The OpenQNX website reports that the QNX 6.2.1 Non-Commercial is released quietly.
QNX 6.2.1 NC Released
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Eugenia Loli
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The site mentions Dan Dodge & Gordon Bell. Something of a coincidence with Gordon Bell of DEC, Vax, VMS fame.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/imt/0,15704,427288-2,00.html
This article gives a good deal of background behind the company.
A million plus installs not too shabby, and another 20mil to Dodge next year.
Deserves more space on the desktop, I wonder how many people use it and what apps there are besides the ready to go.
In other words instead of another Linux newbie install experience, how about an experienced QNX user review.
Does anyone know what the BeOS guys that went to QNX did there or was that a transition to something else?
AFAIK there were only two BeOS-related people who worked for QNX. Dominic Giampaolo already left and he is now at Apple, I am not sure about John Fehr though (of ‘Wildcard Design’ fame), if he is still there.
This is probably a beta version… it couldn’t be that it’s been sitting in there since March 13 and the get.qnx.com still offering 620 version… Can anyone clarify on this?
Chris McKillop of qnx reads osnews, I hope he offers his insight here.
This isn’t a beta. It is the release disc, just that for some reason the main website has not been updated to reflect the new disc.
The way the packaging works, NC is the base with SE adding more packages and then PE adding more to SE. Works out very well.
And yes, there where two former BeOS guys at QNX – Dominic and John. John is still with the company and is the one to blame for the new media architecture present in 6.2.1.
There is also a new online repository for the 6.2.1 3rd Party Disc:
http://download.qnx.com/contrib/repository621a/
Just add that to qnxinstall and away you go…
Yuk! Why is the download only 8 KB/sec? I wonder if the osnews announcement has something to do with this, otherwise it should have been much faster… 😮
I know, my connection to work is horrible as well (I tele-commute and the VPN has been deadly slow since the war started).
Dunno why.
…and I loved it. I am currently using Linux for my Unix devel here at work and I was blown away by the speed and ease of use that QNX offers. Great interface and a clean, simple design that the rest of the Unix world should take a look at.
By the way, I noticed that the new versions of Windows are borrowing pretty heavilty from the QNX designs.
I do have three pet hates:
1) TCP/IP is horribly slow and painful when working.
2) My video card and USB mouse are not supported, is someone going to fix up the USB dev?
3) Doesn’t run too hot under a heavy load. It would be nice if there was a “real time” to “desktop” switch.
Normally I lurk here, Chris does most of the talking, but I think I should step in here.
Unfortunately John’s not here anymore. He quit a little while ago due to personal reasons. Gonna miss that guy. He did some great work while he was here.
As for the NC iso being available, not sure what’s in there myself. I know there were some packaging bugs that delayed the release of NC (some libs were missing), users who use that iso I think are going to be using it at their own risk. It’s not supposed to be officially released yet anyway from what I was told today. It should be released *very* soon, so people might want to wait a bit before trying it.
Matthew, what network driver are you using? That is likly the cause of any tcp/ip performance issues you are seeing.
As for USB mice, you can enable them to work by simply starting the USB stack and devu-mouse+devi-hirun (pre-6.2.1) or io-hid+devi-hid (6.2.1). I am using my wireless intellimouse explorer just fine with devi-hid.
The key to making things work under a heavy load are to setup priorities properly. Under a normal session, all apps run at priority 10. So if you have something computationally intensive drop it down to 9. Nothing at 10 will be stopped any longer and the priority 9 process will get 100% of the free CPU time. It works very well. The opposite is also a possibility – having critial tasks raised in priority. So, for example, media playback threads will run at priority 12.
Downloads from QNX website were always slow.
I tried about a month ago to get 6.20 ISO and decided it’s not worth it.
I guess, it’s intentional to encourage people to buy it.
The Package Installer won’t upgrade me past 6.1. Is this likely to change?
BTW, while I have not used it and never will, Click N Run sounds pretty much like a rip off of Package Installer.
Also, in my experience TCP/IP is extremely fast compared to another “Operating System” installed on my #2 desktop machine, a 233MMX – 128Mb box.
Any news of OOo for QNX?
Bayerwerke – I am afraid that to move from 6.1 to 6.2.x will require a re-install. We don’t support moving from 6.1->6.2.
I started to get the tools required for OOo built on QNX, but lost interest. Great project for someone to pick up, and those of us on #qnx (irc.qnxzone.com) would be happy to help with questions/stuckness.