Raspberry Pi For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Appendix C

RISC OS

In This Chapter

Discovering an easy alternative to Linux

Seeing where RISC OS differs from other operating systems

Exploring some of the free packages bundled with the RISC OS distribution

In the 1980s in Cambridge, there was a little start-up company called Acorn. As you might expect from its name, it grew into something big, in part because it won a contract from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to provide a computer for a TV computer literacy program.

Over time, this company invented the ARM processor, which initially stood for Acorn RISC Machine (although the company now says the A stands for Advanced). In order to use this processor, Acorn also invented a desktop operating system to go with the ARM chip, called RISC OS.

RISC OS is one of the operating systems you can install on your Raspberry Pi using the NOOBS software (see Chapter 2). In this Appendix, we provide a short introduction to RISC OS to help you start exploring it.

What Is RISC OS?

The RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processor was a reaction to the CIS (Complex Instruction Set) processors of the 1980s. Processors were being made with increasingly convoluted instruction sets, ...