Installing gForth on the Raspberry Pi

An operating system is none of those. It is the software layer that sits between each of those and the hardware.

That list is of applications, which have to have been compiled for the operating system.

Alan

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Alan Adams, from Northamptonshire 
alan@adamshome.org.uk 
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Alan Adams
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I'm sorry, I can't follow what you are trying to say. What is your point?

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

Perhaps, but I don't have a good way of estimating that. To be honest, I find the MPE web site to be confusing and hard to find info on your products.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

That's the first clearly expressed thing you have written.

Reply to
mm0fmf

You may find this site of interest. It includes section on using Forth with the Gertboard add on.

RayH

Reply to
Ray

There are several things wrong with that idea. The first is that I

*want* to have the OS so that I can use the many other tools available under it. One of my issues with Linux is the lack of support from a variety of vendors, but for the most part I can do anything under Linux I can do under Windows. I bet you aren't typing your posts on a bare metal Forth machine.

Secondly I disagree it is an hour job to write and debug a serial port driver on the rPi hardware. I have looked at the hardware manual and I expect it would take much longer just to find the info needed and learning how the device works in enough detail to use interrupts with the UART. This is not an MSP430 or an AVR.

One of the reasons I wish to work with the rPi is to put me in a better position to build an add on card for the Pi. This card would very likely include a very low power FPGA and a GA144. But I need to have some level of confidence that I can get a fast interface to the Pi. Right now the few parallel lines and an SPI won't cut it. The BBB looks much better in that regard with a parallel memory mapped interface I am told. But the BBB has much less of a support group. In reality I am learning about Linux as the moment so it doesn't matter as much which hardware I am on. I can change that later if I find it important.

Most of the discussion has actually been off topic in the sense that it was not directly along the line of minimal effort to my end. I thought it might be a good idea crossposting to both the Forth group and to the rPi group. It seems many of the replies from the rPi group are about the many different ways the window interface can be done. Many of the replies from the Forth group seem to be suggesting a variety of things, but few of them on target. I expected someone familiar with gForth would point me to an example saying, Here is how so and so did it" as I found when doing this under Win32Forth. The only example I found in gForth was very complex clearly due to needs that are not at all like mine. But I have most of the info I need and might be able to work out the rest. Now I need to figure out how to edit code on the rPi and I should be ready to proceed. I might work from my PC and control the rPi remotely. Or I have been thinking of changing editors on the PC anyway. Maybe this would be a good time to learn Emacs.

I would ask you that question. If you aren't interested in helping, why are you in this discussion making it longer?

I think that is true, it is often the OS that is not so simple.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

Well, we answer our emails - try the obvious one with the xxx removed, or ring the US access number 901-313-4312 during UK office hours - it's got voicemail, so we'll call back if we miss you.

Stephen

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Stephen Pelc, stephenXXX@mpeforth.com 
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time 
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Reply to
Stephen Pelc

I also gather that Rick has not used gforth before.

Rick, as a NONexpert in FORTH nor *nix may I suggest:

Roland Mas (

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) "Debian Reference" by Osamu Aoki (
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)

Assuming that current Linux and Windows versions of gforth are functionally equivalent that you first port your Forth program to the Windows version of gforth. That way you deal with only one new thing at a time.

P.S. I predate the use of transistors in computers ;/

Reply to
Richard Owlett

Clearly I need to learn more about using Linux. That is no small part of the reason why I am using the rPi. But it seems every time I try something new I feel like I hit a brick wall. I just installed Xemacs on the pi and when I run it I feel like I need to go back to basics. It is so different from any other editor I've ever seen that I am totally stumped on getting started with it. Fortunately it has a lot of materials. :)

I will try your command, thanks. Another learning experience.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

So I am improving... lol

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

Oddly enough this page seems to mostly talk about extending the Atlast kernal with C code. But it is something to look at.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

This command only turned up gForth and yForth. I'm happy with gForth so far.

I brought my laptop to the workbench where the Pi is and it is pretty clear that I need to do the remote login thing. Trying to use two keyboards and two mice will likely drive me insane... or more insane. It will also get around the lack of a pipe character with my Dell keyboard.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

Your exercise is one sided. What would it have taken for me to find the info with C? It would have been a large task since I know virtually nothing about Linux in general. You think it is easy because you have learned to do similar things and this is just applying the knowledge you have acquired. I don't have that knowledge so the Forth example is not much bigger than with C.

To be honest, this is not a useful conversation for me. I'm not really sure what your purpose is in pursuing it.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

ISTR the nano editor is not bad. I hope I'm right in remembering that it's available on the Pi.

Mel.

Reply to
Mel Wilson

Yes, I was thinking of recommending that; it's been available on every Linux distro I've used lately, including Ubuntu on the Tegra TK1 "Jetson" development kit. For simple text/code editing it doesn't have all the baggage of emacs (or vi). Worth checking out if you don't *need* multi- windows, multi-buffers, X windows, etc.

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Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________  CMS Collaboration, 
Brunel University.    Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch]    Room 40-1-B12, CERN 
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Reply to
Ivan D. Reid

Yeah, I'm sure there is a lot in emacs I don't need, but I do work in multiple languages including Verilog and VHDL and like the syntax coloring. Also, I'd like to switch editors on the PC so I am using the same one on all platforms. Nano might do this, but it is not clear from searching for this info.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

As you are thinking of changing editors, it would be useful to know if you prefer programming from the command line or using a GUI before recommending editors.

I'll make just one observation here: its worth looking at Vi or its improved Vim clone. You may hate it but its still useful to know because it is capable of running from a really minimal keyboard and screen. It can be used if the screen is so old or broken that it only has a glass teletype level of screen painting ability and a keyboard without cursor or function keys. If you manage the bork the RPi really badly, knowing vi may help you recover because its often usable when the system is degraded to the point where emacs and other editors can't be used.

I think thats a good idea anyway. Connect the RPi to your LAN and run PuTTY, a well regarded SSH implementation for Windows, on your PC and you've immediately got command-line access to the RPi via an SSH session as well as file transfers via the scp utility. This is known as running the RPi in headless mode and means you don't need a screen/keyboard/mouse for it.

If you want some GUI capability, use VNC: you run vncserver on the RPi and a Windows version of vncviewer on the PC, or there's a Java applet that lets your web browser act as the viewer. Either way, this lets you drive the RPi from your PC's keyboard and mouse and see what its doing on the PC screen.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
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Reply to
Martin Gregorie

Note you can still use the named pipe approach to multiple Forth windows by just opening multiple putty windows as described above. Run gforth in one of them and cat the named pipe to another.

Reply to
Paul Rubin

OK, I'm not sure if there's a "native" Windows version of nano. You might not want to go down this route, but I use cygwin on Windows and it does have nano. If you just use terminal screens it's not too hard; going the full X windows route is a whole other steep learning curve. (If you do go the whole hog with cygwinX, then (X)emacs becomes available on Windows too -- but I'm pretty sure there's a more-native version somewhere.)

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Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________  CMS Collaboration, 
Brunel University.    Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch]    Room 40-1-B12, CERN 
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Reply to
Ivan D. Reid

Thanks for the insight. I looked at nano and found that it was only available for Windows under Cygwin. Xemacs is available as a Win32 app. I have downloaded it but not tried to use it. I fired it up on the rPi and can't use it at all. I'll have to take some time to read the fine manual. :)

I'm taking the forth group off of the replies that only have to do with the rPi and not Forth. I think they don't need to be bothered by this thread for the most part which surprises me a bit. I figured I get some input about the serial port stuff from the various gForth users there.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

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