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

Worked well for me.
Took me ages to work out how to get to the BBC Basic prompt!

OS NEWS is featuring
Raspberry Pi running RISC OS

http://www.osnews.com/story/26178/RISC_ ... _September

The alpha disto for RISC OS for the Pi has now been simplified. The 2Gbyte SD card image is compressed down to 21.7Mbytes at a compression ratio of 98.7%.

Instructions here http://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Software%20information:%20Development%20%28ROM%20image%29

Happy to see Riscos running on the Raspberry Pi.
I tried so long on the Beagleboard, it never got to boot.

On Raspberry Pi it runs!

Thank you for the hard work you do on porting Riscos!

A happy Riscos-Fan

I just tried Risc OS as I only have a 4:3 monitor the text was too small, but did manage to type a couple of lines of basic. I couldn't read the help text in the basic editor or on the command line.
The screensize is bigger than a letter box so you can have a look around, the windows and menus are a bit fiddly to use. I know its just an Alpha release.
The wimp system may need a bit of a make over, hopefully the beta release will prove me wrong. I do think though having the ability to change font sizes on forms and command line is needed (I do have issues with some parts of linux with font sizes.)
All in all it's a bit like welcoming back an old friend. I still have copies of the risc os magazine not all the issues.
it's a shame I got rid of the risc os manuals.

Ps September seems a long way away:)

I just installed the latest alpha on my Pi. And can I say….

Wow! This is incredibly smooth and fast. Everything is much more fluid and speedy than Debian. And those apps! I haven't used RiscOS since secondary school IT lessons, but !Draw doesn't seem to have changed a bit.

I'll be very excited to see how this progresses. Could RISC OS be the RPi OS we were looking for?