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Get QNX For Free
TomRitchford writes: "QNX is about to start distributing their real-time OS for free downloads for non-commercial use at
get.qnx.com.
Right now it's 'Real Soon Now,' but you can sign up and they'll send a free CD to the first 5000 to request it." The
operating system's
concepts will look familiar to anyone who knows unix, but its design makes it better for older (Intel-compatible) CPUs, and situations where stability and predictability are more important than unix's cornucopia of applications and features.
Good things: TOWERS OF HANOI!! Boo-ya!
Got Rhinos?
When QNX first started releasing a free version to average users I remember a thread about it in a listserv I was on so I checked it out. I was astounded by the fact that the whole thing fit on a floppy and soon started carrying a diskette with me with my dial-up infoz everywhere I went. I'd be in department stores and the clerk would be away from the desk and I'd toss in a floppy, reboot, and sit there happily checking my mail...till I was shown out by security. THANKS QNX!
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
.technomancer
.technomancer
Linux is by far not predictable... you cannot guarantee completion of routines within a certain time. For instance, controlling a Neuclear Power Station (I know this comparrison has ven overused by know, so forgive me...) would be an example of an application where one wants to be sure to make a descision within a certain ammount of time, and not unexpectedly having to wait for disk-io...
There are much to read on this out there... I'm sure.
In 99.999 % of cases it's ok to use, ans so we do... That's why Linux is soo cool etc.
Just some people still use Token Ring for the same reason... that 0.001% of the time that something get's delayed...
What if you want BeOS on a single computer by itself? You have to leave a floppy in the drive? How annoying is that? Why can't it be a normal OS? Why can't they simply make it something that can install on it's own partition and work like any normal OS would work?
People may scream that it's not crippled, but to me it is. I don't like floppies, I never have. But because I want to use an OS, I have to have one? That stinks if you ask me.
OK, now that you can get Be for free, and now QNX, has anyone seen any results from this? These aren't the only free but commercial packages out there, but what's noteworthy is they come from commercial roots. Anyone have anything quantitative on these "free" releases in regards to their market expanding? Any rush of developers or users?
Maybe they're hoping someone will write them a new encryption algorithm...
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Hmm...
I think this would allow more development on QNX, at least for the first 5000 who get a CD for free.
If this has IP Masquerating support, I might wipe out Linux on my other box to try QNX out.
Actually, this is also good for people who want to make handheld devices, as this has a very small footprint in terms of RAM and storage space. IMO, this would have been a better choice for TiVO.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
It is notoriously difficult to get pricing information for QNX.
I have heard differing reports on comp.os.qnx, including that it is "very expensive, hundreds of dollars per system," or, on the other hand, the vague answer of "you can license it reasonably economically." (With no definition of what "reasonably economical" means, of course.)
- VSTa
- MIT Exokernel
- EROS
- Possibly even Hurd
- eCos
- RTEMS
- Fiasco
- On Linux, people interested in QNX should almost certainly look at SRR -- QNX API compatible message passing for Linux
These are all interesting alternatives, albeit not all being of identical levels of interest.A copylefted system that "lifts" ideas from QNX and Plan 9
It looks like development has not been terribly active lately.
Again, not terribly active, but an interesting OS kernel.
Eric Raymond thinks it's mindblowing, so the Eric Raymond Personality Cult should all be preparing to drop Linux in favor of EROS. (Of course, it isn't yet capable of self-hosting, which indicates that it's not all that useful at this point. But, to cultists, usefulness is irrelevant...)
It's different from the other options; certainly not a tiny OS option...
Which, like QNX, appears to be used in some reasonably critical system environments...
Which is a "lighter microkernel than Mach"...
This is the critical programming abstraction that QNX uses heavily which isn't all that widely used on traditional UNIXes, namely asynchronous messaging.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
And most importantly, from browsing the site for
a few moments it appears there will finally be a
version of gcc for QNX available for DL as well...
QNX has been available in one form or another
for free for awhile... Now that we can get dev
tools without shelling out $$$ the real fun should
begin.
.technomancer
.technomancer
From QNX page:
The popular command-line GNU development tools are included with the platform, as are graphical debuggers and third-party development tools
So, you can count on having at least GNU gcc.
Talking about the cracked crypt() function is absolutely ridiculous. For starters, it was fixed internally a week before the posting on Slashdot (i.e. the developers found out about it and started fixing it - forget the conspiracy theory). It was only the crypt() function for QNX4 that was cracked. The flavour of QNX that is being given away it Neutrino, with a different type of crypt that isn't cracked. On a side note, having a way to crack the crypt doesn't do a damn load of good on an ATM, or almost any sort of machine that has QNX on it. On the other hand, if you *do* see an ATM, or heart monitor that has an exposed floppy drive and keyboard, feel free to haxor that thing for all it's worth.
