ROOL News: Latest news

RISC OS Open at Wakefield 2013

Steve Revill — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 16:18:00 +0000

RISC OS Open are pleased to announce that we will be attending the ever-popular Wakefield Show on Saturday 20th April.

We hope to see you all there!

Raspberry Pi release RC8 out now

Steve Revill — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:09:00 +0000

The updated release candidate of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi can now be downloaded as a compressed SD card image from the Raspberry Pi downloads page.

Raspberry Pi release RC7 out now

Steve Revill — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 12:44:00 +0000

The latest release candidate of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi can now be downloaded as a compressed SD card image from the Raspberry Pi downloads page.

This release is primarily intended to address problems with compatability with Raspberry Pi hardware using Hynix RAM chips. There are no changes to the Filecore partition (the RISC OS boot sequence and disc image) between this release (RC7) and the previous release (RC6).

A summary of all the changes in the RISC OS ROM image can be found here with the full-fat change list here.

Keep up to date!

Steve Revill — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 16:39:00 +0000

If you want to know what’s going on in the RISC OS world, you can do a lot worse than looking in our forums. You can also see what we’re up to on our Facebook page (rool.social) and Twitter feed (@risc_os).

There are also loads of handy sites like these:

And for those of you who like it old school, there are the “comp.sys.acorn.*” usenet groups.

There’s always lots going on behind the scenes, too. We’d love to post more updates to keep everyone informed but there’s just so little time! If anyone fancies helping out with putting out regular update posts about all things RISC OS, please get in touch here (subject “news help”).

RISC OS Open Christmas down time

Steve Revill — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 13:26:00 +0000

We hope everyone is ready for an end-of-year break – we certainly are. RISC OS Open is planning to shut down over the holidays from Sat 22nd Dec 2012 to Sun 6th Jan 2013 inclusive. We may still keep an eye on emails and the site but cannot guarantee anything!

Please also note that any orders or other enquiries placed over this period will probably not be dealt with until we return.

See you all in the New Year!

Raspberry Pi interest breaks site traffic records

Andrew Hodgkinson — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:16:00 +0000

Over the years traffic to the ROOL web site steadily increased as news of the project gently spread out from the core RISC OS crowd to a wider audience. As more and more of the OS became available, our site page hits gradually increased, along with the amount of data we sent out (bandwidth used) each month.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Raspberry Pi release created a big spike in traffic. We fell just slightly short of 2 million hits in November 2012, with over 115GiB of data sent out. In the whole year of 2011 we reached 5.5M hits and 160GiB data; the October and November 2012 data total exceeds all of 2011 and the hit count is already at over ten million for the year, with most of December still to come.

VAT registration

Steve Revill — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 11:32:00 +0000

RISC OS Open is, once again, a VAT-registered company. We’ve done this voluntarily because it looks like there’s a danger (!) our turnover could get towards the threshold for compulsory registration by the end of our financial year.

This is clearly great news in that it shows just how popular our various merchandise items are (mind you, ROOL only gets a small cut in the end from most of it and please remember that turnover does not mean profit), but it does mean our prices to ordinary users are affected.

RISC OS in the news

Steve Revill — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 13:57:00 +0000

Here is a selection of links to recent RISC OS news from sites outside our community:

We will keep you posted as soon as we spot any more – or add your own finds to the comments…

Official release of RISC OS for Raspberry Pi - updated

Steve Revill — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:02:00 +0000

We have updated the official release of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi (RISC OS Pi) to address a number of issues that were spotted in our first release. The updated image has now been made available for download here.

Take a look at the first official announcement from the Foundation on the Raspberry Pi web site.

If you’re new to RISC OS, you can find a quick overview here and in the “A Stroll Around RISC OS” PDF document here (plus, of course, on the RISC OS Open site!).

Don’t forget, for your convenience and enjoyment, you can buy RISC OS Pi pre-imaged and tested on an SD card from RISC OS Open, as well as the fantastic NutPi add-on pack. See our store pages for more information.

Intermittent web site service

Andrew Hodgkinson — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 22:25:00 +0000

ROOL is currently having some trouble with its web site, partly related to the surge in visits following the release of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi.

Some sections of the web site will not be available at all during this time (you may see “Not Found” pages or similar errors).

We are taking steps to try and maintain a minimal service level until we can get to the bottom of the underlying issue. Please bear with us in the mean time; sorry for the service interruption.

If the forum is up, you may find further information in this discussion thread.