RISC OS Direct 5.31 upgrade with Wifi and Web Browser
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RISC OS Developments (9008) 35 posts |
RISC OS Developments is pleased to announce the release of RISC OS Direct The new version is initially available as an easy to apply upgrade to Key features of RISC OS Direct 5.31
About RISC OS Direct RISC OS Direct is designed to provide a comprehensive, friendly yet RISC OS Direct is offered by RISC OS Developments, owners of the RISC OS The new version introduces RISC OS Developments’ Iris web browser which RISC OS’ famously low resource requirements make it well suited to the low RISC OS Direct can be used “as is”, or updated with on-going updates from Raspberry Pi is a trademark of Raspberry Pi Ltd. |
Simon Ayers (1525) 17 posts |
Does this include Wi-Fi support for the RPi 400? |
Dave Higton (1515) 3496 posts |
I have a new RasPi 4B, bought several months ago but not yet used or tried. I got a new SanDisk 32GB micro SDHC card in the post today. I unzipped the V2 image using 7zip on Ubuntu – the unzipped image is about 16GB – and used Etcher to write the card. Power on: nothing. No video, no flashing LED. I substituted a micro SDHC card previously used in a Pi 3B+. This gave video, with text complaining that it wouldn’t work because some stuff was out of date (or something). I didn’t expect it to work properly, of course, because the image doesn’t have the 4-specific files, but it proves that the Pi is operational and not broken. Since I can’t get the V2 image running, I can’t update to V3. I have tried updating start4.elf, fixup4.dat and bootcode.bin from the Git repo, but it makes no difference – there seems to be no activity at all. Can anyone suggest what I might have done wrong? |
John WILLIAMS (8368) 493 posts |
Is the disc bootable? I seem to remember *Opt 4, something was necessary in the olden days. |
Dave Higton (1515) 3496 posts |
How am I to get it to a state where I can enter *Opt 4? |
Dave Higton (1515) 3496 posts |
The image boots in an older model Pi. Bizarre, innit? So it’s bootable, but it appears incompatible with a Pi 4B. That can’t be true, though, can it? |
Ralph Barrett (1603) 153 posts |
Looking at the ROD website v2.0 works with the original Pi4. V2.1 has upgraded firmware for the newer Pi4s. Try doing the upgrade to v3.0 on an older Pi. Ralph |
David Pitt (9872) 361 posts |
It would appear that it is true. My RPi4B has USB boot set. V2 will start up in a USB SD card reader once |
Andrew McCarthy (3688) 605 posts |
@Dave I recall needing to update the Pi 4’s firmware in a similar setting using the foundation’s Imager program. |
David Pitt (9872) 361 posts |
An update to the post above The V3 update was applied to the V2 card with the card in the USB reader. V3 OS5.31 did startup fully from the card reader. Somewhat disappointingly on moving the card to the SD slot it did not start up at all. It did, however, startup in an RPi3. I do not know why this should be. The next thing to try would be to create a fresh disc image with SystemDisc. A bright idea occurred! I did note that the V2 FAT partition has some extra files in it that are not part of the usual Pi image so they were deleted and would you believe it V3 does now boot on the RPI4B from the SD card slot!! I should have noted what the filenames were but two of them were update files. |
Jean-Michel BRUCK (3009) 351 posts |
@Dave |
Chris Hall (132) 3553 posts |
Shouldn’t the image and the destination card be the same size? The standard Pi distro iamge is 1875Mbytes, designed to fit all SD cards 2GB and larger. |
Dave Higton (1515) 3496 posts |
ROD recommend 32GB but say 16GB might work. The image is about 16GB. |
David Pitt (9872) 361 posts |
The extra files are intended as updates for Pi4/400, see On the Mac the V2 img file can be opened, the extra files removed then |
Dave Higton (1515) 3496 posts |
I’m not having a good time here. I made the mistake of unzipping the V3 upgrade with 7zip. All the file types were lost. I didn’t realise until after I’d done the upgrade. To be safe, I’m going to start again with a fresh V2 image, and then do the upgrade over ShareFS from a copy unzipped with SparkFS. |
Ralph Barrett (1603) 153 posts |
