Welcome to RISC OS Pi

Overview

This is the official RISC OS distribution for the Raspberry Pi.

RISC OS is a British operating system which was designed specifically for the ARM processor by the same team who created the original ARM. It is fast, compact and efficient. It is developed and tested by a loyal community of developers and users. RISC OS is not a version of Linux, nor is it in any way related to Windows. It has a number of unique features and aspects to its design.

• A super quick guide to using RISC OS
• How to get more RISC OS software
• Help and support
• Get involved

Networking Support

In releases prior to RC12, we disabled networking by default. To switch networking on, simply follow these steps:

• Left double-click on the “!Configure” icon on the desktop
• Click on the “Network” icon
• Click on the “Internet” icon
• Select the “Enable TCP/IP Protocol Suite” option
• Click “Close”
• Click “Save”
• Reboot (select “Reboot now”) and your system should have networking (DHCP) enabled

Keyboard Support

Since the Pi can use pretty much any USB keyboard you might find yourself with one that isn’t arranged in the typical large PC keyboard manner. In particular non-UK Pi owners will likely be surprised when they type shift-3 and get a £ character trying up instead of a #.

You can change the keyboard layout in the !Configure window – double-click on the !Configure icon on the desktop, click on the ‘Keyboard’ button and then pull down the menu of keyboard layout choices at the top; a USA keyboard will return you to getting # from shift-3. Brave people might even try the Dvorak layouts.

Another issue that might cause problems is with compact keyboards lacking a couple of F (function) keys and a Pause/Break key. Fortunately there is a module that can map keys to work around this; KeyMapper is at http://www.effarig.co.uk/riscos/download/keymap.zip

Put a copy of the module (not the zip file!) into !Boot.Resources.!System.350.Modules (since it should work correctly back to RISC OS 3.50) and add an obey file to load it in !Boot.Choices.Boot.PreDesk containing (for example):

RMEnsure KeyMapper 0.01 RMLoad System:Modules.KeyMapper
keymap 2 12
keymap 10 15

to map F2 to represent F12 (since there are only 10 function keys on many compact keyboards and F12 is important to RISC OS) and F10 to represent the Break key.

Refer to Low-Level Internal Key Numbers for the definitive list of key numbers.