Award For Risc Os Port To Beagle Board

[timofonic]

We are very pleased to have been awarded with the 2009 Icon Bar Best New Development Award for the ongoing Beagle Board porting work.

A special thanks must go to Jeffrey Lee for all his hard work, and to everyone else who helped him. It’s been great to see people starting to turn our vision for the future of RISC OS into a reality.

Early in 2006, the team at RISC OS Open started the long and often painful process of publishing the entire source code to RISC OS and its related components. Our goal was to see new and improved versions, developed by the community, made available free of charge to all – on native RISC OS machines and through emulators on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

Once we had completed publishing almost all of the main RISC OS ROM image source code, work was started by Jeffrey Lee and a select handful of other volunteers on porting to the Beagle Board.

Jeffrey has almost single-handedly developed the Beagle Board port from scratch in his own time to a point where it is edging ever closer to being complete enough to be a viable day-to-day RISC OS system.

The Beagle Board is an ARM-based device: a USB-powered, low-cost, fan-less single board computer that provides laptop-like performance and expandability without the bulk, expense, or noise of typical desktop machines.

Our hope is that the Beagle Board, or something similar, will form the basis of the next generation of RISC OS machines. These low cost machines will run a free RISC OS, developed by members of the community.

(from Risc OS OPEN site )

What about sending a Pandora to Jeffrey Lee? I think they deserve it.

Craig could give a Pandora in person to him, since they both are British!

I think OpenPandora Ltd. should promote the RiscOS community to use Pandora. There are nice old school coders in their community, lots of them with great experience n ARM optimizing code.

 

[kingoddball]

RiSC OS looks very nice and simple.
It would be nice to have another OS to add to the list.

As for .pnd files, or pandora apps will all have to be recompiled and optimized again to run on RiSC OS.
At least Firefox is already on it!

 

[GizmoTheGreen]

id rather use chromium, or iron

 

[timofonic]

They are an interesting community, remember RiscOS is where ARM born.

In my opinion, this is one of the most sane non-x86 alternative platforms. Not bad corporate conflicts or opportunist companies lying users/consumers, they also still release interesting stuff and porting software from other platforms. It's a small but active and motivated community.

They also has market possibilities, this Open Source RiscOS could make the platform to get more interest. Embedded world could look at eye on it if they add interesting stuff for that, SoC support is a must and OMAP is one of the most important ARM ones.

This also mean you can use software without need to use an emulator. You'll be able to run classic software and such, Software for classic 26bit processors (yes, earlier Arm processors were 26bit instead 32bit) runs nice on new RiscOS versions by using an emulator called Aemulor with a BeagleBoard port in progress too!

Any RiscOS user or former user in the forum? I remember this platform was popular in the UK, most of the actual fanbase is from there too.

 

[jamesleetrigg]

I had a risc pc running RISC OS 4.39. it was one of the last RISC OS computers that acorn made. it has two chips one strong arm and one 586 chip. it could fun win95 in a window inside risc os desktop or full screen, at the time win95 had only just come out .

ARM have always been 32bit chip but yes part of the chips was 26bit.

the first ARM computer I had was a Acorn A3000 and at the time was way better then anything else just cost 4x the price. it looked much like an Atair ST.

the ARM2 was 4.5 times faster then the next fasts desktop chip at the time.

The government bort one acorn computer for every school in the uk. and even BBC TV adopted them. with names like the ACORN BBC B.

that the time they had the lead technology over PC's. Even Apple bort into the Arm and worked with acorn.

Risc Os also had may advantages over windows. It was fast. Was already loaded in to Rom so the system booted in seconds and could not be corrupted or deleted.


So I think it would be quite wrong to not have the OS that started it all on board.

 

[Poem58]

For those of us unaccustomed to Acorn computers etc. What are the benefits of running RISC OS over the Angstrom linux currently set up for the Pandora? Is it more of a second OS to use or being suggested as better to use than Linux here? Would it allow for more/better usage scenarios?

Just curious. Thanks.