Marketing RISC OS
Selling RISC OS to the general public is always going to be difficult; despite some software developements in the last few years, it still lacks features which have long since been ubiquitous on other platforms - especially what might be termed the big three - Windows (more relevantly, WinXP), Mac OS X and Linux.
What naturally compounds this is the near commodity status of PC hardware. For example, recent sale prices have seen entry level laptops in the United States drop as low as 250 GPB., and desktops even lower. I'm sure that similar pricing will soon follow in the UK. This is clearly an impossible situation for RISC OS hardware to match, and it must continue to trade on its other merits of usability.
The mass-market PC still implies, for the most part, WinXP, with of course the significant niche carved out by Apple, not least helped recently by its attention to style and products like the Mac Mini. But what's interesting is that despite all the noise about Linux, and very real and significant usage in server solutions for Linux (even apart from the traditional Apache et al presense on the internet), 2005 failed to be the prophesied "year of the Linux desktop" - at least, in any meaningful way in the mainstream - and it's still very hard to purchase a PC with Linux preinstalled.
As for RISC OS, it clearly has many problems to overcome before it can really gain any wider appeal. But instead of mentioning those in further detail once again, I'd like to cover a topic I hinted at in a earlier article - a ready to go RISC OS demo.
To demonstrate the strongest point of RISC OS - its GUI, and the way applications interact with that and other applications instead of the semi-typical monolithic approach - doesn't require the latest and greatest. In fact, RISC OS 3.1 will do fine as long as the emulator has a reasonable amount of memory, and a polished boot sequence, and can take advantage of things like long filenames via a host filing system. It would of course need to be furnished with some applications, and some kind of tutorial to really get people involved. Oh, and did I mention it needs to be really easy to get going?
I previously mentioned Damn Small Linux. This is an appealing model, as it is a single, relatively small download (well, 50MB) and within a few seconds you can unzip it, and be running a windowed fully-featured Linux desktop within Windows.
As for images of later vesions of RISC OS - particularly RISC OS 3.7, 4 and Select - their legal status is arguably much clearer, and I don't advocate making images available except under existing or new commerical arrangments, especially while they may still have value to the companies involved.
The Components
So, a recap of what would be needed to put this together.
An emulator - ArcEm is perhaps the obvious choice. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X already, has active developers and development versions boast a hostfs host filing system. Its source is available for anyone to hack on, or port to a new system. It still requires some polish before a release could be done, but this is a matter of time.
Boot sequence and applications - this requires someone to take some time to put together a modern boot sequence, perhaps with various patches to provide features not found in a vanilla RISC OS 3.1 setup. It also requires a selection of apps - these need to be well-chosen to demonstrate the strong points of RISC OS, and should not be an ad-hoc collection of the "usual suspects". The files would live on the host filing system, rather than under the restrictions of a RISC OS 3.1 filecore image.
Bundled ROM image - as above, a freely distributable version of a RISC OS ROM, probably 3.1.
If you do wish to pursue this, then good luck. If you need some advice, then by all means contact me.
What naturally compounds this is the near commodity status of PC hardware. For example, recent sale prices have seen entry level laptops in the United States drop as low as 250 GPB., and desktops even lower. I'm sure that similar pricing will soon follow in the UK. This is clearly an impossible situation for RISC OS hardware to match, and it must continue to trade on its other merits of usability.
The mass-market PC still implies, for the most part, WinXP, with of course the significant niche carved out by Apple, not least helped recently by its attention to style and products like the Mac Mini. But what's interesting is that despite all the noise about Linux, and very real and significant usage in server solutions for Linux (even apart from the traditional Apache et al presense on the internet), 2005 failed to be the prophesied "year of the Linux desktop" - at least, in any meaningful way in the mainstream - and it's still very hard to purchase a PC with Linux preinstalled.
As for RISC OS, it clearly has many problems to overcome before it can really gain any wider appeal. But instead of mentioning those in further detail once again, I'd like to cover a topic I hinted at in a earlier article - a ready to go RISC OS demo.
