One of the few gripes many users had with QNX RtP was its inability to place icons on the desktop. QNXZone now reports that the first public version of the QNX Desktop has been released. This version supports dragging icons, changing/editing the item’s launch command, switch between small/big icons.
QNX Desktop 0.1 Released
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Eugenia Loli
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Excellent stuff atj!
I tried this os way back in 1999 when I first started to explore other options to windows. Back then a version of Qnx was possible to download the whole os to a floppy disk and boot it up and surf the net etc. But I was more interested Beos and Linux and Qnx unfortunately I lost interest in it.
Ah.. the same story over and over again…
This floppy-based OS (1.4 MB) you talk about has very little to do anymore with the desktop version of QNX Momentics/RtP (ranges from 40 to 250 MB) that we report here. The experience you had with that OS can’t be compared with the later QNX 5 and 6.x as we are talking about a rewrite on most places, they are considered different OSes, pretty much.
well i must say this looks very spiffy. I may have to try it again. I tried QNX a few years ago but after installing and starting to boot it up it would hang. Guess I need to give it a second chance.
Does anyone know what kind of market share QNX has? One thing that comes to mind to me is being a product of a company it would have some level of commercial support. I know it’s used heavily in the embedded world (since thats really what it is). Being in such a spot makes QNX more attractive over many/most other alt OS’s
Well, QNX is used in really reliability-heavy applications. Most OS licenses say “This is not approved for use in a nuclear facility”; the QSSL license says that you must ask them first before using it there. Chances are, you use QNX many times a day without realizing.
It’s been around for many, many years. One of the few truly innovative OSes (first OS to support a hard disk IIRC).
Yeah I know those things about QNX, thats why I was curious what kind of market share they have. But obviously it’s not very big on the desktop. But seeing that it is so wide spread for other things it seams like it’s an OS with lots of good apps.
Can someone point me out to the HCL for this latest version.
I too tried it once and liked it alot, the only problem was my graphics card couldn’t go to a 85Hz refresh rate in this OS whereas in win2000 it can.
Matrox Millenium II PCI 4MB
Does it have support for it or SCSI at all? I was tempering with the early versions, but I went completely SCSI around that time so no QNX for me any more. I would like to retry, so is there support by now?
I used the Floppy Demodisk on a Pentium 120/32 and was very impressed… at the same time I did a dual-boot install with Win98 on an Athlon ( QNX 4.0 ) – also very good, but marred by a poor web browser and few available applications.
How would a modern QNX hard-disk based install perform on a P133-32 laptop?
Well, one of the reasons I LIKED QNX6 is because it didn’t have these icons… leaving you only with the stuff that’s really needed. Someone once mentioned that icons are obsolete – they tend to get covered by windows anyway, and to get to these icons you have to press that ugly button in Windows that minimizes all windows and upon clicking on an icon all windows go up again. Icons are really redundant… What QNX really needs is more people using it, so that QSSL starts looking more into desktop market…
http://www.qnx.com/support/sd_hardware/
I also tried QNX a few years back. I tried that floppy version and their free version. Worked well enough, I suppose.
My only problem was: once I had QNX installed, and looked at it, I had no idea what I use QNX for.
I guess if I was building some embedded systems for oil rigs, or nuclear power plants, or blood centers, or whatever; QNX might be good, until then; I’m not sure QNX has much to offer me.
This Stuff wasn’t yet done if you, and the nice QNX community wouldn’t have helped me so much on it.
So I want to thank Chris McKillop, Julian Kinraid and Jonathan Björk for the help and genious suggestions they gave me.
I joined the #qnx channel on irc.joher.com:666 in January 2001 and since then I never left it…
Keep the great support going guys!
Looks clean and not in your face GUI. I hope Amiga Inc(MorphOS and Aros) are taking notes.
I always said QNX would make a great desktop OS. Just needed small
things. Good to see someone developing it in that direction, just
hope someone takes out a license to distribute a QNX for the desktop,
they’d make some money.
QNX replaced Linux on my machines months ago. It fast and rock solid stable. It has many apps, most of them open source: Gaim, The Gimp, AbiWord, Apache, Mozilla, etc. These run seemlessly rootless with XPhoton. You can run X Windows alone if you leave the Photon enviroment.
There are also many useful native apps that that are stellar: killerIRC, KillerWeb, killerAudio, PhCam (a digital camera app), PhAudio, etc. QNX can be run “live” off the boot cd, so you can test whether you like it or not.
I personally like the no icons look but I am helping test the new desktop app and its fun and easy to use.
Oh ya and it has Doom, and Unreal and Quake III.
