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Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

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Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#121

Post by josephg »

jl6 wrote: post #107
tech2 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You grant them capabilities, a handle which permits access to a particular directory, one which allows network access (or possibly even further limited than that) etc. No user, just a series of object handles which permit them to perform the task and nothing more.

Sure, but capabilities and handles are technical terms of art below the level at which regular users need to understand. The idea that an app is another person using your computer is not a terrible abstraction in terms of helping people make sense of what's happening.

Maybe. But they're a bad mental model for software developers because user based security is way more limited than what you can do with capabilities.

And they're confusing for users, too. Signal isn't another "user" on my phone. Its still me. I just decide what capabilities I grant it on the day. "Yes, you can use location tracking for now - but only until later in the day."

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#122

Post by josephg »

pjmlp wrote: post #116
tech2 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You grant them capabilities, a handle which permits access to a particular directory, one which allows network access (or possibly even further limited than that) etc. No user, just a series of object handles which permit them to perform the task and nothing more.

Capabilites are just another way of doing role management in processes, and require identities for administration anyway. It is yet another way of managing processes identitities.

A capability is not an identity. And the difference matters a great deal in how you build software that takes advantage of capability based security models.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#123

Post by xyzzy3000 »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #103
rbanffy wrote: post #100

RISC OS is an interesting beast, but I’d LOVE to see RISC/IX ported to the RPi and other small boards. Has anyone saved the sources anywhere? Would whoever now owns IXI IP help with the desktop part?

You mean the Archimedes GUI on top of the BSD kernel? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX I have memories of drooling over those R series machines or anything MIPS/Sparc/Alpha based in the early 90s for that matter. I think ARM systems at the time were never competitive in terms of speed (compared to SUN, SGI, HP), but they were Archimedes' sexy sisters.

Acorn bought-in a couple of GUIs for RISC iX (Motif mwm/twm in later versions, X.desktop from IXI Ltd in the earlier release), but I'm not sure if any were exclusive, and none looked like the RISC OS GUI - I wouldn't characterise anything about the RISC iX GUI as being particularly 'Archimedes'. There's a video of someone playing around with the GUIs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4

If only it had been given the RISC OS GUI with BSD underneath - that would have been way easier to port to modern Unix-like foundations and may have had a healthier-but-niche future as something 'modern' beyond Acorn's existence.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#124

Post by josephg »

dajtxx wrote: post #52
qwerty456127 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can actually make sense - why not make Electron a shared part of the OS instead of so many apps bundling it. As I understand Apple once built its entire GUI system around a flavour of PostScript which was designed for documents typesetting. Now the world just is doing a similar thing with HTML.

Because I'm old and I'm sick to death of everything being a web app. Because I hate web app programming so it limits my employment options :-)

I'd be more mad about this if building native applications wasn't super shitty these days. Xcode crashes all the time. SwiftUI is terribly documented and buggy. And lots of standard things you see apple do in their apps are basically impossible to do from 3rd party code. And its impossible to debug anything because its all closed source. And windows has about 8 different native UI libraries that all look and feel different, and they're constantly making new ones instead of making one UI be good and well supported.

I hate electron with a burning passion. But at least the web has open standards, good debugging tools and modern, performant, well documented and pleasant to use UI libraries like React, SolidJS and so on.

Just don't ask about rich text editing on the web. Oh god. Its been decades and its still so shit.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#125

Post by justinclift »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #47
ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…

> Nowadays computers are almost never shared.

That doesn't seem very accurate, unless you're meaning strictly personal computers?

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#126

Post by jbverschoor »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #47
ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…

Multi user is getting replaced by virtualization / containerization. The layers are simply getting shuffled

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#127

Post by repelsteeltje »

xyzzy3000 wrote: post #123
repelsteeltje wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the Archimedes GUI on top of the BSD kernel? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX I have memories of drooling over those R series machines or anything MIPS/Sparc/Alpha based in the early 90s for that matter. I think ARM systems at the time were never competitive in terms of speed (compared to SUN, SGI, HP), but they were Archimedes' sexy sisters.

Acorn bought-in a couple of GUIs for RISC iX (Motif mwm/twm in later versions, X.desktop from IXI Ltd in the earlier release), but I'm not sure if any were exclusive, and none looked like the RISC OS GUI - I wouldn't characterise anything about the RISC iX GUI as being particularly 'Archimedes'. There's a video of someone playing around with the GUIs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4 If only it had be…

Ah yes, Motif! Now I remember, I stand corrected.

Before Gnome, Qt, KDE we of course had motif and X with it's license issues. If I remember correctly, early Slackware CD bundles came with motif as well.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#128

Post by xyzzy3000 »

dajtxx wrote: post #51
ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

Home computers didn't need multi-user capability or much in the way of security (other than anti-virus) back then. I'd argue they still don't. I don't think these two things were the problem. I can take or leave shared libraries. They seem to cause a lot of trouble, but so do statics, so I'm on the fence there. But in the context of when this was released it's a non-issue. I'll give you the CLI thing though. If the C…

The main limitations of the multitasking command window were that it couldn't be used to drop into a language like the inbuilt BASIC interpreter and then change screen modes in BASIC code, or draw graphics using the BASIC plotting keywords, and so on. The command-line UI foreground and background colours were configured in the host app (typically Edit) rather than being changeable dynamically from within the command-line environment. There may be other limitations that I am not aware of, but for text-based interaction with typical command-line tools or BASIC in text-only mode, it's fine.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#129

Post by ajb »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #99
qwerty456127 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…

Having grown up with RISC OS, I never considered lack of multi user an omission. But the lack of process isolation (or simply: lack of processes) was a real head-ache. No memory protection or hardware access, rudimentary virtual memory "page mapping". Any tardy calls to Wimp_Poll() freezing the entire GUI. "Cooperative multitasking" also means it's still impossible to do something useful with more than 1 Raspberry Pi…

Fair. On reflection I agree with all the people that have pointed out that multiuser isn't that important. It was just, historically, the feature that made operating systems become serious about security, which is now essential for other reasons.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#130

Post by nxobject »

jbverschoor wrote: post #126
qwerty456127 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…

Multi user is getting replaced by virtualization / containerization. The layers are simply getting shuffled

I think pervasive process/app sandboxing – or at the very least proactively and aggressing limiting process capabilites a la OpenBSD pledge and unveil – is a key development as well that's over the horizon as well.

(What's old is new again with virtualization: IBM took that approach to make time-sharing happen with CP/CMS on System/360 – then VM/370, then z/VM...)

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