RISC OS on Raspberry Pi

[Michael]

Liz has already posted this in the news thread, but I figured it deserved a thread of its own in Projects.

As Martin points out, this means that we again have a British-designed ARM-based educational computer running a British-designed fast, lightweight computer operating system written specifically for the ARM processor!

http://www.osnews.com/story/25.....ce_RISC_OS
http://www.riscoscode.com/Page.....m0113.html

[asb]

I'd love to see some video of the board running RISC OS. I'm personally not a fan of proprietary operating systems, but I am very excited to see the device running something other than Linux.

I remember the educational game 'Crystal Rainforest' on the Acorn Archimedes being particularly popular at my school, though haven't dipped in to the RISC OS ecosystem since then. Netsurf I believe was borne out of the RISC OS community though, and that's a rather impressive piece of work.

[Beakster]

Great news. Really looking forward to using RiscOS

[flibble]

I don't have any videos of RISC OS on the Pi board, but I have a few photos

Pi Board mounted on nice perspex sheet
http://home.marutan.net/~peter.....g_7392.jpg

Pi Board running RISC OS, keyboard and mouse is currently provided by the laptop in the forground until the USB stack is up and running.
http://home.marutan.net/~peter.....g_7473.jpg

RISC OS 5 splash screen, showing a graphics bug
http://home.marutan.net/~peter.....g_7485.jpg

Closeup of the R-Pi board
http://home.marutan.net/~peter.....g_7488.jpg

Running some of the ROM apps, and showing a pointer bug
http://home.marutan.net/~peter.....g_7533.jpg

[Lakes]

Nice engraving.

[trevj]

IMHO it would be best for Raspberry Pi to seek a royalty-free educational use distribution of RISC OS from Castle Technology. (Purchased licences would appear to cost £1.50 each for quantities of 30 000 - but considering the low board cost, this remains not insignificant.) Although RISC OS is freely available for download, it really needs to be distributed with the board in order to gain maximum uptake.

Benefits to Castle Technology of agreeing to this would be:Free publicity associated with such a high profile project
Possible future paid-for adoption by users buying full-cost systems, such as the ARMini
Potential licensees for embedded systems, as a result of publicity
If the necessary legal agreements (not to mention technical work on the port) cannot be put in place by board launch, then how about a target of the BETT show on 11-14 Jan 2012?

[liz]

Well - really, the scenario you outline is one that's full of benefits for Castle Technology, not for the foundation. So if they're interested, it's up to them to approach us! We'll be hosting free torrents or links to free torrents of distros, OSes and other software here, and we'd like one of those to be RISC OS.

BETT - God, the very word strikes a cold finger into my soul. In my previous life as an desk and web editor for a couple of educational publishers, I had *countless* Christmases ruined by preparation for that show, and a miserable few days traipsing around it every January. I'm not sure we'll be exhibiting there this year, given where we're likely to be with software in January (we may spend the first part of next year targeting tech conferences rather than educational ones), so it may be a better fit for 2013 - if we do, I am damn well going to make sure somebody else does the preparatory work for it!

[trevj]

Thanks for the reply, Liz.

Benefits to The Raspberry Pi Foundation of encouraging Castle to offer a free distribution would be:Attract schools/parents who view Linux as being too techie (although the kids will know best on this)
Attract teachers/lecturers (and retirees?) to share their expert knowledge of the advantages/disadvantages of using RISC OS in education
Possible access to back catalogue of simple educational software (BASIC progs should work fine AIUI, encouraging teachers and pupils to write their own progs)
Possible access to further EYFS/KS1 software (if updated by publishers), which could be attractive to parents whose "target age" child(ren) have younger siblings
(Apologies for viewing things from a UK perspective.)

As for BETT 2012, if you're there (not you personally, based on your comments!) then attendees will take leaflets and can get their funding requests submitted to budget holders in time for the 2012/13 academic year. Everything doesn't need to be complete/working to ultimate satisfaction... just a demonstration that it's not vapourware!

[theomarkettos]

For anyone interested, we're trying to coordinate work on a RISC OS distribution for RPi in this thread on RISC OS Open. Feel free to join in!

