ROOL News: Latest news

ROOL Christmas break

Steve Revill — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:26:00 +0000

The RISC OS Open team will be taking a long-overdue break for the festive season from the 22nd December to the 2nd January (inclusive). During that period, we will not be responding to email enquiries or processing orders, but will catch up again when we’re back.

Have a happy Christmas and here’s to a prosperous New Year!

Bug tracker temporarily offline

Andrew Hodgkinson — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 10:28:00 +0000

A fault has developed in our bug tracker that causes it to consume all CPU on our web server when we attempt to start it. The problem seems related to the Subversion repository and causes sufficient load of the back-end database that the rest of the web site becomes unable to respond – this was the cause of our brief site down time earlier this week.

I’m investigating the problem but other commitments mean it may be a while before it can be resolved. In the mean time, if you have bugs to report or discuss, please use the bugs forum.

Thanks for your patience!

USB sticks available from ROOL site

Steve Revill — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 18:53:00 +0000

ROOL are very happy to announce the immediate availability of two different ROOL-branded USB sticks to buy from the ROOL store.

These sticks represent a proud milestone for RISC OS Open; we’ve been working towards creating a stand-alone RISC OS solution for Windows and Mac users since we formed in 2006. Thanks to everyone who made this possible!

Changes to the Bounty scheme

Steve Revill — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:37:00 +0000

ROOL are pleased to announce that we are refreshing the list of bounties available on our bounties page. We’ve expired a couple of bounties which aren’t really attracting any interest and we will be rolling-out a couple of new bounties for things which we believe are very important items for the roadmap of RISC OS development. Keep watching this space… :)

New offers and new prices for the latest Developer Tools

Steve Revill — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:25:00 +0100

RISC OS Open is pleased to announce the formal release of version 22 of the ROOL Desktop Development Environment (DDE) tools. Building upon the interim version 21, which was released earlier this year, the main feature of these releases is a major upgrade to the assembler ObjAsm and its associated documentation. ROOL is also announcing new reduced prices and special offers.

ObjAsm Updates

ObjAsm now fully supports the new UAL variant of the ARM instruction set, including over 400 new instructions. UAL syntax is supported up to ARMv7, VFPv4 and NEON™, for CPUs up to the Cortex™-A9. Pre-UAL syntax for ARM and Thumb is extended to its final version for ARMv6 and VFPv3. A significant number of extensions to the supporting assembly language have also been added, many of which have up to now only been available in ObjAsm’s counterpart in ARM’s RVDS™ toolchain, and the ObjAsm manual (supplied in PDF format) has been fully revised and updated so you can make best use of these.

All the new instructions, and some related new relocation types, are fully supported by Link and the disassembly tool DecAOF. An extension to the AOF object file format, to support new types of floating point linkage (mainly related to the introduction of VFP support) is supported in ObjAsm, Link and DecAOF.

Other Updates

Updated versions of SparkFS and !PDF are included. Squeeze has been adapted for compatibility with the A9Home. There have been a number of bugfixes to various components too. For full details, see here and here.

Sign-up process changed

Andrew Hodgkinson — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:20:00 +0100

The ROOL sign-up process through Hub has historically been simple and easy to use with low demand on web browsers so that RISC OS users running software of all vintages have a good chance of signing up. Unfortunately we’ve been forced to change this in response to increasing attacks from so-called “spambots”.

ROOL doubling-up bounty donations

Steve Revill — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:20:00 +0100

ROOL is hereby pledging to match, pound for pound, the first £1000 donated into our bounty scheme, spread across all bounties. This means that every £1 you donate is worth £2 to a developer who implements your chosen bounty. It also means that it’s in your interest to donate early, while this money is still available! We will keep the remaining amount available visible on the bounty page so you have some idea how much longer you can take advantage of this scheme.

There is one exception: we won’t be matching donations to the RISC OS Open administration bounty, since this would just be paying money back into the same fund from which we’re making the matched donations, so this would be pointless!

We will be starting by matching the donations already made into the bounty scheme. The donation matching process will be performed manually by ROOL staff so don’t be surprised if it takes a few days before the matching donation from ROOL appears in the relevant pot!

For more information, please take a look at this page.

RISC OS Open Bounties

Steve Revill — Thu, 26 May 2011 02:00:00 +0100

Development of RISC OS has been increasing in pace since the first batch of source code was published here on the 19th May 2007. There have been people purchasing the development tools from us all over the globe, from the US through Europe, Russia and out to New Zealand and Australia. We’re seeing more and more people getting stuck in and contributing to the future of the OS.

We are extremely grateful to all of those who are contributing their time and energy in return for little more than the knowledge that they have contributed. Things being the way they are, however, it’s sometimes difficult to find the time to put into such a labour of love.

What could sometimes help an enthusiastic developer to find a bit of extra free time is a small financial reward. And we think there is a way to do this: the ROOL Bounty Scheme. It is an opportunity for the RISC OS community as a whole to make their voices heard by voting with their wallets…

Planned web site down time

Andrew Hodgkinson — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:28:00 +0000

The RISC OS Open web site will be undergoing a few changes in the next day or two. These include an evolution of the existing site design which renders more quickly in NetSurf and replacement of the problematic Wiki engine with one which will hopefully prove more reliable.

It is necessary to take the site offline completely during the upgrade process. Data must be migrated from the old to new Wiki and no changes can be permitted during that time. The web server architecture is being overhauled too. As a result we are planning for an hour or two of downtime in the next couple of days.

C tools release 20

Steve Revill — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 22:39:00 +0000

RISC OS Open are pleased to announce the formal release of version 20 of the C/C++ Tools CD. This version includes a number of new components, bug fixes and updates. A full change list can be found here.

Free ISO download for existing developers

This release is available free to all current users of the ROOL Tools CD. Simply drop us an email quoting “ISO image”, your name and your Developer Key. ROOL will then point you towards a custom ISO image download for you to burn your own update/installation CD. Your unique ISO image will be uploaded onto the ROOL site for a period of one week for you to download.

Half-price CD for existing developers

Alternatively, existing users of the ROOL Tools CD have the option to purchase the upgrade on our printed CDs at half of the full price, which will then be posted to you. Send us an email stating “Post CD”, your name and your Developer Key

ROOL Tools CD for new developers

If you don’t already own the ROOL Tools CD but want a copy, you can buy it online from the ROOL store for £50 (plus P&P). We will send you the CD and add you to our database of registered developers.