Sunday, August 27, 2006

What ROLF is

ROLF is a GUI framework using the framebuffer device on Linux to provide a look and feel similar to that of the RISC OS operating system.

The RISC OS GUI is largely unchanged in concept since the late 1980's, not because of any lack of development, but because it just worked, better in many people's opinion than any of its competitors, then and now.

ROLF is not intended to take over from RISC OS, or even to run RISC OS native applications (although that may become possible with the use of Brandy, QEMU and a command line interpreter, among other things), but to allow Linux applications to be written or modified to work in the manner of the RISC OS GUI (with some newer twists, like translucent windows and preemptive scheduling, not to mention multi-gigahertz processors).

Another aspect of RISC OS I would like to emulate is to keep the system lightweight and modular, so that it will work on devices with limited resources as well as highly powerful and resource-rich desktop machines.

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