What are you doing with RISC OS?

Risc OS really needs to compete very hard with mac and windows. Looking for opportunity in mobile OS as well.

It’s lightweight, and runs on a mobile-suited device (Pi). So, I would tend to agree.

My latest fun with RiscOS is trying to use it as a nav ticker. With RC15 in combination with the SerialUSB module and !Connect program working well with my BU353 GPS puck on a Pi2, I have half the battle won there. Now looking for some nice parsing software for the NMEA output.

Take a look at http://www.svrsig.org/HowTo.htm and RaspberryPi GPS.
Software is at http://www.svrsig.org/software/SatNav.htm

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the link. I’ll give that program a whirl … it looks interesting.

Currently I have just dug my RiscPC out of storage and have installed RISC OS on one of my R-Pis. Longer term I am thinking of coupling a touch screen to the pi and using it as networked music player. We will see how time allows for that – two young kids means little time for projects!

Got an A3000 downstairs but I’m not sure it still works. Have a few emulators set up on my PC though, mostly to have access to ARM BASIC for just quickly throwing things together (if that counts!)
Despite the shortcomings, it’s a lot less effort than dealing with Windows and Microsoft’s ever-more-complicated APIs, heh.

post moved to the General Forum; where it should have been in the first place.

Hi all

I’m making the switch to RISC OS as my new main desktop OS.
i love using the Raspberry Pi 3+ for this purpose instead of a big clunky tower.
All I really need is IRC with SSL support, and a browser with JavaScript support.
I want to use it for my work purposes and these two are all I really need i’m not already positive RISC OS fully supports?
But I hope to be able to do Audacity-like audio editing in RISC OS as well.
I think there is a great opportunity to expand the userbase of RISC OS.
More people want a lightweight and minimal OS and are looking for alternatives to Linux.
With the presence and ubiquity of Pi’s it is only natural!

TY

If I can browse the internet, print on my printer (HP Laserjet 1022n), use my Epson V37 scanner (USB), and view .PDF’s, I’d be pretty happy. Can I do all that on a Raspberry Pi 3B, running RISC OS 5.26?

Well NetSurf would be my preferred browser but there’s also !Otter which provides better JavaScript support but comes with a speed penalty. The HP LJ 1022 is listed as supported via Gutenprint (commercial) but since it’s a network printer there’s also a free JetDirect/PCL solution, so you’re good.
Scanning should work, no problem re PDF handling either.

Gutenprint
network printing
Scanning

Have a look at !Plingstore and !PackMan for stuff like !PDF, !PDFTest and !Otter

browse the internet

Limited.
Browse the Internet: yes
Use web apps: good luck

HP LJ 1022

The RISC OS PCL driver could work too.

Scanning should work

No, but since the Twain2 source code is available, a Sane backend could be ported.
Twain2+Sane would be perfect for a bounty, and direct integration into RISC OS 5.

https://www.davidpilling.com/wiki/index.php/TWAIN

What am I doing with RISC OS?

Well, I finally got round to learning ‘C’ and am working on my very first RISC OS program using the OS_Lib library installed via PackMan.
And I’m absolutely loving it. So much fun.

Fixed the patches on some autobuilder packages and got newer versions of some others to build. Mostly libraries.

Also had some success building Jam (Haiku version), cc65, tftp and some other bits and bobs.

Got the WolfSSH client and server communication to work.

Returned to my uSynergy port. I got a new keyboard so I’m feeling motivated.

Went back to bashing my head against a wall trying to get a freepascal core port to build.

Briefly tried to build Rust. It seems totally doable if anyone wants to put time in. I was having a weird problem. I think my setup is messed up.

Our boiler is on its last legs. All being well, it will be replaced next month. In the meantime…

It often fails to fire up. If it fails three times in a row, it locks itself out. Only a manual reset will recover it from this state (sadly, even a power cycle achives nothing – the boiler has no permanent mains supply, but remembers the lockout state anyway).

I bought some light dependent resistors from eBay. I mounted them on a small piece of square pad board, wired them to the expansion connector of my old BeagleBoard (which also acts as the doorbell server), and taped the board to the boiler with the LDRs over the three status LEDs. With some appropriate software, I now get a notification on my mobile phone every time the lockout LED is lit, so I can go and reset the boiler.

Interesting project Dave. Some years ago I had a similar problem with my boiler and realised there is gap in the market for a retro fit unit that would sense a need for a power cycle¹² and do that whilst notifying by mobile phone and logging the error.
¹Fortunately many things only need a power cycle.
²There was quite a bit of damage caused by flooding not far from me when a pump failed and it took several hours for an engineer to get to it to press RESET.

When I was still working, the parent secondary school has a large Windows network, including a number of domain controllers split between two computer rooms linked by gigabit ethernet (which was cutting edge at the time). On New Year’s day one year they had a power cut. Back in school the next day the IT department discovered that the servers weren’t running, and turned them back on. Due to the way that domain controllers replicate things, and the order in which they started up, it was around 5 hours before anything, even the admin systems, were available. ()Fortunately it was a training day, so teaching was not disrupted.) This produced a considerable effort to set up systems that, in the event of power going down, would notify the IT staff. It involved car batteries, inverters, and computers with monitoring hardware. The big issue was how to get the message out if the school had no power, and hence no internet connectivity. I think the solution ultimately involved a computer outside the school which continuously monitored connectivity to one inside, and “rang an alarm” if the connection dropped for a significant period.

Now it would probably involve something like a raspberry pi with a connection to the mobile phone network, and a power bank. None of those existed at the time, sadly.

Well I’m using the extra time while furloughed from Formula One, to redicover all my old RISC OS software I haven’t had time to look at, or get working again on new machines such the the ARMx6 mini.m and Raspberry Pi.

Its occurred to me haven’t written any new exclusively RISC OS programs since the DiscKnight front end in 2000, and I could do with scraping the rust off. (DiscKnight and ARMalyser command line tools were mainly developed firstly in Visual Studio Windows and now Linux. ARMalyser exists in 3 incarnations; Norcroft C, GNU C++ and C# .NET/mono). I have made a minor improvement to my range of OS stats monitor apps, so that’s a start.

I doubt if I’ll get back in to my most productive RISC OS software development phase which was after leaving university straight in to the recession of 1990, but as this economic downturn looks to exceed the great depression, I may well have that much time on my hands again – except for having to look after the kids these days.

Remote F1 racing. Airline pilots flying from home 😀

Remote Wakefield show.

Remote Wakefield show.

You’re organising one?