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## Experiences with RiscOS on the Raspberry Pi ##
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On November 26th I received my Raspberry Pi. Due to delays in production and
shipping my order had been delayed for several months. As a "thank you" for
my patience, the company I ordered from upgraded me to the 512MiB version of
the device. I have tried both Slackware ARM 14.0 and RiscOS on the device so
far. This document will be used to record some notes about my experience with
RiscOS only as I have yet to get Slackware ARM to function past installation.
## Installation and Setup
Installing RiscOS to the SD card was extremely easy. Installation consisted of
running using dd to write the .img file to the card. Once completed, you place
the card in the Raspberry Pi and plug it in. There is a little bit of time for
configuration, which is automatic. After this completed I had to set my screen
resolution and colour depth as well as configure the networking to use dhcp.
## Initial Impressions
Once those two things were done PackMan (the included package manager) and the
web browser functioned perfectly and the system was just as useable as any
other operating system. There are only a few oddities that take some getting
used to. First thing I noticed was that the mouse operates differently than any
other system I've used previously. Right clicking does not seem to do a whole
lot, center clicking seems to act, generally, as you would expect right click
to work and left click works as expected (most of the time).
The other things I've found are that there is no "terminal emulator" of sorts.
It has a terminal emulator type application but I did not find it to be very
useful. For remote access I found an application called "Nettle" works very
well. Additionally, the keyboard layout, at least on my system, was not setup
as expected. Certain <shift> keys were misplaced such as " being swapped with @
matter of re-configuring my keyboard layout, but I have yet to experiment with
doing so.
## Conclusion
Differences from *nix system aside, RiscOS seems to be a fairly capable OS
which has the potential to really shine on the RaspberryPi hardware. It has
some limitations, such as being a single user system and limited selection
of useful applications (lacking office suit and ssh server), which would
keep me from using it as a general purpose operating system right now but, in
time, if these points improve I could see it being a viable alternative to some
of the offerings by the Linux community on the Raspberry Pi.
