At last! RISC OS is back on NOOBS
Posted by Steve Revill Thu, 25 Oct 2018 09:23:00 GMT
Great news! RISC OS is back in the list of Operating Systems supplied as a part of the Raspberry Pi NOOBS – New Out Of the Box Software. It dropped off the list a couple of years ago when our support for the Pi 3 took longer to appear than we’d hoped, but now it’s back!
If you’ve never tried RISC OS (on the Raspberry Pi) before, it has never been easier to give it a spin. Just follow the NOOBS setup guide (or watch the video), select “RISC OS” and off you go! Be sure to also have a quick skim over our super-quick guide to understand some of the ways RISC OS is different to anything you may have used before.
The version you download is RISC OS 5.26 (stable), which is the first ‘stable’ release under the Apache 2.0 license. This is functionally identical to RISC OS 5.24 but for some behind-the-scenes tweaks (e.g. the license file supplied in the $.Sources directory).
Another behind-the-scenes change is that the files comprising the RISC OS part of the NOOBS release are now hosted on a ROOL server, rather than a Raspberry Pi server, which should make things simpler for us in future when rolling-out updates.
There is a known issue where the under-voltage ‘lightning’ symbol sometimes appears when doing intensive SD card activity and will be investigated in due course, however it is not believed to be a blocker. It may just be a side-effect of the fact that we’re now using relatively new firmware and it has exposed something that was actually happening all along.
Are we sure about this? The NOOBS page still seems to refer to a version from early October, but the new RISC OS build should surely be dated this week?
If you have an Internet connection then NOOBS will pull the OS list from online. RISC OS does indeed show up now, and as noted above it reports itself as 5.26. Unfortunately it still has a broken install of PackMan :(
Yes, the Pi site still needs updating. And no, we’ve not fixed PackMan yet because this is functionally identical to 5.24.
Are you sure the lighting bolt symbol isn’t an overlay produced by the display itself? What’s causing the power drain is a related issue, but surely neither would occur on a display not powered via the RPi, as recommended by the ’Foundation?
The RPi firmware generates the lightning bolt, not the display.