What will you do with your Raspberry Pi 4 this week? RISC it for a biscuit perhaps? An update for open-source Arm operating system RISC OS at the weekend features stable support for the Raspberry Pi 4 computer. It continues a pleasing symmetry. Among the inspirations for the original Raspberry Pi were the BBC Microcomputer wares of Acorn Computers, so seeing an operating system that has its origins in Acorn's …
"I do like RISC OS, though cost of software can be a bit off-putting..."
It has been Free and Open Source for some time now, dear child. That is what the "Open" bit of RISC OS Open Ltd. means.
RISC OS 5.28 for the Pi is freely downloadable at https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi
In your rush to be condescending, did you check the prices of good (not bedroom coder) RISC OS software licences (talking about applications, as a RISCOS user I'm well aware that the OS is free to download)?:
Artworx 2.x3 £169
EasiWriter 9.1 £99
TechWriter 9.1 £124
PostScript 3 driver £35
GutenPrint to use some printers: Donation £10+
This is just to get software that has something approaching the quality of linux free software like libreoffice. Dear child, this is what "cost of software" means.
As a RISC OS user, you'll know that it's a small platform (tiny in relation to Linux) and that sales of commercial software can't benefit from economies of scale or be subject to cut-price promotional offers such as are common on other platforms. Nor is there a vast pool of high-quality non-commercial coding talent. Basically, your willingness to buy expensive RO commercial software is effectively a subsidy. On the other hand, the platform is definitely growing and the number of developers is on the rise. And I don't know of any other platform where you can can directly contact the people who've written the software you use daily.
Of course it's all you need, but what do you have on hand? :-P
The Pi-hole is plugged into the 4k telly in the living room right next to the router so there is some sense in having that one able to make use of the screen in full. I don't particularly want to have to pull the pi-hole to reboot to RISC OS; hence excuse to get another one. As if you needed an excuse to get another Pi.
> The temptation to pop a Pi 4 with RISC OS 5.28 on the SD card into the discarded shell of an Acorn computer remains overwhelming; tat bazaar eBay has non-working examples of the Archimedes for a hair over £30.
You could buy the Archie and fix it up.
Admittedly, the Archimedes isn't particularly useful these days, and I've done my fair share of modding computers and/or sticking things in old shells - I slapped one of the first micro-ATX boards into a NES case, f'instance.
OTOH, there's a lot more NES's about than there are Archimedes - Nintendo produced around 60 million of the latter worldwide (and clones of varying quality are still being produced today, in a variety of physical forms - handheld, direct to TV, etc), while Acorn produced maybe half a million Archimedes in total (sounds like exact numbers are hard to come by - https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/14754)
And on the third hand (hey, it's Halloween), if we kept every ancient relic in immaculate condition, then the world would be filled with even more clutter than it is now.
Still, when clearing out some very dead laptops (screen damaged, keyboard melted by rogue ash from the previous owner's dropped cigarettes, etc), there was an orginal Xbox - in it's box, which looked pristine - sat in the electronics skip at the local tip.
Alas, I have no need for such a thing, and nowhere to store it. But I was definitely twitching as I drove away...
All my Pi's run RISC OS. I also have a couple original machines (Risc PC 600 and a A3020).
On the PI you can write BBC BASIC programs, which includes an ARM assembler if you want to add machine code. The BBC BASIC is the latest version and can provide very low latency use of the GPIO pins.
"All my Pi's run RISC OS. ..."
Are any of them the (old) 4B, and are they any more reliable with RISC OS than they are with Linux?
I run three 4Bs (and quite a few more 3B+, a few Zeros and a single 2), most of them 24/365.
By comparison with the 0,2 and 3 the 4Bs are very unreliable. Absolute best uptime so far is about three months (then a crash for no apparent reason) but the most usual case is a few days and then a crash -- often when the wife plugs something into a USB port, or while she's ripping a DVD -- and that's only after spending an inordinate amount of time figuring out what you can, er, risk running and what's likely to crash it. Apart from the USB problems, continually large network loads seem to cause more frequent crashes.
This is all recorded using Nagios so it isn't hearsay. I've had Alix boards run continuously for several years with absolutely no crashes, ever. The 3B+ that I use as a thin client for my desktop is currently at 216 days 18 hours and counting, it only restarts when I tell it to. If the 4Bs were reliable I'd use them in preference to the 3B+, but at the moment as far as I'm concerned the 4B is little more than a curiosity. I'd *love* for it to be a workhorse, but it just isn't up to it.
Does anyone have good experience of the new 8G version of the 4B? Is it any better?
Maybe if you put OpenWrt on it you could do something with it. 1.0 and 1.5 | 2.0 Type A | 2.0 Type B | All versions
> Doing some tidying up a couple of weeks ago I found a "new" sealed in-box unused BT Broadband router from 2010. Completely useless, yet it felt so wrong to drop it in the bin.
I've taken to re-using old routers as wifi access points. I got three of them now, each with the same SSID and channel. Everything (except my Android phone of course) seamlessly switches to the strongest signal AP, resulting in excellent coverage across the house.
I have much difficulty throwing out old stuff that is working, it just feels wrong to consign perfectly working stuff to the tip. I tend to donate it to my local charity, friends in need, or I just keep it and use it, and try to buy as little stuff as needed.
RISC OS 4 and RISC OS Six are still closed source and owned by a company called 3QD. Essentially dead. It's a real shame some of the code could not have been released as there was a huge amount of big fixes, improvements and rewrites in those releases.
Some of the code I believe is copyright, respective of the coders themselves, rather than 3QD, so perhaps some of it could be released, but if it's not happened yet, it's highly unlikely it ever will.
Much as I like RISC OS (I had an Archimedes and an Acorn A5000, and used RISC OS on a RPC emulator for a while), I think it is painting itself into a corner from which it can not escape. It is still mainly written in 32-bit in ARM assembly code, and the world is moving to 64 bits -- it is even becming common that ARM processors are 64-bit only. And it can only use one core, where even tiny systems these days are multicore. Cooperative multi-tasking is also rather dated. There were good reasons for these design decisions in the late 1980s, but they do not fit modern computing. MacOS had similar issues in the 1980s, but when they moved to a platform based on BSD (from Steve Jobs' NEXT project), most of these problems were solved. Acorn died before it could do similar changes to its own platform, and attempts at moving RISC OS to a more modern kernel have been half-hearted -- there was a RISC OS style desktop called ROX for Linux, but it mainly copied the look and feel of RISC OS and didn't go very deep. And nothing seems to have happened with it for a long time.
So, I can't really see RISC OS moving out of a hobbyist niche and into anything approaching mainstream. Not without a so complete rewrite that it is debatable that you can call the result RISC OS anymore. It might be better to port some of the interesting parts of RISC OS (some of the apps, the app-as-a-folder idea, and the font manager) to Linux and let the rest die.
Much of what you say is correct, and the walls are closing in on RISC OS unless they find a way towards a 64-bit neutral codebase from their existing handcrafted, well-optimised ARM assembly code.
The people involved in open sourcing RISC OS know this, and I am sure are working out what needs to be done, and what can be done.
Assuming they manage to successfully transition to 64-bit, it will be the biggest change RISC OS will have ever seen. I really hope they manage it.
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