As mentioned at the end of part one, this article about creating PackMan packages is going to look at what's necessary to generate distribution index files, ROOL pointer files, and how these tasks can be automated. Towards the end I'll also be taking a look at some options for automating the uploading of the files to your website.
 
 

At the recent London Show Chris Hall was showing his new Data Logger. Here he gives some info into the new hardware
 
Version 2.40 of my SatNav software and the compact hardware unit with just an OLED display meant I could stop trying to fix things that were still unfinished. I had full battery management, conditional data logging, robust and error-tolerant data downloading on demand and power management that avoided any SD card corruption.

Where next?

 
There were things still unfinished: I wanted the unit to be able to use WiFi to transmit data instead of making do with manual downloads to a USB pen drive; I would have liked to remove the code which drives a liquid ink display (Papirus) into a more general purpose module, where it should be, but had never tried writing one. RiscBASIC could compile an application to a module but only at 26 bit. Both these aspirations were therefore not immediate.

 
 

Some things we noticed this month. What did you see?
 
R-Comp released a 6th version of their Monitor software, offering more screen modes for Titanium.
 
RISC OS Developments acquire Castle Technology. Expect lots of speculation on the Internet and some hard facts at the London Show.
 
Interesting article on Reading Manga on RISC OS on RISC OS blog.
 
The 10th London show. Read our report.
 

The 10th London show took place at its regular venue on Saturday 27th October (St Giles Hotel - Feltham, London). It was a warm and sunny autumn day (always a good start). The bridge next to the Show was closed this year which made the journey more complex...
 
Numbers were up this year and lots of exciting news in the talks. There was a lot of buzz in the air over the Open sourcing of RISC OS.
 
The show was run as usual by ROUGOL and their army of helpers who did an excellent job of making everything work to time faultlessly.
 
There is a separate report for the talks and a show in pictures article. In this report we will focus on the stands and the actual event.
 
There was wide range of stands at the show, summarised below.
 
 

Here are my notes from the talks. Any mistakes or omissions are mine.
 
11.30 CJE Micro's
in addition to finishing his house, Chris has lots of RISC OS related stuff to share. Not actively involved but very supportive of license changes. CJE not planning to fork the OS. Mentions of lots of items:-
Interface to use USB mouse with old Archimedes machines.
Econet box which can create a small network for you.
New IDE interfaces for A3000 range machines. You can now use compact flash or SD cards. Also offers a neat way to add a new real-time clock if needed.
PiTop 2 available and running RISC OS. Better keyboard and screen. Good battery life
Hdmi 7inch and 10inch small monitors
More ports for pi zero
44 way ide to sd adapter
 
 

Here is a selection of pictures to show you what the event was like.....
 
(Click on the thumbnails for the bigger image)
 
 

 

Hot on the heals of the reveal that RISC OS Developments had acquired Castle Technology and with it the rights to RISC OS 5, more news on the future of RISC OS has emerged this week: RISC OS Developments are working with RISC OS Open to relicense RISC OS under the Apache 2.0 License, a popular and fairly permissive open-source license.
 
Although some the OS's components were already available under permissive open-source licenses such as the BSD and CDDL licenses, ever since RISC OS Open's inception the primary license has been the Castle License, which came in commercial and non-commercial flavours, neither of which satisfied all of the requirements that the OSI deem necessary in order for the code released under that license to be considered "true" open source. So although the "shared source" Castle License was better than nothing and certainly played a big part in RISC OS's survival post-Iyonix, many people have also felt that it's been holding the platform back. ROOL and ROD hope that by relicensing the OS under this new license, developer and user interest in the OS will increase, and the OS will be kept free to grow and evolve into the next decade and beyond.
 
More information about what this means for RISC OS and what ROD's and ROOL's plans for the future of RISC OS are will be released at the London Show this weekend.
 

In a previous article, we covered some of the online resources for reading online some of the magazine from past years.
 
Now you can also enjoy the whole of The Frobnicate collection online. There has also been some lively discussion on the magazines online in the ROOL forums.
 
There is also some good content (especially technical articles) from Acorn User.
 
And if you want something right to to date, we should see new editions from Archive and Drag'n'Drop around the London show.