The Icon Bar: RISC_OS_5.30_arrives: The Icon Bar: RISC OS 5.30 arrives

Posted by Mark Stephens on 17:15, 27/4/2024 | News

It has been four years since 5.28 stable release, so it is really exciting to have the next official release now available.

While you can always use the nightly builds, many people prefer a solid release for their main system. 5.30 brings together all these changes (6 bounties of work), 347 improvements to the 'hard Disc4' image and 329 improvements to the ROM to RISC OS. 76 bug tickets have been resolved.

There is a lot of exciting new things in this release. The highlights for me are:-

Mot of the Applications get tweaks and fixes for issues
Addition of Ovation Pro and full SparkFS thanks to David Pilling
Better PNG support
Out of the box wifi support for many Raspberry Pi models.
Updated User Guide

What are your top features?

Time to backup your systems and plan your upgrade...

ROOL announcement

RISC OS 5.30 arrives

nytrex (16:38 28/4/2024)
arenaman (23:30 5/5/2024)
arober11 (15:13 19/5/2024)

Alan Robertson

Message #125621, posted by nytrex at 16:38, 28/4/2024

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Posts: 107

A huge thank you to everyone involved with the latest release.

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Michael Stubbs

Message #125626, posted by arenaman at 23:30, 5/5/2024, in reply to message #125621

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Posts: 114

I love how the RISC OS scene is still alive and kicking over 25 years after Black Thursday. Sure, there's some major work to do, like 64bit, but what's been achieved so far is brilliant. The fact that RISC OS itself is still actively developed, as is software to run on it, is no mean feat. Well done, guys, and thank you!

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Andy R

Message #125631, posted by arober11 at 15:13, 19/5/2024, in reply to message #125626

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Posts: 1

Appear to have missed a trick, or several, at least with the Pi image.

Burnt a copy of 5.3, using the Ri imager, onto an ancient 16GB microSD (haven't seen anything smaller than 32GB in a decade), the image is ~2GB, the rest is wasted. No FAT32 second partition, however small is added to the SDcard, to permit the easy transfer of downloaded zips, or to add a few ADF floppy images on a PC or Mac, before plugging the card into a Pi, to make the image usable.

The vanilla image lacks SMB, SFTP, SCP, SSH, support, as it lacks an ADF floppy image mounter, to obviously prevent you from accessing any shares you have on your network, or images you manage to get onto the card.

There's NO Partition Manager bundled on the image, to allow you to create a FAT32 partition in the remaining space on the SDCard, though the FAT32FS module is present.

There's no copy of !SoftSCSI to permit you to add filler icons to access any additional FAT partitions you manage to create on the unused space on the SDcard, or on a USB stick, USB CDrom, ...

The included package-managers fail to offer the ability to install SMB, USB, or ADF floppy support, let alone a partition manager, or even the latest version of the 26-bit support mod. The original machines, even if they didn't have an HDD, came with a System disk that included an HDD formatter.

The bundled NetSurf browser doesn't have the JavaScript engine to even be able to access the RaspberryPi support forums, or directly download the necessary missing modules and Apps, from the Javascript heavy sites the Devs have chosen to stash the necessary bits to make RISOC usable on.

Essentially the vanilla image requires a day of dicking around to make a vaguely usable system, to even have a brief play on. The utter lack of end user utility makes this no way near a Public Release.

Draw up a few User stories, for what you expect the average Pi user, say who out of curiosity might want to try out RISCOS, likely for the first time, and play an odd port of a retro Amiga game, desire from the image. Ditto for the old farts, who have physical RISCOS hardware, and previous versions of the Pi images, and will want to transfer stuff from previous installs. If this can't happen on inserting a copy of the burnt image, without a decade or four of RISC OS usage (as there's no tutorial saved to the pinboard), and they can't get or ask for help the browser supplied on the RISC OS image, then the image is no good.

If it takes longer, and an order of magnitude more advanced knowledge, than unboxing a real A3000, A3010, ..., plugging it into a TV and wall socket, removing a Lemmings floppy from its box, or one of the other floppies in the early 1990s Learning Curve / Action pack bundles, to get the software running, and you blowing things up or writing a letter, the release is nothing but an Alpha / Developer preview, not even fit for a Public Beta, let alone to be called a Public release.

[Edited by arober11 at 21:23, 19/5/2024]

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