I read on one site – perhaps incorrectly – that American spacecraft use QNX for some critical systems… although apparently the Shuttles craft use 386 chips ( the silicon fabrication techniques used to make a 386 are so crude and chunky that radiation can’t damage them ) so presumably some slimmed down version is used
NASA representatives are doubtless buying up 486 overdrive chips on eBay to prepare for their Mars mission.
In my office we have a Canon combined photocopier/printer/scanner which has a built in OS and a touchscreen display
The widgets it uses on windows are very QNX-like in appearance but the documentation does not state what OS is used.
What’s a desktop icon? Oh, those horrid things I turn off the minute I get KDE setup
Seriously, in this day and age of floating menus and hotkeys, what’s the point of desktop icons? If anything, they’re more confusing for the new user, since there are now two places (the start menu and the desktop) from which to start applications.
QNX just doesn’t make sense as a desktop OS. The guts aren’t designed for it. It doesn’t handle paging correctly, it doesn’t do proper interactive scheduling, and the filesystem is dead slow.
>If anything, they’re more confusing for the new user, since >there are now two places (the start menu and the desktop) >from which to start applications.
That’s only your point of view, and there are much more people who use desktop icons than people who don’t so apparently many people think desktop icons are usefull.
I use desktop icons as a selected shortcuts of the application that I use often. One key to minimise all apps, one click to launch the app, it isn’t slower than using menus.
Still the big/small desktop icons setup that both QNX and Windows have is a bit limitating IMHO: icons should use vector drawings. This way the user could precisely choose the size of the icons.
Once the size is chosen, the vector could be rendered to bitmap for performance reason.
Usually “Mr. Opinionated” posts from somewhere at gatech.edu… 😉
By the way, from what I’ve read I don’t see how it “incorrectly” handles paging
Yikes. A me-imposter. That would be scary. But no, I’m home for break at the moment, hence the Cox cable IP.
Seriously though, I didn’t mean to imply that desktop icons weren’t useful for many people. I was just saying that maybe its more confusing for a beginning user to have desktop icons than not. Or maybe too confusing to have a start menu instead of somehow having everything accessible via the desktop.
As for paging, I’m thinking of paging in terms of swap. In QNX, paging is disabled by default to prevent erratic paging behavior from effecting real time response rates. Applications that need to use the swap file (for example GCC) need to explicitly enable it by unlocking its heap so that memory can be paged out.
Actually, paging is disabled because it isn’t supported. It just happens that there is a hack in the x86 kernel to allow paging to occur and that only the GNU tools are sanctioned to use it.
So, maybe in the future it will be supported in an offical capacity.
i tried QNX once, and I really found it a pleasure since it is really responsive and it just feels polished (e.g. in contrast to linux).
But I stopped using it, since I need to connect to the internet over a VPN connection and I didn’t find a way for doing this in QNX.
Well, and the second problem is the real-time scheduling I think, since sometimes the audioplayer stopped for a short period playing a song while doing some heavy I/O operations.
However, hopefully the user base keeps growing since I really think this could become a great desktop OS.
I’ve always wondered about the issue of real time OS on a desktop. Would it be feasable for a switch to be made available so that one can flick between “Desktop Mode” and “Real Time Mode”? would that be feasable? maybe a QNX guru can fill this question with an answer?
I’ve always wondered about the issue of real time OS on a desktop. Would it be feasable for a switch to be made available so that one can flick between “Desktop Mode” and “Real Time Mode”? would that be feasable? maybe a QNX guru can fill this question with an answer?
I was thinking the exact same thing.
Also so many WM’s on linux why haven’t they cloned photon yet. eg. OpenPhoton
There isn’t any need to flip between modes. The issue with the default RR schedular is that it is fixed priority. So this means that a priority 12 thread can starve all the threads <=11. There are other options, and for example, QNX4 offered an adaptive schedular that would drop a process down in priority if it used too much CPU time. This has not yet show up under Neutrino.
The issues with skipping audio on disk access are almost always driver related. What audio driver where you using and what release of QNX6 was that skipping experienced with?
It says it can’t find libcpp.so.2 Where can I get it?
install memontics……..just put in your cd and hit installer…..it needs to install that…….contains all your libs and stuff
Not sure what you mean. I’m using Momentics 6.20. Desktop installed okay but gives that error.
I figured it out and did what you said (it’s okay now) but I’m really confused. If Momentics wasn’t already installed, what was that operating system I was using?
Neutrino is the OS, Momentics is the development environment. So we have Momentics under Neutrino, Windows and Solaris. The NC download first installs Neutrino and then you install the Momentics packages.
Thanks for the info but this means my partition is probably too small now. I’ll know better next time.