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      		==================================
                    Risc OS on the Raspberry Pi
		==================================


Ok, we all know and love our unixoid OSes, our more or less vintage Amigas or
Ataris, but did you know that there is a whole other, outside of the british
isles more or less unknown and very well alive ecosystem out there that is
nothing like anything you may have used before? That can run completely from
RAM after bootup (very nice for avoiding the premature death of SD cards),
runs fast even on the oldest PIs and has not only a big pool of freeware and
open source software available but also does see regular releases of commercial
software? That a RaspberryPI of the first generation can feel like a very fast
machine?

I stumbled upon RiscOS on the raspberry Pi a few years ago and was immediately
thrown back to the days of the Atari ST when 8 year old me was told by my dad
of an fascinating computer system he had seen on some electronics show. He
found it great but he was firmly grounded in the Atari world so - besides
reading much about it and ordering some information from england (we live in
germany) his interest in Risc never went anywhere. So... i had to try it out
after discovering that it was available through the Raspberry Pi imager.

As with all of the OS supplied by the Raspberry Pi imager, the "installation"
was just a click and a swap of the SD card in my Pi away. The interesting part
came thereafter: Being a total newbie again.

Ok, we all have used different desktop OS, how hard could it be? Granted, i
HAVE used Plan9 before this, so the paradigm of using all three mouse buttons
was not THAT new for me. Everything else was.

Double left click on the icon of an program does not much at first glance, and
definitively doesn't bring up a program window. What it does is, it loads the
program and parks an icon of the now "active" program in your taskbar.
Clicking left on THIS then finally spawns as much program windows as you want.
Closing a window logically doesn't close the program, just the active window,
to close the program you middle click on the icon in the task bar and choose
"quit" in the pop-up menu. Minimizing is akin to the feature in FVWM and just
drops the window into an icon on your desktop.

The next big think any new RiscOS user discovers is, that the OS makes heavy
use of drag'n drop. There is no "save" or "save as" dialog as we know it, it
appears a window where you can name your file and then you simply drag the
displayed icon of that file into the folder you want to save it. Opening
a file works the same way: You simply drag the file into the open software
you want to work with. And yes, it IS possible to drag a file out of the "save"
dialog of one program into another ... i would call this a very visual way of
building a pipe.


Geting on-line
==============

If you have a wired network connection you will probably already be online at
this point. Wireless is a completely diffent point... (for whom i don't have
a sulution as of now). The browser NetSurf is preinstalled so accessing the web
will be no big problem. What WAS a big problem (at least for me) was to getting
my email to work. As of now there is no free email client available which
supports ssl (but there is a commercial one... i come to this later), so i had
to revive an unencrypted account i still have on a small german mailprovider
named SmartMail. If you just wants to receive and write some emails you would
now open the !Store (or PlingStore as it is called in Risceese) search for
TapirMail, install it make a few configurations regarding your Imap / POP and
SMTP account and you are good to go. But, you may ask, how get i my news? And
do i really have to use a different software for mail and news? No problem! There is !NewsHound, a netnews fetcher, !POPstar, a POP3 client aaand !Pluto, the
reader.

Sooo, newshound is the easy part, start it, it asks you what newsserver you
want to use and then it puts a cute little basset icon into the taskbar and
starts fetching your news. !POPstar is a beast on another level... at first
you need the additional software named socketwatch, which you just needs to
start, it then registers itself with the system. Then you need to copy the
"Choices" and "Users" files which stores you pop / smtp data to the folder
"SDFS::RISCOSpi.$.!Boot.Choices.POPstar"... and here i encountered my next
problem as a RiscOS newbie: Where is that bloody folder? There IS something
called !Boot on the SD card, but if i click on it it opens the system
preferences... it took me a few frustrated hours and a bit too much beer but
i finally discovered it: You have to SHIFT + click to open a program folder!
(Hint: Every icon whose name starts with an ! is a program folder). So, after
that i had just to edit these very, very verbose commented files matching to
my server data and start !POPStar to get the mails to my system. Next i
start Pluto, tell it that i use !NewsHound an !POPstar as transport programs,
click on "Debatch" and voila! now i have NNTP and Mail all in one nice little
program.

At this point you have a system where you can access the internet, ask in
newsgroups (which are very, very active) for help and can install additional
software. I think this is a good start for exploring this hidden and absolutely
vast ecosystem.