The December speaker for the December ROUGOL meeting (one week earlier than usual) was Andrew Rawnsley. He was wearing several hats, including R-Comp, RISC OS Developments, and a very stylish Christmas hat and a Dr Who Christmas jumper.

ROUGOL has become an established monthly fixture, and being online has really boosted attendance, with over 60 people for this meeting. The meeting started as always at 7:30pm with smalltalk before Andrew kicked off at around 7:45pm.
 
Andrew shared his desktop to show some things. He started with the big reveal for the evening with RISC OS running on the new TCP/IP stack (5.71). This is based on OpenBSD TCP/IP stack. Andrew was running his desktop across it and also showed Iris running. Still a work in progress and does not play with Omniclient or Lanman98. Aim is to track the current developments of the OpenBSD stack as much as possible, partly automated through a set of tools. Adding support for IPv6 will require some changes to some other modules. Wifi will be added afterwards. The stack will be released for everyone through ROOL and the source code will be fully open. It will replace some closed source elements of old stack such as MbufManager.
 
In reply to questions about the speed of the stack, Andrew also revealed that there will be a new release of Iris before xmas. A cold boot on Andrew's ARMX6 took 4 seconds, down for about 8 in current release. The latest build was shown off. Main changes are to support latest version of Webkit engine which changed the way clipboard handling works. Text selection works nicely with pasting from a web page into Edit and pasting text into Google search. Iris was also shown running Google Maps. Performance will improve when the JIT compiler is switched on. HTML inspector is now present in Iris but needs to be switched on with a system variable. Facebook works as well. There is no plugin/extension interface at present.
 
Next Andrew switched to a 4te machine where he ran a modified version of Iris called 4te browse and showed off the new box. It is a Pi4 based system with lots of software, including the latest Fireworkz and MPro. There is a nice set of tools to configure the system, make the screen switch to 'big mode' and also integrate VNC easily.
 
There will be a 5.28 updater for existing R-Comp customers very soon. It is in final testing.
 
Andrew did a quick demo of the latest Fireworkz release (2.30) with its dynamic editing using OLE. Ovation Pro will need the latest version which includes a tweak to make it work.
 
The meeting finished with lots of questions for Andrew.
 
It was a very interesting talk - many thanks to Andrew.
 
You can find out about ROUGOL's monthly meetings on their website