Got an Old Raspberry Pi? Try RISC OS
DannyB writes:
Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, literally, something else
RISC OS Open 5.30 arrives - with Raspberry Pi Wi-Fi support
The new version of RISC OS, the original native Arm OS, runs on eight or nine Arm-based platforms, including the Raspberry Pi Zero, 1, 2, 3 and 4 - and on that last two, this release supports wireless networking.
[....] RISC OS 5.30 is the latest release of Acorn's original native operating system for its Arm processors.
[....] Acorn's original, and very comprehensive, documentation has been updated for this release, too:
There's also a complete User Guide PDF included in our RISC OS Pi download - a 618 page book, also available in print from ROOL or Amazon. We take pride in the quality of our user documentation and believe this sets us apart from many Open Source projects.
[....] This is a fairly modernized and refurbished late-1980s single-user GUI-based OS, and that implies some limitations. It was first released the same year as OS/2 1.0, long before Apple System 7 or Windows 3.0. In fact, it'll remind you of Windows 3 on MS-DOS: it's a single-tasking text-mode OS, with networking, on top of which is a graphical desktop that does cooperative multitasking. RISC OS gives applications access to much of the memory map, and so if a program accidentally scribbles over the wrong parts of that address space, the whole computer can freeze up - which in testing our Pi 400 did several times.
But saying that, it's an admirably complete OS, in this vulture's opinion, with quite a rich portfolio of applications. RISC OS 5.30 comes with a selection of productivity apps, plus development tools, including a choice of editors, Python, Lua, and a C compiler - and of course with a 32-bit version of BBC BASIC V, a fully structured interpreter which also supports inline Arm assembly language.
[.... rest omitted ....]
It's fun to remember what could be done long ago on much lower end hardware of the day.
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