I have not had an input from Michael on this so these are my own words.
My personal understanding is that a server is a piece of code which handles a particular application for clients e.g. printer server. The Client and Server generally being on different machines and remote from each other, but not always. Generally there will be many clients for each server and part of the job is usually to handle a queue of some sort and give priority to requests from the clients. Now I wonder what Michael will say?
You will just have to come along and find out!
We were delighted to welcome Steve and Jack to the Club again. 
Jack began by describing the current range of Iyonix machines ( IYONIX pc v5.12 (5.13). Apparently all of the product sales are handled by Iyonix Ltd a subsidiary of Castle Technology. Castle hold the ownership of the Licences for Risc OS however. Jack asked how many of us did not own an Iyonix and I think was a little taken aback to think some of us (3) were still running RISC PCs and others Virtual Acorn on a PC laptop! The Iyonix is faster on all counts than the RPC and he urged us to upgrade to get the benefits of the greater screen resolution as well. Entry level RM machine is £799 (inc VAT). The X300 is about the size of the RPC. The Classic is £999 (inc. VAT) The top end machine is £1099 and there is now a self build DIY kit, containing the Motherboard, RISCOS Graphics card and USB card for £599 ( inc. VAT), so that you can use any standard ATX case to house it. Relatively easy if you have experience of building PCs. There are several special offers at the moment including a 22" LCD TFT Monitor 1680 x 1050 resolution for £229 delivered (inc. VAT) dual VGA input £249 (inc. VAT) ; this allows connection of output from two machines e.g. Iyonix and PC or RPC, changing from one to the other by simply pressing a button on the monitor.There are more card features with the nVidia cads and the USB in ROM offers an inexpensive upgrade. The FX6000 range is now supported. [- see their website www.iyonix.com].
Steve then took over to talk about RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL). There were 5 members of the company two more or less sleeping partners Andy Moyller and Richard Nicol then there 3 engineers Steve Revill, Ben Aveson and Andrew Hodgkinson (Swift JPEG). All had worked for Acorn, Element 14, Pace and all had worked for Castle too. They discussed how to set up an Open Initiative. Initially Steve, Ben and Andrew volunteered to handle the projects in their spare time(!) but later it was decided the best way was to create a new company RISC OS Open Ltd so that anyone who wanted to get involved in a project could go to them instead of having to approach Castle or Iyonix. All the original Castle products are now handled by Iyonix and Castle owns RISC OS and licences various commercial companies e.g. Risc OS Ltd.
The aim behind the initiative was to encourage users to get involved in the development of RISC OS and to correct bugs, suggest improvements and new features their changes would be passed back to ROOL for subsequent incorporation into new releases. They wanted to broaden the use of RISCOS not only on desktop machines but also in set top boxes and all the embedded space.
Private developers would be able to download and modify the software for non-commercial use without charge. It would be free to users. If a commercial company wished they could obtain a relatively inexpensive licence, pence rather than pounds, from Castle in order to sell their work, however Castle would still retain the copyright and ownership of the main code. They wanted to retain control so that people would not be free to rip off bits of code for their own use. There would be some income coming back in licence fees from commercial users who would deal directly with Castle on this via the web.
The system would all be web based and the code can be downloaded after registration as developer. There would be very unencumbered access for users, no EULAs etc. There would be free hosting for other community projects which could use the same repository as the other developments. ROOL had become also the distributor and developers for the C/C++ tools set.
This was an important step since you can't just download GCC as it would need too many changes before you could use it. They will be on sale at the South East show.
IYONIX are the licensees of Castle.
Steve then showed the sort of file structure obtained form the sources download.
You need a build environment and C tools before you can develop anything. The sources are subdivided into each part. He showed how easy it was to edit the code and then build it.
This is as far as they have got to date. The next release is expected for the show and they hope to have more core components like font manager and windows manager available and the printers suite. They have had lot of requests for these bits of RISC OS as some users are very interested in providing support for higher resolution printers and CMYK separations.
This ended Steve's scripted part of the talk.
There now followed a Q&A session with both Steve and Jack.
Frank asked if it was known what what people were working on. Steve replied that he had put a list on the website a few weeks ago. In particular there had been a lot of work on a release of
!Paint which can be downloaded now with various bugs sorted out. This now enabled sprites to be dragged and dropped within the sprite file window or select a load and delete them which is quite handy and Also on !Closeup has been made more style guide compliant. Other improvements were for !SourceEdit - the version of Edit which comes with the C tools considered better than !Edit and could also load basic files.
Andrew's program Screen Effects changes brightness and fades. Filer has had some changes with a menu option for refresh directory. Handy if using LANmanager and a file changes in the background. Pinboard also changed in Choices window. Hard core developers more interested in Font Manger, Window manager Printer stack etc.
