[Virtualacorn-list] RISC OS 6 Installation Problem

[Jeremy Nicoll - virtualacorn]

Dave Symes <dave at triffid.co.uk> wrote:
 
> How would reporter have helped with my particular problem, considering
> that the machine hadn't yet got out of the black screen initial display,
> so it wouldn't have even run reperter at that time, and of course it never
> got to the point where it could run Reporter, so there was no Reporter
> running to report.

It depends what you mean by "the black screen initial display".  If you mean
black shown while the 'hardware' initialises, before it announces eg the
amount of memory you have, then it'd be no use.  I don't know how running RO
6 alters things, if at all.

On my system, VRPC shows a black screen with a line of text that says

RISC OS 4.39 (28 Apr 2004) 136MB

then the word StrongARM in blue

then a line saying RISC OS Adjust 1i2

then a line saying HostFS filer

then three lines showing Reporter starting up, at the very start of !Boot
processing long, long before the any of the other pre-desktop boot
processing happens.

!Reporter is not being started as a 'normal' app that's 'seen' or 'run' by
boot processing.  Instead it's specifically installed to track what happens
during boot.  I'm sure that's covered separately in the Reporter manual. But
in essence it means that 

 !Boot.!Run

contains, very near the start, the code required to load Reporter.  Reporter
itself has two sets of config options - one lot for how it will perform when
started in this way, and another lot for what it will do once the desktop is
going.

You still have the fundamentals of RO start first, but when your system sees
that it regards one disk as the boot one, and looks at the *opt 4,3 (or
whatever) option that marks that disk as the one, it executes the command to
'run' !Boot on that drive.  That in practice means it runs !Boot.!Run, which
starts everything that most of us recognise as RO.


-- 
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.