With this year’s London Show drawing ever nearer – the doors will be open to the public in just two days on 25th October, at the Harrow District Masonic Centre – another announcement has landed in the RISCOSitory bunker, and, amongst other interesting news, this one includes something we’ve all been eagerly awaiting for a very long time: a public release of web browser Iris from RISC OS Developments. Over to Andrew Rawnsley for all the gory details:
Iris Releases via PackMan
The Spring and Summer saw multiple beta releases of Iris as we worked hard towards producing a more public release this Autumn. Whilst nothing is ever as “finished” and “polished” as we’d like, we feel that Iris is now at a point where is provides a much more viable web browsing experience for RISC OS than was previously possible.
If you would like to try installing Iris via PackMan right now, instructions follow:
- Load !PackMan from your Apps folder, and make sure you install any updated packages it tells you about.
- Check PackMan’s version number from its iconbar menu Info window. It should read 0.98 beta. If not, please quit and re-run it. If you have installed the updates mentioned in #1 you should now be on 0.98 beta.
- From the PackMan iconbar menu, go to Advanced->Sources
- Add the new RISC OS Developments package repository:
http://packages.riscosdev.com/pkg/autobuilt - Also, make sure the default package repositories are installed, in particular:
http://packages.riscosopen.org/packages/pkg/programs-armv5 - Tick “Refresh package lists” then Save.
- Add the new RISC OS Developments package repository:
- Now, assuming you’re on a machine capable of running Iris (an ARMv7 compliant machine ie. Pi 2 onwards), when you look in the package list, you should find Iris list.
- Double click on it to install, then follow the screens through to install the Iris program and all its component parts (there are a lot of them).
- Iris will be installed into Apps.Network folder although you can change this or move it around.
- We recommend rebooting before using Iris in case any older module versions are still around.
The first time you open Iris, it may take a bit longer to open its main window because it will be generating font indexes and cache files. Future runs should open more quickly.
We’d like to thank Chris Gransden for his help with packaging Iris, and as always, Lee Noar for his development work.
RISC OS Direct for Pi5
This builds on the great work of the RISC OS for Linux team (Timothy Baldwin and Jan Rinze) to produce a version of RISC OS Direct capable of running on a Pi5 system. Because RISC OS doesn’t support the Pi5 CPU directly, this is achieved as an “application” on top of Linux, although as benchmarks attest, most code is run natively for very high performance.
The RISC OS Direct distribution includes many popular applications and important assets such as compatible monitor definitions and working network configurations, to allow most RISC OS applications to run as expected, including network apps like NetSurf, !Store and more.
The main limitations are that there is presently no sound support (which limits gaming options) and lack of ARMv7 support for Iris.
Wifi and TCP/IP
Check the RISC OS Developments website – there will be a new release around the time of the show, with fixes, improvements and some performance enhancements.
Ethernet-based filing system
This is a by-product of another commercial project, but may be useful to some RISC OS users. The project allows a Filecore (ie. RISC OS native) drive to exist on a network-connected device (eg. a Pi with RAID array). The host system for the filecore partition is largely academic – as long as it exists on an accessible network, a RISC OS computer can access it.
As a demo, a filecore partition was hosted in one part of the country on a server, and accessed securely from a client computer several hundred miles away. Amazingly performance for the database software using this was very similar to running natively, but with the benefits of RAID and encryption.
Traditionally, network drives on RISC OS have been based on other filing systems and used protocols such as SMB for transport. This project allows for secure “native” network drives.
The software was built on the open source BlockDevices platform which significantly shortened development time, allowing this work to be up and running quickly. It also benefits from ROD’s CacheFS disc/memory cache system.
For more info, chat with Richard or Andy V on the ROD stand at the show.
Andrew notes that not all downloads will be live until the weekend, although the Packman Iris server should already be up and running.
