Hello everybody!
If you were good, and Santa was better, you might have a RaspberryPi in your possession right now.
On this awesome little device, you may want to set up RISC OS.
You can! It's easy, right?
Just watch this video and you will have RISC OS running in no time!
A brief bit of history for you:
Back in the mid to late eighties, Acorn Computers wanted a successor to their popular BBC and Master series of computers.
Finding nothing matched their vision, they set about designing one, from the ground up.
I mean that literally, they started by designing their own processor.
On this new hardware, an operating system.
The RISC OS operating system.
It is simple and lightweight compared to today's offerings, but it will offer arguably the friendliest and least-hassle way to begin using your Pi for your own projects.
RISC OS is an operating system that doesn't make a habit of telling you what it thinks you want to you.
It just lets you get on with the hacking.
There are a five pre-requisites.
Firstly, a Windows computer. I use Windows as most people ought to be able to get access to one in some manner or other.
Secondly, you will need the RISC OS image.
This may be found on the RaspberryPi site.
Click on Downloads, you will find RISC OS at the bottom of the page.
It is available as a torrent or a direct download.
The third thing you will need... obviously enough... is a RaspberryPi.
My Pi is a second version Model B. It has two hundred and fifty six megabytes on board.
Unfortunately my Pi turned up just before the announcement of the half gigabyte as standard.
Oh well, this might be a problem with Linux and media servers, but for RISC OS, 256 is PLENTY!
The fourth thing you will need is Win32 Disk Imager. This may be found on SourceForge.
It is a program that writes image files directly to removable media such as SD cards, and is exactly what is needed for making the RISC OS image.
The final thing you will need is a 2 gigabyte SD card.
These can be hard to find these days as people tend to want larger capacities.
I am using the microSD [originally] supplied with my smartphone.
Obviously this was too small for the animé and music collections, so I replaced it with something larger.
And now, in an SD adaptor, it [the original card] is suitable for setting up RISC OS on a Pi.
In order to make this video a little less boring, I have skipped a few steps. The files are downloaded and unpacked.
The riscos-blah-blah-r-c-6 file is what you will download. At 98 megabytes, it shouldn't take too long.
The larger file, one point eight three gigabytes, is the image file unpacked from the zip.
That [the unpacking] may be a little slow depending on what software you use.
Finally, Win32DiskImager that I have unpacked here.
Let's go in there and run it.
As you can see, I have selected the image file, to write to the SD card in drive E.
What drive you choose depends upon your system - do NOT make a mistake here! Double-check everything.
Click on "Write", and if you are absolutely certain you are writing to the correct device, you can click on "Yes".
On my system, it writes at six to seven megabytes per second.
It's not terribly quick, so now would be a good time to put the kettle on.
One cup of tea later, the write is successful.
We're not done yet.
If you are using an analogue PAL television, there is something you need to do.
Dismount the SD card safely...
Eject it, and then pop it back in again.
Here are the files on the SD card.
Now, just to clarify, if you are using HDMI or analogue NTSC, you do NOT need to do this.
If you're using a PAL television, double-click on config dot txt...
At the top of the file, insert the following:
s d t v underscore m o d e equals two
Save the updated file, dismount and eject the SD card.
My Pi is sitting atop the Beagle board.
Connected to the USB are a generic optical mouse, and a generic British layout keyboard.
Video display is via the composite output.
Trying not to knock the camera over, I'll insert the SD card.
Remember it goes in upside down.
Now the moment of truth - plug in the power!
You'll find RISC OS to be astonishingly quick to start.
If you have an HD monitor, then that's it.
RISC OS will be right in front of you in full HD.
If you have a television, you won't be able to read a thing.
So I'll show you how to change to a suitable display mode.
Wait for NetSurf to initialise itself, it won't take long. [it only needs to do this once]
So let's zoom in on the bottom right part of the screen.
You will see three icons down there. Move the pointer over the middle icon and click the LEFT mouse button.
On the right of this window are three little squares.
Move the pointer to the middle one and click the LEFT button once.
Highlight the second menu option, and click the LEFT button once.
Finally, click on the button on the lower right of the window.
If you see this name server message, it is simply because your Pi is not connected to a network.
Move the mouse pointer to the SD icon on the far left. Click the LEFT mouse button, same for !Boot [but double-click it!]
This is the system configuration panel.
It is powerful but can be complex, so best not to meddle in here.
Go to the Screen icon and click the LEFT mouse button.
As there is no analogue video monitor, we'll borrow something.
Click the LEFT button on the square thingy beside Monitor Type "Auto", then choose the "AKF50" monitor.
Set up 16 million colours, and finally, eight hundred by six hundred resolution.
LEFT click on Set to make the settings permanent.
You have now configured a monitor so it will work well on a television.
We can restart the machine to see this take effect.
Now usable on a television, although composite video is inherently sucky;
but all us forty-year-olds will remember the days of eight bit computers hooked to TVs through the aerial lead!
There you go.
A brief look around, the Apps icon contains all of the things you may need quickly - alarm clock, character map, vector/bitmap drawing, web browser, editors, etc.
The SD card icon ... it's like the C drive on a Windows machine.
In here are folders containing a variety of things.
Feel free to look around, there's a veritable plethora of information for those who're interested in programming their Pi with RISC OS...
...including a full description of the API.
On the RISC OS Open website is something called NutPi which, at forty two pounds,
offers plenty of things to enhance your use of the Pi -
- photo editor, email, the complete official development environment and much more.
Incredible value for money, go take a look!
Thank you for watching.
I hope RISC OS and your Pi bring you lots of enjoyment.