If its any conlsolation – I did this too last week when I was installing ROD 5.31 onto an SD card. I unzipped the files on my RPi5, and then copied them over the top of the v2.0 folders. Ahhhhh ! I also started again, after wasting a couple of minutes manually setting filetypes. A rookie Risc OS user error … Off-Topic Note: I have recently started using my RPi5 for imaging Risc OS SD cards. I use an SSD as the main drive for my RPi5, so the SD card slot (mmcblk0?) is usually empty. I use something like “sudo dd if=filename.img of=/dev/mmcblk0” from the RPi5 command line. Usually quite quick. Also you can copy (say) a 16GB Risc OS image file onto a 4GB SD card without any problem (so long as that extra space was unused). YMMV. Ralph |
Stuart Swales (8827) 1346 posts |
Would help then to at least have a line ‘Extract this update under RISC OS’ on the https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/ site |
Dave Higton (1515) 3496 posts |
I think the site needs several lines added! |
Dave Higton (1515) 3496 posts |
Still no activity whatsoever from the Pi4 when the fully upgraded SDHC card is plugged in. I ran the upgrade on a Pi1 (full size SD card slot, needs an adapter) and it appeared to go exactly as it should. The Pi1 subsequently booted, albeit with an error message in a text-only window that takes 3 clicks to clear. I’ve had enough for now. The lest few hours have been rather unrewarding. I’ll attack the problem again, another day, when I’ve recovered a bit of determination. |
David Pitt (9872) 361 posts |
I have been round the loop for a second time. On the Mac remove the ‘aberrant’ Loader files from the V2 img, flash the card which now does work in the RPI4B’s SD card slot. The V3 upgrade was then applied in situ. It could be that the RPi4’s eeprom version is relevant. *vcgencmd bootloader_version 2024/05/17 12:26:58 |
Dave Higton (1515) 3496 posts |
Bleedin’ ’ell. It boots. There is life! I’ve removed lots of files – everything with a name unlike what’s on earlier Pi’s. Maybe too many, because there’s no sign of any network. I’ll work on it. |
David Pitt (9872) 361 posts |
I came across a recent YouTube of an installation of Direct v3 on an RPi400. Having had Direct v2 fail to start up on the RPi4B I was interested to see how well this went. It went very well, the installation completed on the RPi400 without issue. Time for a take 2. A newly created v2 card again failed to start here on the RPi4B but did start on the RPi400. The RPi400 has an older eeprom than the RPi4B. *vcgencmd bootloader_version Jan 16 2021 14:10:13 Another possibility is that the RPi4B is rev5. Other than the RPi4B issue, whatever that might be, Direct v2 and v3 both work out of the box, the v3 upgrade is entirely painless and even offers to install the ROD internet stack. Sadly the YouTuber was not impressed with RISC OS, it is not as capable as Raspberry Pi OS. I think he missed the point, we use RISC OS for what it is not what it isn’t. |
David Pitt (9872) 361 posts |
One further point, the card once updated to v3 does startup in the RPi4B, where v2 had failed. The ‘extra’ files now are not a stopper. |
Rick Murray (539) 13797 posts |
Unfortunately coming from other more mainstream systems, people are going to hit the long list of expectations that it cannot do, rather than what it can do. These days most people’s experiences are around playing videos and social media, content heavy websites, and so on. There’s a reason that I do most of my internet stuff on a phone or tablet. RISC OS is good at what it can do (I still use OvationPro, for example, and create diagrams for my blog in DrawPlus) but it’s very much of its time and things have moved on dramatically since then. I’m not even going to bother comparing it with the likes of Windows as my machine still runs XP and I haven’t found a use case that justifies the outlay of buying a new PC. My Android devices do what I want, and what I do on RISC OS is more for pleasure than anything else. It’s just a different world to how it was in 1998. Oh, and if we’re talking about things that aren’t impressive, can I point out how abysmal the RISC OS recordings were? Whatever he was using often failed to keep up with the mouse pointer, and the bit of BASIC at ~11m25s was an absolute horror show. |
Rick Murray (539) 13797 posts |
Interesting that he points out BASIC being case sensitive in that KEYWORDS must be in CAPITALS. Even more widely used languages, like C, are case sensitive. printf() isn’t PrintF(). I can’t help but feel that case insensitivity may be a feel-good idea that is ultimately less than useful. Case preserving, yes. But not case insensitive. |
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