RISC OS, the operating system of the original Arm computer, the Acorn Archimedes, is still very much alive – and doing relatively well for its age.

In June 1987, Acorn launched the Archimedes A305 and A310, starting at £800 ($982) and running a new operating system called Arthur. At the time, it was a radical and very fast computer. In his review [PDF] for Personal Computer World, Dick Pountain memorably said: "It loads huge programs with a faint burping noise, in the time it takes to blink an eye."

Arthur was loosely related to Acorn's earlier MOS, the BBC Micro operating system but looked very different thanks to a prototype graphical desktop, implemented in BBC BASIC, that could charitably be called "technicolor."

Renamed RISC OS, version 2 followed in 1989 – the same year that Sun started selling its new SPARCstation 1 (a snip at £7,500c $9,200) and DEC launched the MIPS R2000-chipset-based DECstation 3100 (for £8,800/c $10,800).

RISC OS has had a rather convoluted history, partly due to Acorn spinning out Arm, eventually pulling out of the computer market, rebranding as Element 14 and being acquired by Broadcom, where Arm co-designer Sophie Wilson still works today. And partly due to drama over the ownership of the OS post-Acorn at one point.

• Path of Least Resistance

  In machine learning, optimizations algorithms often move towards a local minimum (or maximum) by a process called gradient descent that finds the path of steepest descent. In smaller dimensions, this looks a lot like the path of least resistance.

  Consumers often choose products that are on the path of least resistance.

• Async Cancellation II: Time and Signals

  For the past few years I've been working on the async-std library, which provides an async implementation of the APIs exposed by std. However, we also added several new APIs related to things unique to async Rust: concurrency, control over execution, and the interaction between the two.

  These APIs were initially introduced in async-std as "unstable", and have been the main focus of my work to design since. On this blog there are numerous posts related to for example: concurrency, cancellation, and parallelism. Today I want to share a new experiment I've been working for time-based operations in async Rust. I've designed it as a stand-alone crate for now, but I intend to PR its addition to async-std in the near future.

• Write documentation first. Then build.

  Write your idea first. You then have a script to follow, a consistent way to share your story with others. We’re this, not that, here’s why.

• We’ll see you at CSTA 2022 Annual Conference

  Connecting face to face with educators around the world is a key part of our mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and it’s something that we’ve sorely missed doing over the last two years. We’re therefore thrilled to be joining over 1000 computing educators in the USA at the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Annual Conference in Chicago in July.

• Upgrading Qubes 4.0.4 to 4.1.0

  For those running Qubes 4.0.4 looking to upgrade to 4.1.0, let’s review the upgrade process using a Librem 14. To get started, you’ll need a USB hard drive to store your backup and a USB flash drive to boot the upgrade ISO.

  Most file system formats will work as long as they support large files, but you’ll need something more than fat32. If your drive uses fat you’ll need to reformat with ext4, exFAT or NTFS. To reformat, install GParted.

A Linux distro for smartphones abandoned by their manufacturers, postmarketOS, has introduced in-place upgrades.

Alpine Linux is a very minimal general-purpose distro that runs well on low-end kit, as The Reg FOSS desk found when we looked at version 3.16 last month. postmarketOS's – pmOS for short – version 22.06 is based on the same version.

This itself is distinctive. Most other third-party smartphone OSes, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS, or the former CyanogenMod, are based on the core of Android itself.

The project is quite different. It uses the mainline Linux kernel, and a standard userland, to support a wide variety of devices. The theory is that not needing a manufacturer's outdated firmware or drivers means that pmOS can use more current components, direct from the various upstream Linux projects. The project's own wiki currently lists over 200 supported devices, including phones, tablets, and e-book readers, ranging back to the venerable Nokia N900.

They're not all equally supported, though. Most of them can can boot, many have Wi-Fi support, but currently just two actual phones work as phones: the open-source hardware PinePhone and the Purism Librem 5. Even saying that, though, the ability to connect to Wi-Fi and use an old device as a pocketable terminal could make obsolete hardware useful again.

The new version of Linux Mint's default desktop will feature improved support for multiple monitors and other enhancements.

The developers of Linux Mint have announced a new version of the default Cinnamon desktop environment, version 5.4. The release comes ahead of the pending release of Linux Mint 21, dubbed "Vanessa."

The biggest change in Cinnamon 5.4 is a new version of the Mutter window manager, according to 9To5Linux. The JavaScript engine is also being overhauled.