ROOL News: Latest news

New IYONIX ROM release (version 5.16)

Steve Revill — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:34:00 +0000

RISC OS Open (ROOL) are pleased to announce the immediate release of the very latest RISC OS ROM release from Castle Technology (Castle) for the IYONIX pc desktop computer.

This is an official release from Castle and represents the second formal ROM release to include changes and improvements which have been fed back into the shared source project.

You can download your copy of RISC OS 5.16, either as a softload (to try it out) or as a ROM programmer tool, from this page.

Please note that in order to fix the incorrect date bug seem on some machines in 2010 with RISC OS 5.15 or earlier, you must program the ROM into Flash.

IYONIX pc 2012 date problem

Steve Revill — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:22:00 +0000

Many of you will be aware of a bug in the handling of a year counter in the IYONIX pc which means that the date on some machines changes to 2012 when they are booted. This is a software problem and a number of work-arounds already exist.

However, Castle Technology feel that this is a sufficiently severe fault to justify starting work on the next official release of RISC OS 5 for the IYONIX pc – RISC OS 5.15.

The latest version will not only address the date problem mentioned above, but will include many of the changes and improvements implemented since RISC OS 5.14 was released back in April 2009. Once it is available, users should program the new release into their machines using a supplied flash programmer to ensure that the date bugfix is correctly installed.

Keep an eye on the RISC OS Open web site over the next week or two for further news on the testing and release process.

Note to developers: the development version of RISC OS will move to 5.16 (beta) as soon as the new official version is released.

Award for RISC OS port to Beagle Board

Steve Revill — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 02:29:00 +0000

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.

Seasons Greetings!

Steve Revill — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:30:00 +0000

As Christmas and the New Year is upon us, the team at ROOL is taking a well earned holiday for a couple of weeks. As such, please expect that allocation requests, source code submissions and other enquiries will take longer for us to process than normal.

Don’t panic though; we will be back in the New Year and dealing with things as normal again.

May we take this opportunity to wish you all a happy holiday and prosperous New Year!

—the ROOL team

CVS repository incremental archives

Steve Revill — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:23:00 +0000

To help people who want to keep a mirror of our CVS repository on their own machines, we’ve been publishing a cvs-repos tarball on our downloads pages which includes all of the repository (minus the CVSROOT directory that you have to create yourself). This tarball is automatically generated in the early hours of each morning (UK time).

However, this is a bit wasteful of bandwidth and painful for people to download and dearchive every time they want to update their local mirror. So to help out, we’ve introduced three smaller tarballs:

1. cvs-repos-day
2. cvs-repos-week
3. cvs-repos-month

These are each rebuilt every morning but only include files which have changed in the last 24 hours, seven days or one month respectively. We hope this makes things much easier for keeping your mirrored source repositories up to date.

Note: due to the way they are built, the archives do include lots of empty directories (the whole directory structure) but none of the repository files unless they changed within the specified time period.

Everything just got a bit cheaper

Steve Revill — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:20:00 +0000

RISC OS Open have deregistered for VAT so we are no longer adding this to our prices. That means unless you were already VAT registered yourself, our prices are now 15% cheaper. Every penny counts!

C/C++ Tools Upgrade for half price!

Steve Revill — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:58:00 +0100

RISC OS Open will open a new special offer at the London Show on Saturday. All existing owners of the C/C++ Tools CD with a C compiler newer than version 4.99 qualify for a half price upgrade to the latest version of the tools.

If you own the C/C++ Tools CD with a compiler version 5.00 or newer, you can update to the current newest toolset (version 5.68) for half price! Once your purchase has been confirmed, this tools update will be posted direct to you.

Come and see us at our stand at the London Show to place your order tomorrow!

Updates on the ROOL website

Steve Revill — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:51:00 +0100

In advance of the London Show this weekend, RISC OS Open have updated a large number of the downloads to the latest and greatest versions.

All of the source code archives are automatically updated each night but prebuilt items, such as ROM images and applications, are only updated when we perform builds.

To assist with the on-going work on the Beagleboard, all of our pre-built components are now ARMv7 safe and the OMAP ROM build is up to date. We’ve updated the RISC OS 5.15 ROM build (for IYONIX softload) to use the latest sources in CVS, too.

Helper required for Acorn World

Steve Revill — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:07:00 +0100

RISC OS Open have been planning to visit the Acorn World Show in Huddersfield on 13^th September. This is an exciting opportunity for us to talk to people who may not be regulars on the RISC OS show scene about the shared source project and all of the interesting community developments that have come out of it.

Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, we here at ROOL find ourselves unable to attend. We are frustrated by this development but rather than pull out completely, we would like to invite one or more enthusiastic members of the community to go along and represent us.

Even if you can’t help ROOL with our presentation, you should seriously consider going along to the show (which is running on the Sat and Sun) to see all kinds of fascinating exhibits and talks from the history of Acorn, including a presentation from Professor Steve Furber – one of the creators of the original Acorn computers.

Autobuilds and daily updates

Steve Revill — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:31:00 +0100

RISC OS Open have finished implementing a system which automatically rebuilds the source code tarballs on the web site.

We have also automated the process of testing various builds and uploading the results to our web site – assuming the builds don’t fail!

Over time, we will be extending this process to build more and more components straight from our source repository so you can be sure that the versions of software that you download from our web site are reasonably up-to-date.