RISC OS on Raspberry Pi

RISC OS is actually designed to work in a small memory footprint. The whole of the operating system and all the supporting disc image including drivers, editors, system utilities etc etc will all fit into about 80Mbytes. So it will work just by loading itself into a RAM disc. Plug in external storage and you can save stuff. It's as easy as that.

svrsig said:

RISC OS is actually designed to work in a small memory footprint. The whole of the operating system and all the supporting disc image including drivers, editors, system utilities etc etc will all fit into about 80Mbytes.

You could get down to 20MB quite easily and even less than 8MB is possible!

So what we need is for someone to write graphics and mathematical libraries for BBC Basic using the GPU on the Broadcom SoC. Probably too large a project for volunteers though.

I used to run Minix with 2Mb of memory and Linux in a commercial environment with 8Mb of memory. The memory bloat that you see in (for example) a poorly coded flash applications which has 1000Mb of unfreed objects is a side effect of the environment that they code in. If their management cared about issues like this they would be fixed, instead they rely on the knowledge that the recipients of the software have sufficiently beefy hardware to absorb their poor coding practices. Considering that we are posting on a site that is offering a full working computer with 256Mb memory for £25 it makes full commercial sense not to spend a lot of time saving a few k of memory.

Computers are there to use, not to be room heaters. Whatever we use our Pi's for, they will need to interact with the outside world to be useful. I would love to have the option of running RiscOS on mine but until it can properly interact with the USB and Ethernet devices (with support for filesystems and protocols beyond recognising the hardware and applications to make them useful) it would just be a useless curiosity.

Has anyone tried to get RiscOs apps to run on Linux on ARM hardware? in the same way that WINE allows Windows apps to run on Linux on x86.

darkcity said:

Has anyone tried to get RiscOs apps to run on Linux on ARM hardware? in the same way that WINE allows Windows apps to run on Linux on x86.

Why would you want that? Another layer of abstraction is not usefull. If you are running Linux there are plenty of native Linux apps. What does RiscOs offer that is not duplicated in Linux and is worth adding more overhead. BTW WINE allows some windows apps to sort of run. Not really a good solution--mike

I've used WINE to run Irfanview and Appleworks portable quite nicely.  Some people have said they find WINE is more stable than Windows for some programs.  Also the overhead is only about 1% cpu.  In the RiscOS corner I was thinking about artGraph and various other art apps ; -)

mengel said:

Why would you want that? Another layer of abstraction is not usefull. If you are running Linux there are plenty of native Linux apps. What does RiscOs offer that is not duplicated in Linux and is worth adding more overhead. BTW WINE allows some windows apps to sort of run. Not really a good solution--mike

I have a copy of the OED on CDROM and the software for it is a 16 bit Windows app. Since Microsoft dropped Win16 support, it won't run under modern versions of Windows - it runs fine under Linux using WINE though. If there's no native alternative, running under an abstraction layer can be very useful.

That said, I think implementing a RiscOS equivalent of WINE would pose difficulties not present in WINE. WINE is just reimplementation of APIs, RiscOS more readily allows applications access to hardware and so would likely need emulation of that or face greater compatibility problems. There's also the issue of 26bit/32bit code to further complicate things.

Wonder if I can get a copy of this build before next Sunday? Would be great to have it at the Beeb@30 event.

Will have a word with the RISC OS Open guys.

Yes I sense a disturbance in the IT paradigm!

Come on R.I.S.C. O.S. its your turn to shine yet again,

in our darkest moment of need this may be your finest hour,

you can help us escape the clutches of the evil corporate empires

and the hydra headed beast they call Linux.

So I'm looking at you http://www.riscosopen.org

and you http://www.castle-technology.co.uk

and i ask "Please unleash the R-PI / RISC OS genie!"

If i was the one that brought the RaspberryPi to market i would include an OS. Preferably one that is small, fast, easy access to gpio and other periphirals.

Every RPi would be the same, student, geeks and others would share their information and that information would actually be usefull.

Not the 'which version', 'which kernel', 'which desktop' etc that will happen now.

Remember the reason why computers in the past were very successful.

Like the cbm64, Trs-80, atari, amiga, zx80/81/spectrum etc..

After that it has been a difficult time to have the latest hardware, drivers, OS's etc.

Wanted to buy a game, 20 lines of requirement. Want to do some wordprocessing 20 lines of requiremnts.

A Rpi with single type hardware, single OS would have not one of those problems.

Think how current gamecomputers work. Buy a game, put in the disk and play.

dreaming.....

[jamesh]

And that, of course, is why the Foundation will have a 'recommended' kernel, with a recommended desktop, and recommended educational software suite.

Any news on the RISC OS front?

I wonder if anyone has any use for a copy of the old Programmers Reference Manual for RiscOs 3? Free to a good home, though you'd have to live nearby as its too heavy to post.

the info is available online, so that might be your best solution.

