RISC OS comes to Raspberry Pi
Who remembers their BBC BASIC syntax?
RISC OS, the operating system with its roots in Acorn's 1987 Archimedes micro and therefore the birth of the ARM processor architecture, has been released for the Raspberry Pi.
Available as a free download, or pre-loaded onto an SD card for £10 plus postage, the release for the Pi is version 5.19 RC6. There's also a £35 software bundle on offer, dubbed NutPi, that includes all manner of useful applications to turn a RISC OS Pi into a viable everyday machine.
The OS will confront users with the need to learn some technical skills almost as soon as it is booted, as the Pi's ethernet port is switched off by default in order to speed boot times.
A tutorial available as part of the default install explains how to enable networking.
If that's not enough for you, the OS also includes BBC BASIC, giving your hippocampus the chance to dredge up some very old syntax from deep memory.
The RISC OS version offered is release 5.19 RC6 and has already had a few changes made, detailed here, since a late October pre-release. ®
COMMENTS
Re: Whoo Hooo!
Unix perhaps. Linux = 1991.
I'll go pedant at people somewhere else now.
My second childhood is beckoning (pouting lasciviously, actually)
First step was buying the "Acorn User" DVDs from http://www.acornelectron.co.uk/p-dvd.php#au_dvd_1 - cue much ooohing and aaahing and cooing as all those neurons that have been napping for almost three decades jumped up and fired away.
And now a (sort-of) Arc for a mere hanky-load of groats? All I can say is...
100 DEF PROCAsm
110 DIM store 100
120 P% = store
130 [ MOV R0, #42 ; built-in assembler, wheeee!
140 MOV R15, R14
150 ]
160 ENDPROC
Re: Write your own TCP/IP stack?
"So given you need to hack it to even enable the network port do you have to write your own TCP/IP stack too?"
Hack it? <sigh>
It's a pointy-clicky configuration tool that you tell it how the network behaves (static IP, DHCP, blah blah). Give it the right info, it is done. No, you don't need to write a stack. There's one built in. I guess, since you call the machines "Archimedes", that it has been a really long time since you'd used RISC OS...
"I'm only being semi-facetious here as ISTR the simplest (and most reliable) way to get the last model of Archimedes online was to buy an add-on card which was basically a 486SX25 with 4MB of RAM - and run Windows For Workgroups or Win3.1 with trumpet winsock."
You really don't have much of a clue, do you? Okay, so setting up ka9q was a serious pain in the ass. Well, Argo Interactive put together a floppy disc of stuff. An entire internet suite on a floppy disc (this in the days before widespread scripting and when HTML 3.2 was cutting edge). Anyway, put the disc into the machine, let it install some stuff. Run it, and off you go. I remember thinking it was going to be a BBS killer because you could download stuff (which took ages at 28k8) and do other stuff at the same time. Like try to figure out the best syntax to get altavista to return the results you really wanted...
"given the RiscOS internet apps were crap."
They are lacking now. I'm not so sure back then. Heck, Webite made a better attempt than Mosaic. Fresco and Oregano did a reasonable job with the whole "Best viewed with MSIE 3!" style pages. I think it started to come unstuck around the time of HTML 4 (anybody remember "frameset"? ;-) ) when the world went "yay" for scripts and flash and real video (as opposed, I guess, to fake video?).
Pluto was hands down better than most of the mainstream packages around. These days we have Thunderbird. Fifteen years ago, we didn't. But then, I decided to write my own mail fetcher because I wanted to discard messages that were "too big" and so on. I wrote it in BBC BASIC. Because I could. Talks POP3, it'd probably still work...
"my current Raspberry Pi issues are more demanding"
Mmm, enjoy yourself. You look at DVDs, I'll look at RISC OS's kernel source. We all have our own definitions of "fun".
first post made the point I wanted to make
giving your hippocampus the chance to dredge up some very old syntax from deep memory.
BBC Basic has an embedded assembler, so you've actually got two different syntaxes to remember (or, in my case, learn).
Co-operative multitasking
Co-operative multitasking in itself *can* work well - it's great for simple high-throughput servers (pretty much how Novell's NetWare was built, though it added basic 'pseudo pre-emption later') - though it does fail badly in a lot of cases too. There's some basic command-line-only multitasking available on RISC OS in the form of TaskWindows, which might help with the package manager, and someone actually got quite a long way towards implementing a pre-emptive scheduler under the name Wimp2 (the original desktop being 'the WIMP').
(Quite an impressive feat that Windows managed to jump from cooperative to preemptive multitasking along with the 16-32 bit move, while keeping the API almost identical; there are a few catches in the RISC OS API which make this more difficult, as I recall, which is a shame.)
