image

RISCO OS is an operating system originally designed by Acorn in the 1980s and and development continues to this day for ARM platforms. The RISC OS Open team have released a version for the Raspberry Pi.  To give it a try you will need a SD card that is 2GB or larger and then your ready to use the OS that ran on the Acorn Archimedes, go to the Raspberry Pi download site to get the image.

It’s great to have an alternative OS to play with on the Pi, I tried an beta build and it’s certainly different to Debian.

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 the first ‘official’ release of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi. It is intended to be programmed onto an SD card (2GB or larger) and can be downloaded free from the Raspberry Pi download site, as an SD card image or as a torrent. Alternatively, you can buy a specially-branded SD card already programmed and tested direct from RISC OS Open.

Eben Upton, from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, had the following to say about the RISC OS release: “Having spent a lot of time in my youth pining over Acorn Archimedes and RiscPC products, it’s a great moment for me personally to see an evolved version of the original ARM operating system brought to the Raspberry Pi. From the Foundation’s point of view, we welcome the arrival of an alternative desktop environment, offering a rich suite of applications, and with BBC BASIC only a few keystrokes away.”

Steve Revill, from RISC OS Open, added: “We’re proud and excited to have achieved this milestone in the development of RISC OS. It’s so good to see some great British software engineering to complement the fantastic British Raspberry Pi hardware.”

Leave a Reply