Tony was interested in Pipedream support since he preferred this to Fireworkz. He also mentioned a Fireworkz for Windows version.
Jack asked about documentation for developers and Steve said there was a Wiki and plenty of information. You can edit and update. It was very detailed and one can always email for advice.
Paul asked how able you had to be to make changes. Steve answered that one person armed with a template editor and a knowledge of basic was able to edit !Closeup to make it more compliant. But editing !Pinboard which is in assembly language needed more experience as it was more complex. They would always be willing to help if you knew what you wanted to do. You would only crash your own machine if something went wrong!
Peter asked about debugging tools. Steve said that there was a debug button you could use when a fault occurred. There was also a set of debug tools for trapping errors and watches etc. They were always keen to release these tools when in Acorn but were never able to do so; but now they can. The address related to the source file in a certain module if it aborted. Showregs would show where faults were. e.g. wrong pointer etc. You can get get source code for Zap mind bogglingly complicated! The Castle move to Xscale meant that some ARM instructions (26bit) no longer worked, which is why Aemulor is needed.
Tony was concerned about !Lennon which he found useful which no longer worked on the IYONIX. Steve suggested looking at the Newsgroups and posting a question.
It had been noticed that Steve moved a widow off screen which led into his 7th Software application !MoreDesk which enables you to have 9 screens and move between them. he had also added a feature to link to other programs like Pluto's alert feature to tell him when he received an email. Steve wanted to make his application very flexible and he can drag groups of windows around and no other application on the market catered for this so he decided to write it himself. After 6 months work decided he had better to sell it! Several of us purchased a copy there and then!
Gareth asked how they decide which bit to open up. The first batch they were very careful. You need to know the legality of each bit of software, was it bought in, were then any rude comments in the code! Does it still build and work! Chose a big collection of components the week before the Wakefield show - a long week of well known code like !Edit.
Some code is GPL. This is not really a problem as long as separately identified.
Peter asked if they knew who had written/changed the code. Steve said using CVS made it easier. They do attribute new authors to new code and give credit. Jack said there was a lot of RISC code which was of no interest to others. There was 2GB of code in total. There were a lot of humorous bits. "Help I'm trapped in a software factory!" Acorn stopped RMtidy from doing anything. "FSlock is Captain Scarlet" as FSLock could not be killed by RMtidy it was invincible.
Jack asked who were the main architects of RISCOS.
Steve said one of the major architects of RISC OS was Sophie Wilson - she created BASIC.
Gareth asked if a new ROM release would come out of RISC OS. Jack and Steve said they thought this would ultimately happen with all the new versions of Apps, it would depend on when IYONIX thought they could do this.
John asked about new Hardware and Jack said they were always on the lookout for new hardware, but he would never say when anything would come out before it did.
There is a list of what is released on the website http://www.riscosopen.org and people are also encouraged to make a donation to the project in order to offset the high cost of bandwidth for the system.
Steve was also selling mouse mats which had all the listed major developers and URLs.
This was a very good talk. many thanks to Jack and Steve for coming and giving us such a detailed presentation. It has certainly given us a good introduction to future developments.
Peter had videoed the presentation during the evening but has promised that it won't come out on youtube!
Not much to report this time. I will put Tony's on "Royalty for 1000yrs "talk files on the website.
| 2007 | ||
| November 7th | What is a server? - (Microsoft based) | Michael |
| December 5th | Gadgets and party evening | All |
| 2008 | ||
| January | Social evening TBA | All |
| February 6th | "Vector Artware and Artworks" | Frank |
| March 5th | "iLife08 Managing your digital world" | Gareth |
| April 2nd | AGM + TBA | All |
Talks with Visiting speakers are shown in Red. We will give more details as soon as they are confirmed. We are having a committee meeting this month to revise our programme so the above topics will probably change.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE , for a map and other details please see the website. http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2·50. The membership fee is £20 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events - please see their Website for details of their next meeting.
| 13th November 2007 | "Film scanning revisited" | |
| 11th December 2007 | "Xmas Special" | |
| 14th January 2008 | "What I got for Xmas" | |
| 12th February 2008 | "Sat Nav Loaded" |
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall, on the second Tuesday of the month
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.eaug.org.uk or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.eaug.org.uk/ppl.htm
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
P.S. My insurance company have added my computer cover away from home with no extra premium required, yours might do the same.(Ed.)
If anyone would like a copy of the CD of our old newsletters this could be arranged.
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the website.
Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com as a virtual domain,
it can also be reached using http://www.btinternet.com/~icenicomputerclub
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk