What are you doing with RISC OS?

Risc OS really needs to compete very hard with mac and windows. Looking for opportunity in mobile OS as well.

It’s lightweight, and runs on a mobile-suited device (Pi). So, I would tend to agree.

My latest fun with RiscOS is trying to use it as a nav ticker. With RC15 in combination with the SerialUSB module and !Connect program working well with my BU353 GPS puck on a Pi2, I have half the battle won there. Now looking for some nice parsing software for the NMEA output.

Take a look at http://www.svrsig.org/HowTo.htm and RaspberryPi GPS.
Software is at http://www.svrsig.org/software/SatNav.htm

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the link. I’ll give that program a whirl … it looks interesting.

Currently I have just dug my RiscPC out of storage and have installed RISC OS on one of my R-Pis. Longer term I am thinking of coupling a touch screen to the pi and using it as networked music player. We will see how time allows for that – two young kids means little time for projects!

Got an A3000 downstairs but I’m not sure it still works. Have a few emulators set up on my PC though, mostly to have access to ARM BASIC for just quickly throwing things together (if that counts!)
Despite the shortcomings, it’s a lot less effort than dealing with Windows and Microsoft’s ever-more-complicated APIs, heh.

post moved to the General Forum; where it should have been in the first place.

Hi all

I’m making the switch to RISC OS as my new main desktop OS.
i love using the Raspberry Pi 3+ for this purpose instead of a big clunky tower.
All I really need is IRC with SSL support, and a browser with JavaScript support.
I want to use it for my work purposes and these two are all I really need i’m not already positive RISC OS fully supports?
But I hope to be able to do Audacity-like audio editing in RISC OS as well.
I think there is a great opportunity to expand the userbase of RISC OS.
More people want a lightweight and minimal OS and are looking for alternatives to Linux.
With the presence and ubiquity of Pi’s it is only natural!

TY

If I can browse the internet, print on my printer (HP Laserjet 1022n), use my Epson V37 scanner (USB), and view .PDF’s, I’d be pretty happy. Can I do all that on a Raspberry Pi 3B, running RISC OS 5.26?

Well NetSurf would be my preferred browser but there’s also !Otter which provides better JavaScript support but comes with a speed penalty. The HP LJ 1022 is listed as supported via Gutenprint (commercial) but since it’s a network printer there’s also a free JetDirect/PCL solution, so you’re good.
Scanning should work, no problem re PDF handling either.

Gutenprint
network printing
Scanning

Have a look at !Plingstore and !PackMan for stuff like !PDF, !PDFTest and !Otter

browse the internet

Limited.
Browse the Internet: yes
Use web apps: good luck

HP LJ 1022

The RISC OS PCL driver could work too.

Scanning should work

No, but since the Twain2 source code is available, a Sane backend could be ported.
Twain2+Sane would be perfect for a bounty, and direct integration into RISC OS 5.

https://www.davidpilling.com/wiki/index.php/TWAIN

What am I doing with RISC OS?

Well, I finally got round to learning ‘C’ and am working on my very first RISC OS program using the OS_Lib library installed via PackMan.
And I’m absolutely loving it. So much fun.

Fixed the patches on some autobuilder packages and got newer versions of some others to build. Mostly libraries.

Also had some success building Jam (Haiku version), cc65, tftp and some other bits and bobs.

Got the WolfSSH client and server communication to work.

Returned to my uSynergy port. I got a new keyboard so I’m feeling motivated.

Went back to bashing my head against a wall trying to get a freepascal core port to build.

Briefly tried to build Rust. It seems totally doable if anyone wants to put time in. I was having a weird problem. I think my setup is messed up.

Our boiler is on its last legs. All being well, it will be replaced next month. In the meantime…

It often fails to fire up. If it fails three times in a row, it locks itself out. Only a manual reset will recover it from this state (sadly, even a power cycle achives nothing – the boiler has no permanent mains supply, but remembers the lockout state anyway).

I bought some light dependent resistors from eBay. I mounted them on a small piece of square pad board, wired them to the expansion connector of my old BeagleBoard (which also acts as the doorbell server), and taped the board to the boiler with the LDRs over the three status LEDs. With some appropriate software, I now get a notification on my mobile phone every time the lockout LED is lit, so I can go and reset the boiler.

Interesting project Dave. Some years ago I had a similar problem with my boiler and realised there is gap in the market for a retro fit unit that would sense a need for a power cycle¹² and do that whilst notifying by mobile phone and logging the error.
¹Fortunately many things only need a power cycle.
²There was quite a bit of damage caused by flooding not far from me when a pump failed and it took several hours for an engineer to get to it to press RESET.