RISC OS Demo
So how would such a thing work? The major problem with providing something that people are able to download and immediately run on their commodity hardware without messing around with extra downloads, or having to pay anything, is licensing. RedSquirrel went some way towards this, but you still had to locate RISC OS, and put together a boot sequence, etc. Similar comments can be made of the other emulators like ArcEm and Arculator.To demonstrate the strongest point of RISC OS - its GUI, and the way applications interact with that and other applications instead of the semi-typical monolithic approach - doesn't require the latest and greatest. In fact, RISC OS 3.1 will do fine as long as the emulator has a reasonable amount of memory, and a polished boot sequence, and can take advantage of things like long filenames via a host filing system. It would of course need to be furnished with some applications, and some kind of tutorial to really get people involved. Oh, and did I mention it needs to be really easy to get going?
I previously mentioned Damn Small Linux. This is an appealing model, as it is a single, relatively small download (well, 50MB) and within a few seconds you can unzip it, and be running a windowed fully-featured Linux desktop within Windows.
RISC OS Licensing
As I mentioned, and has been debated much in the past, the problem remains with the legal status of RISC OS ROM images - the rest is entirely possible under freely available RISC OS software and RISC OS hardware emulation software. In particular, with RISC OS 3.1 ROM images, of which the status of I won't begin to speculate about. What I can agree with is that their value to RISC OS may be greater if freedom is given to pass them around with impunity. This would allow completion of such an emulated environment, and put an end to the underhand (not to mention illegal) passing around of RISC OS 3.1 ROM images. It would also gain some karma points and publicity for any companies involved in making this happen.As for images of later vesions of RISC OS - particularly RISC OS 3.7, 4 and Select - their legal status is arguably much clearer, and I don't advocate making images available except under existing or new commerical arrangments, especially while they may still have value to the companies involved.
The Components
So, a recap of what would be needed to put this together.
An emulator - ArcEm is perhaps the obvious choice. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X already, has active developers and development versions boast a hostfs host filing system. Its source is available for anyone to hack on, or port to a new system. It still requires some polish before a release could be done, but this is a matter of time.
Boot sequence and applications - this requires someone to take some time to put together a modern boot sequence, perhaps with various patches to provide features not found in a vanilla RISC OS 3.1 setup. It also requires a selection of apps - these need to be well-chosen to demonstrate the strong points of RISC OS, and should not be an ad-hoc collection of the "usual suspects". The files would live on the host filing system, rather than under the restrictions of a RISC OS 3.1 filecore image.
Bundled ROM image - as above, a freely distributable version of a RISC OS ROM, probably 3.1.
Conclusion
I am going to pursue this? Apart from my interest in ArcEm, not particularly. Indeed, there isn't a great deal of technical detail here that isn't already being taken care of. This might be a chance for someone to get off their rear, I as talked about previously. Whilst we're on the topic of emulation, I'd like to correct a recent drobe article on mentioning various emulators. It mentions that the work by Nick Burrett and myself on RISC OS emulation in QEMU (as contrast to hardware emulators such as ArcEM and VirtualRPC) could be used in ArcEm. In truth, this makes little sense - the QEMU work was an effort to emulate RISC OS APIs - something that has value, but cannot really provide anything close to a comprehensive emulation environment. In the scenario in this article, the ROMs provide RISC OS itself, and emulation is of the hardware - a much more practical prospect. What remains true is that integrating the QEMU engine into ArcEm (which was also used by the referred to project) would greatly improve its speed.If you do wish to pursue this, then good luck. If you need some advice, then by all means contact me.
As for being involved with Linux; it's very likely I have had much more contact with it than you have - I think such exposure allows me to be more effective when commenting on a niche market such as RISC OS. (Comment this)
Holger: such a solution makes little sense. Given the price of the commodity hardware I mention, it would be much better for people to get a PC. And that PC would run tens or hundreds of times faster than any software solution you could come up with, especially since they run much faster than modern RISC OS hardware. (Comment this)