[Martin Hansen]

#PiRO is official hash tag for Raspberry Pi + RISC OS tweets.
Regards,
Martin.
http://www.RISCOScode.com

[ukscone]

That's going to be one hot hashtag. it'll burnup the twitter "airwaves"

[ukscone]

The RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi (#PiRO) newbies site has gone live. Loving The Quicksand Font.

http://wwwPiLearn.com

[Bacan]

UK: your above link should read

http://www.PiLearn.com

It's just a little missing period error.

[ukscone]

Quote from Bacan on November 20, 2011, 20:44
UK: your above link should read

http://www.PiLearn.com

It's just a little missing period error.



yes it should but do you know the price of punctuation these days? fullstops are about $600 a bushel and don't talk to me about the cost of commas

[Bacan]

I started to create a replay that would just both of us into a lot of trouble.

So I'll just skip it, and get back to rainy day chores.

[toxibunny]

is this going to use the full hardware capabilities of the raspi?

[Martin Hansen]

An issue with PiLearn looking like PiLeam on some mobile devices has caused me to revamp the website as piLEARN. Have redone the website's graphics and all references to the word to reflect the change.
Now hoping to get on with adding content.
Got a ton of good ideas to write up.
Once a couple are done and posted, and folks can see the direction that the site is heading in, contributions will be welcome.
Regards,
Martin.

http://www.piLEARN.com

[Spankenstein]

Possible access to back catalogue of simple educational software (BASIC progs should work fine AIUI, encouraging teachers and pupils to write their own progs)

Will it be possible to run old Archimedes games such as Fervour and the BBC emulator (for Repton, etc.)?

Thank you.

[liz]

Of course! We wouldn't be much of a platform if we couldn't run Repton...

[trevj]

Quote from Spankenstein on November 29, 2011, 23:02

Will it be possible to run old Archimedes games such as Fervour and the BBC emulator (for Repton, etc.)?
Old Archie games would require an emulator, and I don't know whether Fervour would work that way. But Beeb emulation is good. Check out the software compatibility list, but bear in mind that a compatible monitor definition file is required.

Quote from liz on November 29, 2011, 23:36
Of course! We wouldn't be much of a platform if we couldn't run Repton...

Kids will love Repton... I remember waking one morning (at least a couple of decades ago) with the solution to a Repton 3 boulder/earth/diamonds problem formed in my head while asleep!

And while we're here, further to my previous comments about BETT, I now know how expensive it is. I also understand that if kids' usage is expected to be (initially?) at after-school clubs then targeting formal education is not a (current?) priority. So, basically, sorry for any misunderstanding on my behalf.

[tinctu]

RiscOs very very cool!!! I remember when there was ATARI STs and AMIGAs there was ACORN Archimedes too... It was very cool computer but never sold in central EU...
But I was dreaming to have one in that time. I had one brochure from small computer expo...

Still loves that ACORN product design (computer AMIGA500 like case).

[Jessie]

I have never used RISC OS. Now the big question is the £99 yearly fee the only way to get this OS? I mean that is a heavy investment for someone like me for something I don't even know if I will get use out of.

[helpful]

Keep up at the back there

You can download it for free (binaries and source) from https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

An emulator can be download from http://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/ to which you will need to add the download RISC OS "ROM" and disc image.

Or if you want to make a small investment of £10 you can get everything in a neat ready-to-go format on a USB stick, either a native one for booting a Beagleboard (not R-Pi yet) or the emulator version for Windows, MacOS and Linux:
https://www.riscosopen.org/news/article ... -rool-site

[DavidS]

I love Risc OS.  Does any one know of any to succeed at using the 26-bit only stuff on an ARM that does not have the 26-bit modes?  This is an issue that I have been trying to sort out, it is simple enough on 32-bit addressing ARMs so long as you have support for the 26-bit modes, we do not.

I would guess that most of it would probably run well enough under a CPU emulator, though that is kind of slow.  Perhaps some way to replace the Opcodes/Opcode sequences that are potentially problematic at run time (though they are still valid Ops so they can not be simply trapped).

[larsth]

asb said:


I'm personally not a fan of proprietary operating systems, but I am very excited to see the device running something other than Linux.


I had taked a look at RISC OS.

It looks nice. RISC OS looks much simpler (KISS principle) than Linux, so it should be easier to teach the art of programming.