RealOS' main objective is to create an easily installable desktop environment for people that wish to start with data analyics in an open source, low carbon footprint environment. It should appeal to people interested in ethical computing. Using SWI-Prolog as the main vehicle provides a high-level programming framework that encourages experimentation and conceptual productivity. Pairing this with R that has extensive user contributed libraries of open source code, specially in statistics and data analytics.
This is an extremely cheap entry to the world of open source OS and data analytics software for people that might have no prior experience with these tools.
You only require a Raspberry pi 4 (in UK the 4GB version currently retails for around 55 GBP), a power supply, an SD card (16Gb or higher), a keyboard and a monitor.
Get the latest realos image from this directory, burn the image on an SD card with at least 12Gb capacity. You can burn the SD card with something like the PI Imager (advertised as runnning on Windows, MacOS and Ubuntu). We have tested the Ubuntu version of this, and found to be working well. Also have tested on one Windows 10 machine with up-to-date OS updates and worked perfectly fine.
Login to user "stoic" with password "42swipl".
The image will expand to incorporate the full size of the used SD card at the first boot.
The image is an in expensive way to get acquainted with open source operating systems and software. The main vehicle for programming is the SWI-Prolog implementation of logic programming- so the image only makes sense if you use or want to learn Prolog.
RealOS is primarily targeting people working on data analytics combining the knowledge representation prowess of Prolog with the abundance of statistical algorithms available in R. For example data analytics in biology are well suited by this combination, and additional packs are available in SWI-Prolog to further help in this area (not installed in the image, but easily installed from within SWI-Prolog).
Even for people with no statistical tasks, the image can provide a powerful vehicle for doing serious SWI-Prolog work in an environment-friendly, low-cost platform. Such users can completely ignore the integration with R, or use in a supplementary fashion for creating high quality plots for publication or presentations.
There are also a few screenshots in directory images.
Nicos Angelopoulos, Feb 2021.