A flurry of RISC OS news today all crammed up into one item. There is a story on Java and RISC OS, a semi-announcement to a new source code release of RISC OS 5 by ROOL, and the Faraday medal for the man who designed the BBC Micro and ARM architecture - Professor Steve Furber. In addition, there is a piece on last week's news about the think tank Globalisation Institute's advice. The head of the organisation (who is a former RISC OS magazine journalist) seems to think unbundling RISC OS from the Iyonix is a possibility. Interestingly, the reports excludes Macintosh computers from unbundling. Update: The Intel Mac VirtualRiscPC beta has gone on sale.
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RISC OS is very modular and has been so from the start.
It still needs a lot of development before it covers all that Linux or Windows does. Especially device drivers are lacking, so you don't have as wide a selection of devices as you would on other platforms.
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Freebasen: think Amiga like OS splits. The OS is developed by 2 different companies who hate each others guts. Version 0-3 were made by Acorn originally. Version 4 and 6 by one company (6 is just renumbered 4 to get them past the other group) produced and runs on some newer hardware and older hardware. Version 5 is made by a different company runs on a different set of newer hardware, it's v5 that's being opened up (a bit).
Two groups competing to be the king of the worlds smallest hill.
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for these really nitch market OS's the mac's might be the best platform for them to work for. here is why. the mac is very exclusive hardware and you wouldnt only have to write upwards of 20 true device drivers. as opposed to the endless amount of genergic x86 boxes out there. the mac would allow them to get it working quickly and focus on the OS and not how many things can we make a driver for....
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The mac hardware is a very poor platform for porting risc os too, because large chucks of RISC OS are written in non-portable ARM assembler, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
The (not very) open license even goes as far as forbidding anyone to port it to non-ARM platforms.
Also, how open will Apple be with regards to hardware specs?
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