R-Comp recently announced two new systems, both based around the Raspberry Pi 5 compute module – the 5idekick, and the Pi5erve – and on Monday, 21st July Andrew Rawnsley will be talking to the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) about these machines and other recent developments and updates.
Andrew plans to begin his talk on the subject of NVMe and the block drivers, venturing in the direction of the multi-headed Hydra systems available from R-Comp, and that will in turn bring the talk around to 5idekick (which in his announcement he described as “most of a Hydra”) and Pi5erve.
If you haven’t checked out the announcement (why not?), neither machines are RISC OS computers as such – being based around Pi 5 technology, RISC OS itself doesn’t run on them as the primary operating system. The 5idekick is a small footprint Linux machine intended to be run without a display of its own, accessed and operated across the network from your existing RISC OS set up, while pi5erve is designed to be used as a very RISC OS friendly network attached storage (NAS) device, with one or more SSD drives and (with multiple drives in place) as a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Discs) system.
And although RISC OS doesn’t run as you’d normally like on the 64-bit processor used in the Pi 5 devices, it can be run in 32-bit mode as an application under Linux using Stephen Baldwin’s ‘RISC OS on Linux’.
As well as hardware developments and releases, there were a good number of software updates at the RISC OS North event in March, so you can expect Andrew to mention (for example) PhotoDesk, Messenger Pro, and more – and as we’re now more than half way between that and the next event, the RISC OS London show, on Saturday, 25th October, maybe you can tease hints from him in the Q&A after his main talk about the plans for that?
Breaking: According to ROUGOL’s Bryan Hogan, Andrew will be showing something “never seen on RISC OS before” as part of his presentation. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest a video embedded in a web page playing in Iris, and I’m usually completely wrong, so tune in tonight to find out just how wrong I am!
As usual, the meeting will be a hybrid one with some people attending in person, and others joining from home via Zoom.
You can attend the meeting in person – and this time around, the guest speaker will be appearing in person, so if you have the choice heading to the physical meeting will provide the best experience –1 at:
The Duke of Sussex
(Upstairs in the Chichester or Petworth Room)
23 Baylis Road,
London,
SE1 7AY.
And you can attend online from wherever you are (as long as you have an internet connection and a suitable device) by using Zoom.
There will be ROUGOL members lurking in the pub from around 6:30pm, and the Zoom meeting will open from 7:30pm to give people time to join – the meeting proper will commence from around 7:45pm.
There are directions on the ROUGOL website for people joining in person, and if you’re joining online you’ll need the meeting credentials – these remain the same as usual, but if you haven’t previously joined a meeting you can get these by contacting the group in plenty of time.
Looking ahead, you can look forward to Mark Moxon talking to ROUGOL on the subject of ‘Econet ArcElite’ on 18th August, ‘Book Publishing with Ovation Pro’ by Gavin Crawford on 15th September, a pre-show teaser from RISCOSbits on 20th October, and an update from Gerph about Pyromaniac on 17th November – all well worth attending if you can.
!ReadMe
- The reference to the speaker being in the pub was included in error – a hasty copy and paste from last month. Andrew Rawnsley is based too far away to make a London pub visit possible, and will be attending and giving his presentation by Zoom, so apologies for that mistake.