; -)

I would love to see RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi, if only for old times sake. I have a massive affection for this operating system and I feel that, in the context of its time, the RiscPC was just the finest computer ever made by a million miles.

Even though I'd been forced onto a rubbish pre-iMac all-in-one Mac (eager to pursue a publishing career) I still really wanted to get a Phoebe 2100 for my own amusement because in most regards I still felt RISC OS was a nicer platform to use - especially the fast boots and the killer GUI (who actually designed that GUI? It's up there with the ARM for design greatness).

It was a real shame the Phoebe never made it to market as its spec could have made it a useful bridge to modern technologies. RISC OS was left marooned being developed on very old computers by those soldering on.

My mother still used a RiscPC long, long after Acorn's demise, with a laptop on the side when it could no longer operate well online, and still felt it had something special about it, despite its age.

BlowingRaspberries said:

It was a real shame the Phoebe never made it to market as its spec could have made it a useful bridge to modern technologies.

Have a look down this old page of mine which has an item on Phoebe

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/dav.....inter.html

Cheers, daveac

Great nostalgia, Dave! Still want a Phoebe. Maybe some scamp will put their R-Pi in an old Phobe prototype case.

My fave guy on the RISC OS scene was actually Charles Moir of CC - he really sank £££ into making the Archimedes a Mac-beater. Impression and Artworks were a real joy to use for graphic design and page layout and CC's standards of presentation were very Apple-like. As a young teen, I spoke to him a couple of times when Acorn shows were still at places like Wembley and you could kind of tell he had more ambition for the Archie than Acorn itself. I had an old Acorn leaflet for ages describing the 'Acorn Publishing System', which was an Acorn A5000 bundled with CC stuff and a Laser Direct but, again, totally half-hearted marketing.

I guess Acorn's main problem, though, was that UK investors only really care about property speculation and shuffling money around casinos. What might have been...

Anyway, what's the status of the RISC OS port for the Pi?

So what we need is for someone to write graphics and mathematical libraries for BBC Basic using the GPU on the Broadcom SoC. Probably too large a project for volunteers though.

Well - not sure. The Raspberry Pi is a cheap and simple device to attract users who would then move on to a more powerful platform but demand one that had a programming interface. Beagleboard XM perhaps running RISC OS. Or whatever. Even Windows with a copy of BBC BASIC for Windows (which has a huge number of library routines for all sorts of things).

There won't be public documentation of the GPU, so you cannot directly program it and use it as GPGPU. (That's sad, cuz I like the idea of playing with OpenCL on the Pi)

The graphics acceleration could be done by using OpenGL ES which is fully accelerated by the GPU using one of the Pi's Linux releases. I'm not sure if it is / can be accelerated for RISC OS, too. Question is, wether the graphics functions itselves in BBC Basic on the Pi are bottlenecks.

If drawing a line is fast and just interpreting the Basic code is rather slow, a speedup of the line drawing function doesn't add significantly to the program's overall performance.

Optimization is good, but you have to know when and where it makes sense.

Alex Langer said:

If drawing a line is fast and just interpreting the Basic code is rather slow, a speedup of the line drawing function doesn't add significantly to the program's overall performance.

I believe (as a non-programmer) that the interpretation is quick. It was rewritten in ARM assembler for the Archimedes. Does anyone else have a more definitive, informed comment?

And are there some reasonably generic BASIC benchmark programs which can be compared between different flavours of BASIC? (Written to genuinely test a varied selection of scenarios.)

[Davespice]

Hi everyone!

How is this going? I have my Pi now so if you need people to test things for you, I'll volunteer...

Thought there were plans afoot to show RISC OS running on a Pi at the Wakefield Acorn User show last Sunday. Have not seen any news about this. Did anybody go to the show.

The BeagleBoard running RISC OS at 1 GHz (a 25% speed boost) took the limelight this time around, along with a ton of software releases.

There is a brief show report on the Wakefield show on RISCOScode at

http://www.riscoscode.com/Page.....m0119.html

The next show is in Birmingham on July 7th by which stage I''d hope the port of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi that Adrian Lees is working on (in his spare time) will hopefully be released.

Regards,

Martin

[Davespice]

Martin Hansen said:

The BeagleBoard running RISC OS at 1 GHz (a 25% speed boost) took the limelight this time around, along with a ton of software releases.

There is a brief show report on the Wakefield show on RISCOScode at

http://www.riscoscode.com/Page.....m0119.html

The next show is in Birmingham on July 7th by which stage I"'d hope the port of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi that Adrian Lees is working on (in his spare time) will hopefully be released.

Regards,

Martin

Thumbs up!

What's that on the horizon - just a shimmering speck in the distance, yet discernably multicoloured round and spikey?