~04/1995
Questions and Answers --------------------- Q. I need to know ifworks on my Risc PC. Where do I find out? A. Your best route is to ask the vendor of that product. Of the products Acorn has tested, over 95% work without modification. Of the remaining 5%, many of the software houses have since produced newer versions which work correctly. A large percentage of the incompatible software comprises games; problems running these pieces of software are commonly connected with screen modes. "Game On!," a utility to patch some of these games, has recently become available from: The ARM Club FREEPOST ND 6573 London N12 0BR Directory Viewers ----------------- Everyone is familiar with double-clicking Select on a file, directory or application. However there are actually a number of other things you can do as well (some of these are not present in RISC OS 2.00) Double-Click Adjust - as Select, but the directory viewer closes Single-Click Select - select this object, deselect any others. Single-Click Adjust - select this object, adding it to any others already selected in this viewer. Also, deselects a selected object. In effect, it toggles the state of this object. Menu - selects the object under the pointer if nothing is selected SHIFT Double-Click Select - Open a directory or application. Load a file into !Edit SHIFT Double-Click Adjust - As above, plus directory viewer closes CTRL Double-Click Select - Open a directory or application. Don't run any !Boot files. CTRL Double-Click Adjust - As above, plus directory viewer closes Drag to icon bar - Load the file into the application you dragged it to, or run the file if you drag it to a vacant part of the icon bar. Shift Drag to an open !Edit window - Insert name of object(s) dragged You can also select a number of objects which are adjacent in a directory viewer by starting a drag near the first (make sure that the first object is NOT selected by this) and then dragging the box to enclose all the objects you want selected. On releasing the mouse button all these obects will be selected. Finally, don't forget the menu option to 'Select All'. It can often be quicker to drag a box round more objects than you want (or Select All) and then remove the ones you don't want by clicking Adjust. Postcards From The Edge, Part 2 ------------------------------- Another item (although not an Acorn product) showcased at Acorn World was RiscBSD, a UNIX lookalike for the Risc PC. RiscBSD is based on the NetBSD2 source tree; NetBSD2 is a lookalike of BSD 4.4 Lite. The source tree is, I'm assured, a pleasantly clean one; all the CPU-specific code is in separate directories, so it's merely (!) a case of porting the specific stuff to an ARM directory, fixing the MakeFiles and then (hopefully) typing "make". Of course, life is never that easy! The system on display at Acorn World was a very, very alpha kernel. So far, everything is built via cross-compilation using gcc under Linux; the RiscBSD team hope to have native compilation very soon. Actual coding had been on-going for six weeks prior to Acorn World, so considering that every core member also has either a job or a degree to do, they have done a fine job so far. The multicoloured square was built to show off the process system; one process was moving the square, another was changing its colour, and there were two more changing the orientation and colour of the bars in it to reflect CPU state. In addition to RiscBSD, there is also the ArcBSD initiative, which aims to provide (again) BSD 4.4 Lite, but sourced from the FreeBSD tree. ArcBSD is being written with the explicit brief that it must be executable on all 32 bit Acorn machines with sufficient RAM and hard disc space to make support of BSD viable. Further details on the progress of these projects can be found on the comp.sys.acorn newsgroup; details of mailing list contacts for further information are usually included in these postings.