RISC OS Open RC15 Released, Designed for the Raspberry Pi single-board computer

Steve Revill has announced the release of a new development build of RISC OS Open, a special edition of RISC OS designed for the Raspberry Pi single-board computer. RISC OS, developed by the inventors of the ARM processor architecture, is not based on UNIX, Linux or any other existing system. The freely available Raspberry Pi variant uses its own desktop environment (called Pinboard) and applications. 

What’s changed

Right up to date support for the latest ARMv8 in the main OS ROM, bundled with hundreds of fixes and improvements to the OS. The previous release was based on RISC OS 5.21 which was current at the time.

There are new and updated applications on the disc too, as well significant improvements completed thanks to donations in the form of updated JPEG support, EDID monitor detection and the first few pieces of USB work.

Models supported

The Raspberry Pi Foundation have been busy creating new models at an astonishing rate, so the list of different Pi boards supported has grown too. RC15 now supports:

• Pi Zero (new)
• Pi 1 models A, A+, B, B+
• Pi 2 with BCM2836 processor
• Pi 2 with BCM2837 processor (new)
• Pi 3 (new)
• Compute Module
• Compute Module 3 (new)

Thanks to Chris Hall for helping testing all the variants alongside ROOL. That’s a pretty epic list, even more than the 6 different machine types that the Risc PC and ARM7500 ROMs do.

Here is the full release announcement.