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| RISC OS Pi released |
| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by bhtooefr on 2012-10-28 22:11:24 |
| "RISC OS Open are very pleased to announce the official release of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi, 'RISC OS Pi'. This is a watershed moment for RISC OS and represents the culmination of many months of hard work from a whole community of developers, testers and other contributors. It also means the Raspberry Pi can now boast support for the quick, compact, original ARM-based operating system." This is absolutely fantastic news. I'm going to try this on my Pi later this week. |
|
| Woot! |
| By Morgan on 2012-10-28 22:59:18 |
| I really wish I was at home instead of stuck at work all night. I think I'll have this up and running by sunrise though! |
 - Score: 3 |
| Cool |
| By Luke McCarthy on 2012-10-29 00:27:35 |
| I'm going to try it out right now. Is the Raspberry Pi now the fastest computer that can run RISC OS natively? |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Cool |
| By bhtooefr on 2012-10-29 01:19:07 |
|
Nope. That would be the PandaBoard ES, which has a dual core Cortex-A9 at 1.2 GHz. (There is also a 1.0 GHz PandaBoard that the ES effectively replaced.) However, RISC OS doesn't support multiprocessor systems, so one core stays idle. I suspect the PandaBoard also has the fastest floating point, as the TI OMAP4's version of the Cortex-A9 core has the VFPv3 unit included. Also, the BeagleBoard xM (1 GHz Cortex-A8) and BeagleBoard (600 MHz Cortex-A8) are both faster than the Raspberry Pi's older 700 MHz ARM1176 for integer work. However, the Raspberry Pi is faster for floating point, as it seems that RISC OS has standardized on using VFP for floating point, instead of NEON (ARM backpedaled on the whole "deprecating VFP" thing that they tried with Cortex-A8, now it's just that the vector VFP instructions are deprecated, and NEON is used for those), and the Cortex-A8 uses a badly crippled VFP unit. |
| - Score: 11 |
| site is down |
| By aurora on 2012-10-29 15:47:21 |
|
mmm ... apparently the site is down. too many people tried to download riscos? has anybody been able to install it? how is the experience? are there any mirror sites? thanks! |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: site is down |
| By bhtooefr on 2012-10-29 16:00:26 |
|
It got linked from Reddit, and I'm told that ROOL's site has rather... fragile... infrastructure. (And apparently it got linked somewhere on the RPi blog, which will take down something quite quickly. RPi's Twitter account turned my cable modem into a melted blob of plastic and PCB material.) Good news is, they're not hosting the Raspberry Pi image, the Raspberry Pi foundation is hosting it. http://downloads.raspberrypi.org... (both direct download and torrent) Put it on the card the same way you put any other Raspberry Pi OS image on the card - extract everything, then dd the image onto the card. Edited 2012-10-29 16:01 UTC |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE: site is down |
| By KrustyVader on 2012-10-29 20:29:02 |
| Also the site may be down because they are preparing a new image. I downloaded last night and it boot but fails to initialize the O.S. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: site is down |
| By bhtooefr on 2012-10-29 22:27:24 |
|
Nope, the site was down because they were experiencing technical difficulties. (I think they may be preparing a new image due to a couple bugs, though, but a boot failure is probably related to the SD card - IIRC it can be finicky with SD cards in different ways from Linux on the Pi.) Edited 2012-10-29 22:27 UTC |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[2]: Cool |
| By Zbigniew on 2012-10-29 23:24:44 |
| Actually, that would be some "Project Denver" mobo - announced by NVidia for this year - if it was in sale. We're reaching the end of the year, and they're still silent. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[3]: Cool |
| By bhtooefr on 2012-10-29 23:34:27 |
|
And if RISC OS supported it, which it doesn't (and usually a stable port isn't available until the platform's had about 6-12 months of RISC OS development, based on the past). Fastest single ARM core you can readily buy is probably the Cortex-A15 as used in Samsung's Exynos 5 Dual, running at 1.7 GHz. (The second core sits there and does nothing under RISC OS.) Once the X-Gene comes out, that thing will be an absolute beast. As far as I can tell, ARM basically outsourced the development of the first ARMv8 chips to AppliedMicro, and the X-Gene looks like it'll whip up on the Cortex-A15. And with eight 2.5 GHz cores. (About a third as fast as an equivalent Sandy Bridge core, it seems, but that's still REALLY FREAKING FAST as far as ARM stuff goes.) But, it's a server chip. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[4]: Cool |
| By bhtooefr on 2012-10-30 00:42:18 |
|
Gah, I forgot to clarify that that platform isn't supported under RISC OS, either. PandaBoard ES is still the fastest. I'm guessing the next port target that will happen is to the Arndale Board, which uses the Exynos 5 Dual. (So, same as the Nexus 10 and Series 3 Chromebook.) |
| - Score: 3 |
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