It’s now just three weeks to go until this year’s London Show, which takes place at the Harrow District Masonic Centre on 25th October, and the first announcement from an exhibitor has already landed in the RISCOSitory bunker. In fact, the email arrived before last week’s post about the show, so keen was Paolo Zaino, the exhibitor in question, but I deliberately held it back so that it came after the show preview.
Using the name ZFP Systems (the brand under which he originally provided professional services to retail outlets that dealt with RISC OS systems in Italy), Paolo is working on quite a few projects, and will use the London Show to demonstrate and talk about the progress he is making on some of them, and perhaps get useful feedback from visitors.
- RISC OS Merlin is an operating system kernel, written in Rust to benefit from the security, memory safety, and other features the language brings. While it has RISC OS in its name, it isn’t actually a new version of our favourite operating system, but instead a new system that will feature RISC OS compatibility – and capable of running on both AArch32 and AArch64 (32-bit and 64-bit ARM Architechures).
- UltimaVM is, as the final two letters of its name suggests, a virtual machine that runs its own efficient byte-code interpreter – a sort of machine code language for a CPU that exists purely within UltimaVM; it isn’t emulating a ‘real’ CPU. The software will target numerous platforms – RISC OS being one – and allow software written for it to run on any of those platforms.
- ShareFS Server is a re-implentation of the ShareFS protocols, written in Rust, and targetting Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows, allowing RISC OS computers to read and write files on these alien platforms using a tried and tested file sharing protocol.
Paolo is also developing themes and plug-ins that aim to make websites based on the WordPress blogging and content management system more RISC OS-friendly, allowing the pages to render more cleanly on browsers such as NetSurf. As WordPress progresses, sometimes old themes have to be retired and replaced with new ones, and finding one that works as best as possible with older, less capable browsers (and/or tayloring them as much as possible to improve compatibility) can be quite a chore – take it from me; RISCOSitory is powered by WordPress!
And finally, he will also bring along his RISC OS Cluster; a Distributed Computing Protocol for RISC OS. Paolo says that he has made no recent progress on this, because he has simply had no time – but that’s hardly surprising given some of the other projects he’s working on!
