RISC OS
RISC OS is an operating system with graphical user interface. The British company Acorn developed in the late 1980s RISC OS for their 32 -bit computer with Archimedes ARM CPU.
History
RISC OS 2 was the first version of RISC OS and replaced in 1989, written in BBC BASIC transition Arthur operating system of Archimedes. The Acorn A5000 1992 shipped with RISC OS 3. In 1994 RISC OS 3.5 with the introduction of the Acorn Risc PC. The StrongARM support came in 1996 with RISC OS 3.7. Acorn RISC OS developed 4 1998 Acorn RISC OS broke up and went to the company Pace For never available successor to the Risc PC. RISCOS Ltd.. licensed RISC OS 4 and gave it 1999. Since then RISCOS Ltd. developed. the operating system RISC OS Select on. Pace fit RISC OS 4 on modern ARM CPUs as ARM9 and XScale, and removed the dependencies on specific processors that Acorn had developed. This version was then pc from Castle Technology from 2002 operated in its XScale iyonix as RISC OS 5 is used and further developed. Thus, there are two active branches of development of RISC OS. Both branches are largely compatible application programs, but not completely. A merger of the two RISC OS branches it is not predicted to give. 2003 acquired Castle RISC OS from Pace. For the ARM9 computer A9home RISCOS Ltd. fit. their RISC OS Select for modern ARM processors and named it in 2006 Adjust32. In RISC OS Adjust32 the dependencies of the old Acorn hardware were removed in addition. In the same year, RISC OS Open began, 5 to release first part of RISC OS in the source code. The entire source code should be released gradually. Appeared in 2007 RISC OS Select 4 under the name RISC OS 6 and is an evolution of Adjust32. The open source code of RISC OS 5 is since the end of 2008 to more modern ARM hardware, namely the system on a chip the OMAP family, ported.
Properties
RISC OS is a lean and fast operating system with cooperative multitasking and running, aside from emulators, only on computers with ARM CPU including StrongARM and XScale. The core of the operating system is small. A variety of interchangeable modules is responsible for the file system, disk access, graphical interface, etc.. A large part of the operating system and several application programs contained in the ROM or the flash ROM. A boot from the hard disk as with other operating systems can be eliminated with it. Exception is RISC OS Select, in which an image of the ROM is loaded into RAM from the hard disk.
The graphical interface of RISC OS supported from the outset consistently drag and drop. So no dialog box is used, for example, when saving, which maps the file system. Instead, with the mouse, a symbol is dragged into a file manager window and therefore the file stored on the hard drive. Subtracting the icon in the window of another application program, the data is transferred to that other application program. In RISC OS a three-button mouse is required. A menu at the top of the window or the screen does not exist. It will be used only context- sensitive menus that are called with the middle mouse button anywhere in the window. The menus can be moved with the mouse. If one chooses the right mouse button to select a menu item, the menu will not close and you can then select further menu items without return to the same sub-menu. If you click with the right mouse button on an arrow of the scroll bar, the bar moves in the opposite direction of the arrow. There are many other uses the right mouse button in order to facilitate the work on the computer.
The desktop consists of two parts since ARTHUR. The upper and larger part of the desktop is the actual user interface. The lower part consists of a bar, called Iconbar. There you'll find left the icons for the available drives and right the symbols for the loaded application programs. Each of these symbols has a menu that is always open with the middle mouse button. With a single click opens the file manager window of the respective drive or the application of the program window. Individual windows get no icon on the icon bar.
Application programs log in to each session and can be moved or deleted as well as any on the hard disk. RISC OS does not require file extensions to recognize the file format. The file format is noted in the file system. If one double clicks on a file in the file manager, is reviewed by RISC OS first if an application program is loaded, that can handle this file format. If this is not the case in the pending application programs a suitable program will be sought in order to open the file. Alternatively, you can drag the file to the application program in the icon bar or in the opened window.