When I was still working, the parent secondary school has a large Windows network, including a number of domain controllers split between two computer rooms linked by gigabit ethernet (which was cutting edge at the time). On New Year’s day one year they had a power cut. Back in school the next day the IT department discovered that the servers weren’t running, and turned them back on. Due to the way that domain controllers replicate things, and the order in which they started up, it was around 5 hours before anything, even the admin systems, were available. ()Fortunately it was a training day, so teaching was not disrupted.) This produced a considerable effort to set up systems that, in the event of power going down, would notify the IT staff. It involved car batteries, inverters, and computers with monitoring hardware. The big issue was how to get the message out if the school had no power, and hence no internet connectivity. I think the solution ultimately involved a computer outside the school which continuously monitored connectivity to one inside, and “rang an alarm” if the connection dropped for a significant period.

Now it would probably involve something like a raspberry pi with a connection to the mobile phone network, and a power bank. None of those existed at the time, sadly.

Well I’m using the extra time while furloughed from Formula One, to redicover all my old RISC OS software I haven’t had time to look at, or get working again on new machines such the the ARMx6 mini.m and Raspberry Pi.

Its occurred to me haven’t written any new exclusively RISC OS programs since the DiscKnight front end in 2000, and I could do with scraping the rust off. (DiscKnight and ARMalyser command line tools were mainly developed firstly in Visual Studio Windows and now Linux. ARMalyser exists in 3 incarnations; Norcroft C, GNU C++ and C# .NET/mono). I have made a minor improvement to my range of OS stats monitor apps, so that’s a start.

I doubt if I’ll get back in to my most productive RISC OS software development phase which was after leaving university straight in to the recession of 1990, but as this economic downturn looks to exceed the great depression, I may well have that much time on my hands again – except for having to look after the kids these days.

Remote F1 racing. Airline pilots flying from home 😀

Remote Wakefield show.

Remote Wakefield show.

You’re organising one?

My first opinion piece on RISC OS has been published: https://librefree.me/risc-os-why-to-keep-your-eyes-on-it-going-into-2021
I had issues with capturing images of the OS in work, so I had to pull an image off of the internet for this one. This is my first of many posts in relation to RISC OS. I next plan to review the pling !ChatCube. I’m hoping I can find a workaround for getting images to work on my website. Thank you.

I had issues with capturing images of the OS in work,

Some things, written by less clued people, only understand “.jpg” as a JPEG image. They’ll reject “.jpeg”. Is it written by hand or using some sort of tool? I ask because the image isn’t sized.

Like many, I installed the OS, gave it a whirl, and quickly deleted it for something more usable.

ROTFL. Yeah, that is an issue… People these days have a set of expectations.

having it’s GUI and minimum hardware requirements decided on some 20 plus years ago

You’re missing a decade. :-)

A lot of potential wouldn’t mean a thing if there wasn’t a great team supporting it though.

I think it’s possibly also worth mentioning Elesar who designed a top end motherboard for RISC OS.

I feel like CJE deserves a shout-out here as well. Certainly, there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to get stuff happening.

It’s an exciting time to see so many teams furthering the advancement of RISC OS 5.

It sure is! Back when Acorn flushed itself down the pan, I never would have expected to run my favourite operating system on a machine with GHz processor speeds or a Gigabyte of RAM. And I certainly never would have imagined being able to put together an entire system for ~€100. I knew RISC OS Ltd were tarting up the OS for RiscPC class machines, and I knew Castle had a little bit of success 32 bitting it for their new machine, that was amusingly way better than Phoebe in every respect, and only a couple of years later. But, alas, ROLtd faded away, as did the Iyonix. So, the end of RISC OS then?

No. Somebody had the brilliant move of making it “almost open source”, and thanks to the HAL design, it aided porting the OS to run on other devices such as OMAP3 boards.
Then along came the Pi, which smashed down the price of these ARM development boards, and while it was pretty impressive to get a full ARM system with 256MiB and competent video for the price of a meal out, what you can get today for the same money is simply mind-blowing.
For myself, I have an ARMv7 (original) Pi2. I don’t see much point in upgrading as, well, this machine is plenty fast enough for what I use it for.

And that’s the thing with RISC OS. Very soon 5.28 will roll out. I don’t need to think “oh God, newer OS, it’ll suck on my hardware, I’ll need to upgrade”, as is all too often the state in x86 land. No, RISC OS will still take tiny amounts of memory and it will still fly.

Is it written by hand or using some sort of tool? I ask because the image isn’t sized.

