RISC OS Archive

Castle and RISC OS Open have revealed the details of their 'shared source' licence - which is hoped to encourage coders to download and improve the ARM-based operating system. The wording of the licence has drawn mixed reactions, and the first batch of RISC OS source code is expected to be released tomorrow.

VirtualAcorn today announced it was releasing a version of its RiscPC emulator for Apple PowerPC machines as part of a new beta testing scheme. According to their website, the publisher will release 'a limited number of VirtualRPC-AdjustSA products suitable for use on G4 and G5 PowerPC Apple Macintosh computers'.

"RISC OS is said to be used in set top boxes scattered across the world, and a mobile phone developer reportedly bought up a load of RISC OS 5 kit. But some applications of ROS are much closer to home. Martin Hansen reports on the growing use of RISC OS in the timber frame housing industry."

A NetSurf coder has sparked debate over the future of the web browser by suggesting ways in which JavaScript support and other features can be developed. In tentative plans sketched out by John-Mark Bell, which are to be discussed with fellow programmers, he suggested that version 2.0 of NetSurf could feature JavaScript support.

Those wondering what's happened to VirtualAcorn's port of VirtualRiscPC to Mac OS X should look no further than this statement from VA's Aaron Timbrell: "It has been delayed for a number of reasons. The main one being time. Both Graeme and I have been busy on other projects. Further delays have been caused because I haven't been very well." There is also an article on how to build RISC OS.

RISC OS Open is to manage the RISC OS allocations service after Alan Glover was said to have stepped down from the role. The list was maintained by Alan for several years on a voluntary basis. Now seemingly with the blessing of both Castle, the owners of RISC OS and developers of ROS 5, and RISCOS Ltd, developers of RISC OS 4 and 6, RISC OS Open have offered to fill Alan's shoes. The database is used by developers to officially reserve resources for new products and software, such as filetypes and system variable names. Castle boss Jack Lillingston said ROOL were this week "officially authorised" to take over the allocations system from Alan.

An ancient build of Linux for Acorn PC cards has been uploaded to riscos.info as part of a new drive to revive the PC Card Linux project. The zipfile dates back to 1994, and contains Linux 1.1.29 and suitable drivers for pre-RiscPC machines fitted with PC cards. During the 1990s, Acorn and Aleph1 produced a range of PC cards for RiscPC and pre-RiscPC machines, which featured Intel 486-compatible processors. This allowed RISC OS users to run Windows and PC applications from their otherwise ARM-powered desktop machines.

Firefox port developer Peter Naulls has offered an alpha-quality build of open source email client Thunderbird for RISC OS. The software is currently suitable for Iyonix, A9, and Omega computers only. You can get the build here.

Castle and RISC OS Open discuss there plans for the gradual unveiling of an open source RISC OS over the next twelve months. They explain their reasoning behind some of the source code restrictions in their licence. "Castle's Jack Lillingston opened the presentation with a brief run through of his company's products before outlining the shared source initiative - which is designed to get the source code to RISC OS 5 out into the open for free, and encourage third party developers to improve it. Steve then took over to explain more about how the project will be organised, and how they need donations to keep going."

The shared source licence being drawn up as part of the RISC OS Open project is in the hands of lawyers, it was revealed this week. In a report to be published by Archive magazine, Castle are said to have spent a 'lot of money' on legal bills to make the licence watertight. The company fears loopholes may be found in their complex shared source agreement which could allow royalty free use of the source code for commercial purposes or let people avoid disclosing updates to the RISC OS blueprints.

"Gosh! I didn't realize how much discussion my original article would create. A lot of people seemed to accuse me of living in cloud cuckoo land, whereas a lot more agreed with me. I think those who disagreed have either never used RISC OS or just liked a good rant! In either case, I feel compelled to write a short follow up article clarifying some of the points I made in the original article - all of which were perfectly valid." Read the follow up article.

"I'm a confirmed RISC OS user, enthusiast, promoter and what some may even say, evangelist. Why did I feel inspired to write this short article and share my views with people? Partly in response to an article and partly because there are a number of rather ignorant, yet arrogant, PC users inhabiting some of the comp.sys.acorn.* newsgroups who love to complain about RISC OS and prosthetalize about how good PC applications are to their RISC OS counterparts - usually without the skill set or experience to make a valid judgement. I'm all for argument, but when people argue through ignorance or though blinkers, I feel like shouting 'Oi! No!' in their faces, but instead I'll settle for writing this article."

A cheeky programmer has produced an unofficial patch to allow the previously Iyonix-only Firefox 2 port to run on A9home computers. The hack intercepts low level ARMv5 instructions that the Iyonix's IOP321 XScale can execute, and converts them into instructions suitable for the ARMv4 Samsung ARM920T processor in the A9home. On a related note, RPCEmu has been updated to work with RISC OS 6.

The Iyonix-only version 2 of the RISC OS Firefox port was released this weekend. Developer Peter Naulls made the open source web browser available for free download after generous punters donated a grand in cash to the project in little over a fortnight. A second release could be posted online in time for Christmas day if Peter secures more funding. Version 2 has no RISC OS-style menus, the iconbar icon has been removed, and the while browser does support secure 'https' websites, users will have to manually verify the identity of certain sites. Peter also hopes to use the NetSurf Unicode engine in a future release to display non-Latin characters.