“US-based company Genesi, which builds ARM Cortex-powered appliances that could be compatible with the RISC OS Open Beagleboard work, is said to be in talks with RISC OS companies over a possible port of the OS to its products. It’s hoped ROS 5 could be made to run on the lightweight EFIKA MX Open Client, which sports a 800MHz Cortex-A8 processor, 3D graphics hardware, 512M RAM, wifi networking and more. Genesi analyst Matt Sealey said: ‘RISC OS is really popular in the UK and the last dedicated RISC OS box – the Iyonix – has been discontinued for six months. We are currently questioning the relevant companies in the UK, including [ROS 5 owners] Castle, about collaboration and marketing efforts, and the support they’d need to make it a reality.'”
I’m defiantly getting one!
Shame they’re no MorphOS, but RISCOS? Yes please!
sweet. now if only morphos would port to arm too, then it would be my alternative os dream machine.
Has it been confirmed that MorphOS isn’t porting to the new EFIKA? If so, its a shame.
Unlikely as MorphOS is PPC based.
AROS is very likely to be ported.
Cortex-A8 processor, 3D graphics hardware, 512M RAM, wifi
Sounds like the upcoming Nokia N900 hardware.
That’s because it uses the same hardware. A lot of other devices use it too like the iPhone 3GS and the upcoming Pandora handheld.
Not to mention the Palm pre…
Saying a device with Cortex-A8 processor, 3D graphics hardware, 512M RAM, wifi, is like saying a car with an internal combustion engine, wheels and windows.
Cortex-A8 is licensed by a lot of companies.
Edit: There are more ARM hardware implementations than Intel’s x84. Very little of those can be called “the same hardware”
Edited 2009-09-01 20:23 UTC
Yeah, I noticed that too. And it sounds like the hardest part of a port is not the ARMv7 instruction set’s requirements, but rather driving the rest of the SoC, and that’s completely different in the Freescale chip, from the TI chip they’ve been using.
i would love a netbook based on RiscOS and ARM.
batter life – 3 days?
power on to desktop – 1 second.. not far from the RiscOS Archimedes computers where the OS was in ROM.
No. Wrong. The A7000 (Last Acorn machine I used, RISCOS 3.6) takes about 40 – 50 seconds to boot. Whilst the *basic* OS is in ROM, it loads much of the rest of the OS from Hard disc. Even the A3000, which was entirely ROM based and ran RISCOS 2.0 still took around 10 seconds.
Hmmm. Some 10 years ago I knew someone with a RiscPC, not quite sure of the model but I think it had a StrongARM CPU. As I remember it, the thing would indeed boot in a few seconds. I must admit that I never worked closely enough with the machine to remember if it would continue to load stuff in the background (like Windows does since XP). But I am quite sure it was *usable* after only a second of 3 to 5.
Another thing I clearly remember is that the owner would often just reboot instead of closing all his open applications. It was faster and less hassle than closing all apps manually
“RISC OS is really popular in the UK”
True in 1989 (by virtue of Acorn’s privileged status in education), much less true in 1999 (by virtue of Acorn’s demise), hardly true at all in 2009.
Agreed. You’d be hard pressed to find more than a handful of Acorn users in any city. They are thin on the ground and mostly using second user systems that schools threw out or overly expensive (now discontinued) Iyonix.