I captured the screen image with paint and got a sprite, I then used !ChangeFSI to convert the sprite to JPEG. My blog runs on a platform called write.as and uses a connected site called Snap.as. In Snap.as you can drag and drop images to upload them and then it gives you a URL that you post into your blog post so that when the post is published, an image appears. With that being said, Snap.as did not accept my screenshots of RISC OS and thus I couldn’t use them in the blog post. I got some recommendations for other ways to get screenshots in the Community Help section, so I will try those moving forward.

making it “almost open source”

While this statement is historical as RISC OS is now a combination of Apache (most of it), bsd (some bits), and CDDL (some other bits)…

…originally all of the Apache bits were a specific Castle licence. This licence was essentially unrestricted for bedroom hackers like me. I could download the OS, tweak it, build my own ROMs, and even dump them on my website for others. Here is the text of the licence. What I couldn’t do is sell RISC OS devices, because…

…this pushed you into a commercial (OEM) licence, which had a somewhat different structure in that one purchased licences for each device, and you were expected to feel back your source code to Castle for inclusion into the master version of RISC OS. How lng you had exclusivity over your enhancements determined the eventual licence costs. While some people made a big creation about the “Castle expects us to pay them for us improving the OS”, I do believe that “no we won’t” was a valid option for the feeding back of changes (obviously commercially sensitive stuff wouldn’t want to be released).

That said, I never really understood all of the shouting and screaming. It’s perhaps something that the likes of Google and Facebook have conditioned people to accept – that a company can create something, release it, makes loads of money from it, and completely forget the underlying infrastructure. Making RISC OS available wasn’t free. Hosting it isn’t free. If a company is going to produce something based around the OS and make profit from it, then why the hell shouldn’t they throw some coins in the pot?

You will notice, on the other side of the open source fence, that being Linux, that a lot of the work is aided by commercial donations, or companies who employ people to work on projects. Everything costs money, and that money needs to come from somewhere.
Canonical (Ubuntu) and RedHat offer paid support solutions for their respective versions of Linux. Though, perhaps it is telling that RedHat probably ought to be wearing a blue fedora these days.

So – back to my question – why is it so onerous, such a big deal, if a company that takes RISC OS and uses it in something that they then sell, is expected to send a little back?

@ Rick

So – back to my question – why is it so onerous, such a big deal, if a company that takes RISC OS and uses it in something that they then sell, is expected to send a little back?

Just saw your comment, with some year of delay, but still wanted to add some thoughts:

First of all, I agree in principle with what you mention, however is the “licensing form” that is the difference.

Linux “economics” are based on donations, so the donor decides how much “effort”, “money”, “time” they want to put into it. While on a paid license is the other side that decides what they believe should be paid to use the product, and that could not match the business model or the market value for who decides to use it.

Now, on the surface, yes in both cases someone is paying or investing on such OS, so it may appear to be a very similar situation, but in reality there is a big difference (especially when one considers that if a company sells 3000 devices running Linux they do not need to make a donation for each and every device they have sold).

So, again, I agree on the principle you have explained, but the donation form is definitely more convenient for who will decide to invest on RISC OS.

With that said, it’s also obvious that the value offered by RISC OS to a potential commercial investor is minimal (if anything at all) compared to what Linux can offer. We all know and have discussed the whys etc. and this is another factor that can determine “why is it so onerous” to use your words.

IMHO, RISC OS could be improved to become a nice OS to tinker and have fun with (for an hobbyist market and enthusiasts market), could be improved to be used on some Embedded/IoT, retro gaming and retro gaming on handled devices. For the enthusiasts we can improve the Desktop experience to make it more productive and more fun. But, I personally do not see it as something that can do more than that, unless some serious re-design becomes a reality (and I don’t think it will, surely not in the short term).

My 0.5c

Hi All,

This is my first post so be kind 😀

Couldn’t see a “Introduce Yourself Thread”???

Been getting back into Risc OS, haven’t got myself another Acorn RISC PC again yet, but found my Raspberry PI 1 model B does the job almost perfectly. Got loads of of games working, few I still have to figure out the GemRB engine for Baldur’s Gate and Stratagus/Wargus engine.
Hexen 1 & 2, Duke Nukem and the R comp Quake & Doom ports which run amazingly well.

I try to do as much as possible on the little SBC so Ive over clocked to 950mhz and have active cooling, probably one of the only Pi 1s that has :D Ive done a few bits to prolong the life of the SD card like move the scrap file to the Ram Disk to stop all the little read/writes to the card.

I have all my e-mails setup and as I have the Risc OS direct distro of RISC OS so has all the Beeb emulation built in as well as the 26 bit Acorn mode as you all well know.

I’m trying to get the Pi 1 to almost take over so I can move away from my Windows machine a bit more albeit a little more limited way.
I’ve still yet to work out how to use the YouTube scrapper/ add-on to play YouTube videos. Heard it can be a bit hit and miss and not sure without the hardware accelerator of the GPU it would play too well anyway, especially on a Pi 1 model B? Correct me if I’m wrong.

Two things I’d like to do would be: get into coding probably just in something easy like Basic, so the platform seams ideal for this & use Risc OS for my SDR (software defined radio) receiver that I’m due to get, probably not possible – I’d have to do a bit more digging on info on that one. I’m guessing drivers is going to be an issue.

All in all well happy with the setup so far, like I say I’m fairly new and getting back into Risc OS.

Thanks people😀

Chris.