Risc Os

[waldorfmuppet]

RISC OS was the first "proper" operating system on ARM.

It also, as an aside, had the best version of Elite ever made.

It has recentanty become, as much as possible, open source. http://www.riscosopen.org

I would love to see this running on Pandora - anyone interested?

 

[schnitzelboy]

yeah, um people having been working their butt off to make a good LINUX os system with gui, plus a bunch of the programmers are familiar with it, and have ported to it

so in one word
no

it's just unpractical in my opinion, why run multiple oses on a portable umpc, when most programs are only written on one?

 

[pcklee123]

I think you should send a request to info@riscosopen.org. They may be interested in porting to Pandora. Since Pandora can boot of sd card/usb, it should not be a problem for users to boot up riscos (if its ported). To make it easier for the riscos developers you may want to send them a Pandora.
What hardware does riscos currently run on now?

 

[icurafu]

Thankyou schnitzelboy for your almighty self-centered answer as a representative for the development community.

Let it be know that we should not port other operating systems because SB would not find any use for multiple OSs.

 

[senquack]

I've heard it's a pretty cool OS, a real hacker's OS some say but the only issue was that it was closed-source. Nice to hear it is open source now! Does it use the newer 32-bit addressing or still use 26-bit? Does it support preemptive multitasking? Always heard it used cooperative.

You're sure gonna have a long row to hoe, though, getting it ported over.

 

[OrR]

why run multiple oses on a portable umpc, when most programs are only written on one?

1. Because it's possible.
2. Because it's awesome.

 

[second exodous]

Even though Risc Os is now open source I don't see it competing for arm Linux users. If someone would port it and prove me wrong that would be great though.

 

[Pleng]

I'd really love to see Haiku running on this thing. Unfortunately I don't there's an ARM version of it right at the moment

 

[pcklee123]

QNX would be nice. http://www.qnx.com/

 

[Parkydr]

I've heard it's a pretty cool OS, a real hacker's OS some say but the only issue was that it was closed-source. Nice to hear it is open source now! Does it use the newer 32-bit addressing or still use 26-bit? Does it support preemptive multitasking? Always heard it used cooperative.

On my A3000 (RISCOS 3.1) it has proper 32 bit addressing and cooperative multitasking. I don't know if this is true of later versions on the RISCPC.

There is some custom hardware so it may be difficult to port.

I looked at this before but you need a RISCPC to build it.

 

[levi]

On my A3000 (RISCOS 3.1) it has proper 32 bit addressing and cooperative multitasking. I don't know if this is true of later versions on the RISCPC.
RISC OS 3.1 only supported 26-bit PC mode (though you could use 32 bit addresses to read and write memory, which I guess is where the confusion arises). RISC OS 5 supports 32-bit PC addressing, which enables it to run on the Iyonix from Castle, which uses some XScale chip (and doesn't support the older 26-bit addressing). In the other fork of the OS, RISC OS 4.42 is also 32-bit and runs on the A9 Home - which presumably means RISC OS 6 is similarly 32-bit. It's the RISC OS 5/Iyonix fork that's in the process of being open-sourced, by the way.

QUOTE
There is some custom hardware so it may be difficult to port.
RISC OS 5 has some form of abstracted HAL, but I don't know how extensive it is.

There has been some discussion of Pandora on the RISC OS newsgroups (see [url="http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.acorn.misc/browse_thread/thread/bb05d1246f9d7fe9"this thread on google groups[/url]

The main problem identified is some difference between ARM code in the Cortex A series and all previous ARM chips, but I'm not sure exactly what (pipeline lengths keep getting mentioned, but no-one who knows anything is being very explicit). An unknown (to me) proportion of RISC OS is still hand-written ARM code, so it's not just a matter of tweaking compiler options and hitting 'go'.

QUOTE
I looked at this before but you need a RISCPC to build it.
That's surprising, given some of the stuff on RiscOSOpen won't even run on an old RISC PC (you need an Iyonix, or possibly an A9 Home). Plus historically, RISC OS itself wasn't built on hardware capable of running RISC OS natively. I guess the riscosopen guys have included some makefiles for use with standard RISC OS build chains, for the benefit of users who don't have access to other hardware.

(Oh, and there's also Pandora spam in some of the Acorn newsgroups by a certain Raj Takhar - grr!)