[squeak-dev] Raspberry Pi - A few questions about I/O

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Fri Jan 11 03:05:24 UTC 2013


Back from birthday lunch et al. time to continue - 

Step 8. download the OS. This is an enormous file as you'd expect for an entire operating system.  Why, it takes up a whole 1/6th of a CD-rom!
Go to http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads grab the 'Direct download' of riscos-2012-11-01-RC6.zip unless you really like using torrents.

Step 9. Unzip the file; it should end up 1.97 Gb - lots of empty space in there.

Step 10. Write it to an SD card. Sounds easy. What, you want instructions? Oh, ok. If you look back up to the top of the Downloads page you'll see a paragraph mentioning that you use `dd` or Win32DiskImager. I went to the suggested http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup page and followed the instructions for OS X command line. It's also worth looking at http://www.pilearn.com/Pages/Page1001.html to get an alternative view of the same process. I'll note the that page was written by an old Smalltalker and Squeak user...

Step 11. Assemble your Pi. Connect all the bits of hardware, remembering to insert the usb plugs into the usb sockets and not into the hdmi or  ethernet sockets. Insert you prepared SD card into the relevant socket. Insert the micro-usb from the power supply into the micro-usb socket next to the SD card slot. Wait about 10 seconds and RISC OS will be there, typically trying to drive the monitor at 1920x1080, which might look odd for a while.

Step 12.  Hmm, a 12 step program. Am I your 'higher power'? Learn about RISC OS so you can feel like you have some sort of control over the situation. 
When you first start the pi you should see a web-browser window with a 'Welcome to RISC OS Pi' page already open. It's well worth a read.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=22093 - actually, hit the raspberrypi.org forums for RISC OS in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS isn't terrible.

By this stage you are all set with a basic running RISC OS machine.  If you want to boot your pi as a Raspbian device (or use any other the other no doubt wonderful OS 's on offer) all you need to do is write another SD card and plug it in instead before booting.

You can try Squeak by downloading the temporary test version VM from (http://www.rowledge.org/tim/squeak/Squeak3-9b-RISCOS.zip ) on my website and a Squeak 4.0 image/changes/sources from squeak.org. If you read the READMERIGHTNOW file it will help get started.

To add the development tools to build a Squeak VM etc. you'll need the appallingly named 'nutPi' pack from the equally poorly named ROOL. (http://www.riscosopen.org/content/sales/nutpi) That comes as a 2Gb SD card, though for completely not understood reasons it doesn't come as a RISC OS plus dev tools all-in-one setup. All you do is boot Pi into RISC OS, remove the main SD card, stick in the nutPi SD card, open it up, run the !PiCopy file which will remind you of the old days of swapping floppy disks around, just more quickly. Once that has run you could I suppose reuse the nutPi SD card for some other purpose.

You would also need the OSLib package (http://ro-oslib.sourceforge.net/) and !SVN which is loaded via the !PackMan package loader application already on the RISC OS Pi. It ain't no AppStore but it seems to work ok.

After that you need the VM sources, some magic sauce and so on. Later, I think. And of course, we should make a nice wiki page about all this once it is shown to be intelligible to someone that hasn't been used to RISC OS for 25 years…

As for justifications for a new toy, this one is amazingly cheap, terribly chic, usable as a media centre if you get bored, good for expanding the neural pathways of an ageing brian and probably good for your spelling, too.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
You can't make a program without broken egos.




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