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[SysAdmin]

Since QNX almost became the next Amiga OS kernel* this news item may be of interest to Amiga fans.

http://www.osnews.com/story/23134/Re...s_QNX_Software


http://news.google.com/news/search?a...us&hl=en&q=QNX


Hopefully it will not get buried like another acquired OS* that was also in discussions to possibly be the next Amiga OS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS


*Reference

http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/beos.html

[XDelusion]

I never latched on to QNX as I did BeOS. It was interesting for sure, and very resource friendly, but there was just something about it that kept me from keeping it on my Hard Drive.

[B00tDisk]

QNX was novel to me "back in the day" with its whole bootable environment on a floppy disk. For 199...6? '7? that was a very neat trick indeed.

(In case you missed it, you could download a self-extracting disk image with a rudimentary web-browser, command line, text editor, and a Towers of Hanoi type game and I think it had a bezier curve screensaver but someone might want to check me out on that; again, quite novel for the mid/late 90's)

[EvilGuy]

All of the cool things about QNX (ie, the node-based networking, virtual console support and real-time scheduling) were pretty much glossed over by most people when QNX was touted as the next foundation for Amiga.

[persia]

It was pretty clever actually, with a realtime micro-kernel it really had potential. The idea was to build a new AmigaOS on top of QNX, sort of like OS X did on top of BSD. Except that BSD is monolithic. I think it might have give AmigaOS a future instead of just being a jazzed up fossil like it ended up....

[the_leander]

It'll be interesting to see what Blackberry does with QNX, thats for sure.

Like XDelusion I was impressed by QNX, but never in the same way as BeOS.

[redfox]

Back in the day, I was very impressed by that floppy version of QNX. It worked on my IBM Aptiva at home and the IBM machines we used at work. I still think it was a cool idea.

For awhile, I had noncommercial versions of QNX 6.1 and then QNX 6.2 installed at home on my HP pavilion minitower machine. I had a dual boot setup, Windows XP for the rest of the familly and I used QNX. Still have QNX on that machine.

Then I got involved with AmigaOS4 and have not upgraded my QNX system for awhile. I think I will look into the latest version of QNX and give it a try.

---
redfox

[odin]

From what I understand it is brilliant for using in embedded systems controlling factories and probably military systems, but has QNX ever been usable as a desktop OS?

[XDelusion]

As far as I ever saw, they never pushed the Desktop thing very far, though they did have a nice port of UAE and had it set up so that you could launch QNX apps through UAE. That's one feature I always envied!

[redfox]

QNX Neutrino 6.2.0 had a good web browser, file manager, editor, terminal (shell) program and other basics needed to create a usable desktop environment for a premium development system. It also had some bells and whistles of its own for creating the desktop look and feel the developer desired. What it lacked was user programs such as paint programs, spreadsheet programs, word processing, games, stuff like that. Some programs were made available by others for download from certain repository sites. I downloaded a few games, a version of Opera which provided some enhancements for the QNX Voyager WebBrowser, a version of Mozilla and an email program.

In other words, the basic system was usable right out of the box and I could surf the net right away after installing the system. But a casual user like me had to go out and find the other programs that I wanted to use.

I haven't tried QNX 6.4 yet, so not sure what it has available.

---
redfox

[Darth_X]

Originally Posted by B00tDisk

QNX was novel to me "back in the day" with its whole bootable environment on a floppy disk. For 199...6? '7? that was a very neat trick indeed.

(In case you missed it, you could download a self-extracting disk image with a rudimentary web-browser, command line, text editor, and a Towers of Hanoi type game and I think it had a bezier curve screensaver but someone might want to check me out on that; again, quite novel for the mid/late 90's)

It was cool.. I wish I still had the disk...

[kolla]

QNX Desktop - that would be neutrino with the photon GUI.

Yes, it was nice, brilliant, shiny, cool, fast, glorious, fanstatic ... and then some jackass ported GTK to it, and all native development vanished as all devs instead wasted time porting halfassed GTK applications that never really worked well. Users soon found out that the very same GTK apps worked much better on Linux or whateverBSD so why run Neutrino? At least that's how I experienced it.

The other part was that they were waaay slow to develop hardware drivers, I remember communicating with one guy at QSSL doing PCMCIA drivers, and from whay I understood, it was just him. Him and a huge pile of PCMCIA cards.

I still get invites from QSSL/QNX regarding various seminars/conferences/workshops they are holding every now and then.

[B00tDisk]

Originally Posted by Darth_X

It was cool.. I wish I still had the disk...

You can still get it, just google around. You can also put it on a CD and make that bootable, but that's cheating

[wiser3]

I went to a computer show in Toronto around the early 1990's where QNX had a large booth. They emphasized the stability of the system. It was being used in nuclear reactors, military ships, ATM machines, traffic light systems, etc... Areas where stability over long periods of time where extremely important. Imagine trying to control a nuclear reactor with windows constantly freezing up and crashing on you.

Most impressive was a demonstration of upgrading the QNX OS while apps were running without needing to close the apps or shut down. You could see the appearance of each apps interface change as it moved the apps to the updated OS. All the running apps had to be written in a manner compliant with this feature, but it was still very impressive.

[benJamin]

You can also put it on a CD and make that bootable, but that's cheating

Didn't bother installing a floppy drive? Just boot it in QEMU/VirtualBox/Etc.
I actually booted this up for the first time only last week. I stumbled upon the image on the net and thought, I never got the chance to use that way back then...