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.

The RISC OS On Linux project has released the first alpha-quality version of their live CD. "A first attempt at a Live CD has been uploaded here (169MB download, a bzipped iso), the space has been kindly donated by Ned Abell. This CD should boot into a desktop with Tux on the right and disc icons for /home/rolf and /tmp, on the left of the Iconbar. In /home/rolf are three apps that should work immediately, !Terminal, !Viewer and !Vim. !NetSurf needs a little help to run, as does Inkscape, which has no application directory yet." ROLF is a user space layer above the Linux Kernel, providing a superset of the RISC OS look and feel on Linux.

The Amiga world is an interesting one to follow. As an outsider, it is almost impossible to fully understand all the processes at work over there. The various companies, the individuals, the developers, The Three Men And A Cow who own an AmigaOne - they are not making it any easier. The past few weeks have seen quite a few news items regarding the Amiga platform. Did they help in creating a clearer picture of where the Amiga stands?

The LLVM Project recently released a new version of their compiler, optimizer and code generators. LLVM includes a drop-in GCC-compatible C/C++ and ObjC compiler, mature optimization technology (including cross file/whole program optimization), and a highly optimizing code generator. For people who enjoy hacking on compilers and runtimes, LLVM provides libraries for implementing custom optimizers and code generators including JIT compiler support. This release is the first to provide beta GCC 4.2 compatibility as well as the new "clang" C/ObjC front-end, which provides capabilities to build source-to-source translators and many other tools.

The IBM Installation Toolkit for Linux on POWER simplifies the installation of Linux on virtualized and non-virtualized Power machines, gives you a bootable rescue DVD, and provides the software needed to fully exploit the Power platform. Learn to use the toolkit to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on IBM System p and System i5 machines.

Miray Software has released the first version of its newly developed embedded RTOS, Symobi. "Symobi was introduced in professional circles for the first time on the Systems 2006 exposition. Symobi is a graphical RTOS with a newly designed architecture, according to state-of-the-art technology. It is based on the microkernel system µnOS, which was also developed by Miray Software. Therefore, Symobi has its main characteristics - real-time, stability, portability, and modularity - and expands it with new services. The research team of Prof. Dr. Uwe Baumgarten of the Technical University Munich is also involved in the development." There are screenshots, as well as a live CD (for x86 and the Pegasos II/ODW).