RISC OS Pi released (RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi)
Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 26 Oct 2012 13:35:00 GMT
RISC OS Open are very pleased to announce the official release of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi, “RISC OS Pi”. This is a watershed moment for RISC OS and represents the culmination of many months of hard work from a whole community of developers, testers and other contributors. It also means the Raspberry Pi can now boast support for the quick, compact, original ARM-based operating system.
This is the first ‘official’ release of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi. It is intended to be programmed onto an SD card (2GB or larger) and can be downloaded free from the Raspberry Pi download site, as an SD card image or as a torrent. Alternatively, you can buy a specially-branded SD card already programmed and tested direct from RISC OS Open.
Eben Upton, from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, had the following to say about the RISC OS release: “Having spent a lot of time in my youth pining over Acorn Archimedes and RiscPC products, it’s a great moment for me personally to see an evolved version of the original ARM operating system brought to the Raspberry Pi. From the Foundation’s point of view, we welcome the arrival of an alternative desktop environment, offering a rich suite of applications, and with BBC BASIC only a few keystrokes away.”
Steve Revill, from RISC OS Open, added: “We’re proud and excited to have achieved this milestone in the development of RISC OS. It’s so good to see some great British software engineering to complement the fantastic British Raspberry Pi hardware.”
About the Raspberry Pi:
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.
About RISC OS:
RISC OS is a fast, light-weight operating system specifically designed for the ARM architecture. It was developed by the same team of engineers who created the original ARM processor and has undergone continual development over the following decades. For the past six years, RISC OS has been opened up into a community project, with its source code published at the RISC OS Open web site. RISC OS is the property of Castle Technology Ltd and can be licensed for commercial use.
About RISC OS Open:
RISC OS Open Limited (ROOL) manages the source code to RISC OS. We are an organisation run on a largely voluntary basis. We also offer professional services to anyone who is interested in developing commercial products using RISC OS.
This is fantastic news. Well done and thank you to everyone involved in this project.
Excellent news. Congratulations to all concerned.
Jochen
Congratulations to everyone involved in achieving this.
Congratulations on this milestone achievement! Where would we be without ROOL?
Trevor: Still using RISC OS 4.42 (well, the A9home users are still stuck on that, right?), 5.13 (and on leftover Iyonixes only) or 4.02/4.39/6.20 on IOMD hardware?
Gotta say, this works quite well. Except for the ROM glitch with saving CMOS (and it’d be nice to have the GPU/CPU memory split as a Configure item (even if it actually just changes what start.elf is used), rather than having to manually change the file), it’s quite excellent.
Went ahead and submitted this to OSNews, too.
Nice one, Eric :-) Personally, I’d be on 6.x/4.39 (and a noisy HDD) without shared source RO5.
NewIT in Norfolk is selling a Debian RasPi SD card. Any thoughts on asking if they’ll consider doing similarly for RISC OS?
Does it support USB floppy drives and reading Acorn format discs?
Congratulations on the release. Should this be added to the main downloads html page? http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
I also noticed there is a Fedora image that is not on the html page. What’s the foundation’s policy on what goes on the html page?
This is SO cool!
Exactly what I was hoping to run on my Pi.
I had no idea this was coming, or even had arrived. Just suddenly thought this weekend “I wish I could put RISC OS on my Raspberry Pi”. Great timing!
BTW, the donation link on the front page is broken.
My enthusiasm was about to turn into cash, but it got thwarted ;-)