Hopefully this will be a useful guide to getting the most out of a RaspBerry Pi while using RISC OS
As RISC OS has its origins set back in the 80s it’s not going to be that similar to modern day operating systems, no putting in a CD (ahem, I mean a USB flash drive) and just straight up installing your chosen OS, there is a few extra steps to getting up and running.
Standard install – RISC OS Open
Head on over to RISC OS Open and you can grab the latest version (5.30 at the time of writing)
Or, use the Raspberry Pi imager
Either way you want to end up with RISC OS on an SD card for the Pi, there are plenty of guides online how to do this so I wont cover it here.
Extra software – Direct version
RISC OS Direct comes with the standard install but a whole host of extra goodies, this can be downloaded here, and a video guide link is available on that site.
Unfortunately I have noticed that some of the extra included software is not the latest version, and cannot be easily upgraded with !PackMan as it is not installed in the default location, or not recorded with !PackMan somehow.
You will probably want to upgrade from 5.28 to 5.30 to add WiFi access
Getting that extra space
ROOL forum thread here the rest of this section is just a TL;DR of this thread.
One of the things I noticed straight up was that no matter what size SD card I used, it would only have 2GB available for the OS. Not really an issue for such a small OS: (growing up, full sized games were under 1.6MB in size) but I did just find a 40GB-ish dump of RISC OS stuff, magazine scans and software.
And why is this? Well because the image that is being copied to the SD card is literally only 2 GB, and RISC OS does not contain software for resizing the FileCore partition.
There is a paid for version available here or a more technical process here
Here is a video on the process from RISC OS Community on GitHub
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