Explaining RISC OS on the Pi

Explaining RISC OS on the Pi – what you get, what you see.

Hopefully this will address some of the ‘what can you do with RISC OS’ and ‘what software do I need’ questions from newcomers to the RISC OS scene.

Very nice. Some minor edits:
In first paragraph of Welcome to RISC OS, I think “font scanning” should be “font-scanning” and “anout” should be “about”. In the paragraph below "What you should see after …. " in the third sentence I think “different to” should be “different from”. In the paragraph titled “The icon bar” I would suggest “fixed address” rather than “fixed point”.
Another point of style: do we talk of the “icon bar”, the “icon-bar” or the “iconbar”? I prefer the last because then one can talk of the “iconbar-icon” of an application.
I hope you do not mind me “comma-hunting” and “nit-picking”. It is a kneejerk reaction, burned into my psyche after many years.

A few more edits (from another compulsive typo-spotter!):
Lines 6, 27, 40, 51: ‘NetSurf’ not ‘Netsurf’;
Line 42: ‘usage’ not ‘uage’;
Line 44: ‘networking and’ not ‘networkingand’.
Generally, consistency in the use of plings would be good; any reference to an app (as opposed to a function) should be plinged IMO, so !Help rather than Help if referring to the app, but Help if the reference is generic.

Otherwise, a clear, concise and helpful overview of RISC OS – well done!

Thanks Chris. I’ll collating a list of such guides on the wiki – have added Chris’, please add any more such guides if you find them. I also wrote a sticky post for the RPi forum explaining what it’s all about.

And it’s “StrongED”, not “StrongEd”. People who pointed out “Netsurf” but missed that one, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Another point of style: do we talk of the “icon bar”, the “icon-bar” or the “iconbar”? I prefer the last because then one can talk of the “iconbar-icon” of an application.

“icon bar” is the correct term, according to Acorn.

Did anyone volunteer to convert my welcome HTML pages from the RPi distro into pages on our wiki? I don’t recall anyone saying they’d do it, but it seems like a no-brainer to me.

A few more edits

Edits done (including ‘icon bar’ to ‘iconbar’).

Did anyone volunteer to convert my welcome HTML pages from the RPi distro into pages on our wiki? I don’t recall anyone saying they’d do it, but it seems like a no-brainer to me.

I haven’t volunteered as such, but I’ll do it if I find some spare time for it.

Cheers. Let me know if you want an archive of them rather than pulling them out of the SD card image.

I can do it. An archive of some sort would be handy, so that I don’t have to write the RC6 image.

I’ve uploaded an archive here.

images.icons.title/png is missing from that archive. Is it missing on the RC6 image?

Finished the quick guide except for title/png. Had to get a bit creative on the navigation, because I couldn’t do what the guide pages in the welcome guide did.

Will do the rest in the morning (UTC-5).

And the rest is done, except for that one image.

https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Welcome%20to%20RISC%20OS%20Pi

Fixed one typo on the Getting RISC OS Software page, that made it into that archive – it’s Gutenprint, not Guttenprint.

Nice one! It’s looking great already. Some of the images don’t work on the “Getting RISC OS Software” page – not sure what that’s about.

Gutenprint

Yes, I made that error all over the place and have been trying to correct it ever since! Guttenprint means “gut print” so that’s nice.

What we need next is international versions of the same pages! :-D

The weird part is that the images are there – if you go to edit them, it actually loads them.

As far as internationalization, does the wiki support that directly, or will it just have to be prefixed or postfixed pages with the language?

(I could translate into en_US… :P Actually, someone should check to make sure there weren’t any en_US quirks that slipped in there. There shouldn’t be, considering most of it was copy and paste, but…)

Fixed one typo on the Getting RISC OS Software page, that made it into that archive – it’s Gutenprint, not Guttenprint.

Missed one extremely small typo on page 6 – the “Next” link has an extraneous “tr” immediately after it.
Page 7 needs a space between key and press (“key press” not “keypress”)

Getting software page – missing apostrophe in the plingstore section “At the time of writing, this is a work-in-progress so keep checking to see how its getting on.” should be …“how it is getting on” or …“how it’s getting on”
Brilliant work to run through that lot so fast BTW.

Page 6 error fixed (typo that I introduced), page 7 error left alone (that is, IMO, a style choice), getting software page error fixed.

Out of curiosity, what’s the licensing on the RISC OS 3.7 User Guide? Did Castle get a license to it, and if so, did they open it, or is that all ROL?

What we need next is international versions of the same pages! :-D

If you’re being serious I could help with a German version

As a new user who’s only been using RISC OS for a month I wish I had been pointed in the direction of ALT-Break and CTRL-Break sooner.

A good overview, thanks for doing this and thank you to everyone involved in the Pi effort – a truly remarkable achievement. I do however think that there is something lacking when it comes to the Pi documentation.

In my opinion the great power of RISC OS is that it allows the programmer to press F12 and then they can straight away tinker with the OS via unplugging modules etc, write BASIC code and interface with the OS very easily. Then as they get more experienced they can write WIMP code, create application directories, obey scripts etc and it is all very painless to achieve. Certainly this is what got me fascinated in computing in the early 90s on my school’s A3010s and I think this simple interactivity between the different parts and being able to write powerful but simple code straight away in a standard(ish) language that ships with the OS is what is lacking from modern more complex OSes.

It strikes me that what RISC OS is giving us here not only fits in with the whole aim of the Raspberry Pi foundation but also RISC OS really is an educational OS that novices can achieve stuff in very quickly – whereas the Linux distros on the same downloads page really are not so much.

It would be great if we had some sort of “Learn computing with RISC OS in x hours” type thing, which starts off by explaining the basic concepts of an OS but using ROS as an example practically (modules, the task manager memory management etc), then explaining CLI programming using BASIC and Obey and interacting with the OS via * commands and oscli, and then slowly moving onto creating WIMP stuff via FormEd or something still called from BASIC etc…..

Nick