History
Pluto is an email and news reader that runs on the RISC OS operating system,
written by Jonathan Duddington in 1997 as a commercial product.
Jonathan stopped developing Pluto in about 2005, but in April 2013 Jonathan
announced Pluto v3.06 (09 Apr 2013), which was released
with a GPLv3 licence, and freely available to download from SourceForge,
including the source.
Since then Robert Sprowson and myself (Martin Avison) have made some
amendments, and in August 2013 this page was created, to contain
all current Pluto information in one place.
The sources to Pluto, including changes since v3.06, are available from
SourceForge.
If anyone wants to contribute a change, please contact Robert or myself.
eSpeak was included within !Pluto up to v3.15, but because of new hardware
and software a new RISC OS version has now been re-compiled with some minor
changes. This has been built from a copy of the SourceForge espeak files (as
we have been unable to contact Jonathan), and updated for RISC OS. It has
also been moved out of !Pluto back into !eSpeak, as a
separate download, which will make using it in other applications easier.
Versions Available
Please click on any of the versions listed on the left (newest ones first)
for information about the changes and downloads for that version. Note that :
- From v3.14, even-numbered versions will be 'release' versions, and
odd-numbered ones will be 'development' versions.
- The latest version of Pluto is available using the !Store application from
Plingstore.
- All versions of Pluto are available from SourceForge:
- SourceForge links for Pluto are on the pages for each version.
- Netsurf and Orgeano2 users may see a SourceForge page saying
Your download will start shortly..., but if nothing happens then click
on the Problems Downloading? then direct link on that page to complete the download.
- The zip file may arrive with a filetype of Data and need changing to RISC
OS filetype of Zip, most easily by just dragging to SparkFS on the
iconbar.
Future Changes
It is hoped that further changes will be made to Pluto.
Any changes will be announced on the Pluto mailing list,
and on the comp.sys.acorn.announce newsgroup.
Any offers of help always welcome!
The Pluto Mailing List should be used for any questions or
suggestions for changes to Pluto and the documentation, or offers of help!
Note there is no guarantee that any suggestions will be acted on
The mailing list (which is low message volume) can be joined by sending an
email to
Pluto-list-subscribe@riscository.co.uk with a subject of Subscribe, or
visiting Riscository.
Note that there have been other previous mailing lists, the main PlutoUsers and one called pluto-users (both on Yahoo Groups which is closing all lists in December 2020),
and the original pluto-l on Argonet.
Downloads of other associated applications
Note that for full use of Pluto some other applications may be required or installed:
- To read the Pluto manual you will need StrongHelp, which can be downloaded from
Fred Graute's website.
- Application(s) to 'Transport' Mail & News messages to and from the Internet are required.
The manual includes details of how to use with AntiSpam, Hermes, NewsHound and PopStar.
- PlutoMon is a small monitoring application which may be useful.