Failed installation of BBC Basic to Raspberry Pi

[agw]

Copied this from old forum in case it is of some help in continuity

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xx Re: failed installation
« Reply #6 on: Aug 4th, 2017, 2:34pm »
on Aug 4th, 2017, 2:15pm, bbott wrote:
Just checked lib directory, I don't have diglib.bbc subdirectory, so I presume thats the fault.

How did you extract the zip file? I simply ran the following command and it created all the subdirectories correctly for me:

Code:
unzip bbc-rpi.zip

Is that what you did?

Richard.


As you can see I have a very bad habit of repeating keystrokes if nothing appears to happen, which probably helps to explain part of the mess I am in.

I downloaded from www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic.html which puts a small window at the bottom of the screen which I failed to see and repeated keystroke two or three times with subsequent repeated downloads (I never learn) A menu from this window opened some sort of extraction . I think this is Xarchiver 0.5.4. I have not used an "unzip" command. Do not know if this is Raspbian, or whatever, which shows how green I am. I can though, guess what it may do.

This has extracted BBC files to /home/pi/downloads/lib, except bbcsdl bbcsdl.bbc and install-rpi.txt which went to /home/pi/downloads

I have worked through install-rpi.txt from the command line several times. It works OK I think upto chmod +x bbcsdl, where it fails with "cannot access bbcsdl: no such file or directory. I have copied bbcsdl and bbcsdl.bbc to /home/pi/downloads/lib to no effect. It still fails at the same point.

NB A comment about my GPIO thread for info. At this point I am only interested in using Basic (if I ever get it installed) to complete a particular logging requirement with Raspberry Pi. I may look into Python later if I have the time and interest, though a glance at some listings did not make it seem very appealing, and I have many interests elsewhere. At my age who knows how much time is left for those interests.

Cheers

Phil

[guest]

I have worked through install-rpi.txt from the command line several times. It works OK I think upto chmod +x bbcsdl, where it fails with "cannot access bbcsdl: no such file or directory. I have copied bbcsdl and bbcsdl.bbc to /home/pi/downloads/lib to no effect. It still fails at the same point.

I share your frustration with Linux. The error message "no such file or directory" presumably means exactly that, so I still suspect that the Zip hasn't been extracted properly. I would advise that you use unzip rather than any other tool, because it works reliably; I presume that unzip is installed as standard on every Linux machine, but even if it isn't it should be readily available from the repository.

To avoid your installation being cluttered with other files, making it harder to see whether BBC BASIC has been installed properly or not, I would strongly advise creating a new directory for it (here I use ~/BBCBASIC). Unzip bbc-rpi.zip into that directory; once unzipped you should find two sub-directories and five files there:

 examples/
 lib/
 bbc256x.png
 bbcsdl
 bbcsdl.bbc
 bbcsdl.desktop
 install-rpi.txt

If that's not what you see it has already gone wrong and you will need to backtrack. If everything is OK make sure that the installation directory is the current directory, and execute the commands in install-rpi.txt. You definitely should not get a "no such file or directory" message because there it is, in front of you! That's why I recommend starting with an empty directory so you don't have to search within a clutter of other files.

Don't forget to enable the 'experimental' VC4 driver; without that BBC BASIC will run so slowly as to be completely unusable.

Richard.

[scruss]

If you do

Code: Select all

unzip bbc-rpi.zip -d ~/BBCBASIC
cd ~/BBCBASIC

you won't go far wrong.

Incidentally, BBC Basic won't run on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It fails with "Illegal Instruction". I guess it was built for the 2 and 3 only.