I think you are off on a few points. First, prior to R5, the number of BeOS users was estimated at 100,000. The following is an excerpt from a Be press release last week:
"Within a week of the release of BeOS 5 Personal Edition, a record breaking 550,000 downloads were reported, and as of yesterday that total had increased to more than 870,000. These figures include all downloads from Be's web site, as well as from 18 reporting download partners. Be estimates that at least 39 other download sites have not yet reported."
Even if you figure that the remaining 39 FTP sites add only another 200,000 downloads and that none of the people who downloaded burned a CD or passed the file to a friend, this brings the BeOS userbase to about 11 times its pre-R5 release (i.e. 1.1 million).
Second, despite the marketing line that Be gave the world about being "the Media OS" (principly to avoid the wrath of Redmond) be has always been "a general purpose OS that does media really well", and not "a media OS that is not a good general purpose OS" as you seem to be implying. BeOS makes a truly great general desktop operating system (it still lacks on the server side but that is what we have Linux and BSD for).
QNX is not a general purpose OS and trying to hack it into one does not make a whole lot of sense (the same is true of Linux by the way). QNX & Linux make good embedded OSs. Linux makes a good server OS. Both are a mistake as a general purpose desktop OS, because it is not really what they are designed to do (THERE IS A REASON THEY ARE COMMAND LINE). Why re-invent the wheel when you have a GOOD desktop option already available in BeOS?
All of which brings me to something that I am truly curious about, what made the ex-Amiga people choose QNX over BeOS?
Worth it, though...
Yep, QNX is indeed *very* cool. For those who have never tried it, QNX uses a pseudo-rawrite utility to write the image to the floppy disk. There are two images available: one for modem users, and one for networked machines. Oh yeah -- the machine doesn't need a hard drive either!
The handy thing about this is if you're at a location which has the PC's under some sort of lock-down (like Crowd Control) that prevents you from accessing the net or whatever, you can just boot to that floppy instead. Blammo! Instant Net-Ready OS!
I thought I once recalled instructions somewhere on QNX's site about how to install the QNX demo images to a hard disk, but was unable to find them. Anybody ever try this?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
It's not better or worse than Linux, *BSD, *NIX, it's just different, and that's why it's so good :)
QNX makes the majority of its money from large commercial development hosts and royalty fees for people producing QNX boxes (embedded systems.) There is little reason for us not to allow the general computing community to see our software, become more familiar with it, and help us improve the development environment.
We use QNX Neutrino everyday here; all of our products are developed on QNX Photon desktop environments. We read mail, run servers, do programming, debugging and just about all the things a linux person does on their computer. QNX's isn't trying to be a desktop, but it's also not enough for us to just *say* we're scalable. We're doing our best to prove it.
-William Bull
This is a tentative list. There is increasing hardware compatibility including PCI enumerators for real hardware (plug and pray) detection. We have a new accelerated graphics architecture with a driver development kit and new accelerated drivers. Expect this list to grow - our graphics team has been able to get a large number of high quality drivers prepared for this latest relese.
-William Bull
um, sorry?
I didn't know you could do that. It doesn't really change my original argument about this happening during INSATLL, but it's good to know that it's possible. thanks.
FWIW, I see this is a bit more dramatic than what happened with BeOS. Earlier versions of BeOS were pretty inexpensive anyway, you could just call up many mail order stores and get a copy for less than a hundred bucks. By the time BeOS 5 PE came out, most developers who were interested in BeOS, probably already had tried 4.5. What's $69?
With QNX and Neutrino, it didn't appear to be widely available; I think they only sold direct and you had to call them to get a price. Combine that with all the hubbub about high licensing fees in previous versions of QNX, and it was a real turn-off for small-time developers who don't want to make a big committment.
I think this new strategy is a huge change from what QSSL was doing before, so it's going to have a more noticable effect than BeOS 5 PE did. A lot of developers are about to try out Neutrino for their first time.
Oh, and one more difference here. BeOS was always marketed as a "media OS" and still is, so BeOS 5 PE doesn't really have much potential for bringing in new blood. But with Neutrino, there's something else going on behind the scenes: the movement to change the target of Neutrino. QNX and Neutrino have traditionally been seen as just being for embedded work. But now there's the Phoenix Consortium (Amiga refugees) who intend to turn Neutrino into the base for a new general-purpose platform. This could make Neutrino a lot more interesting to people who previously wouldn't have given it a second thought. (Like me, for example.)
I guess what I'm say is: don't try to predict the volume of Neutrino's developer rush by looking at BeOS's. The situations are different.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There are certainly a number of applications where you need to have quite a bit more control over the operating system than is possible under an OS like Windows 98 or NT.
For the past several years I've been working in a couple of industries where the price of the computer hardware is insignificant, and the driving cost is actually the software development.
For the most part, these can be considered machines that are dedicated to one particular task, but we are using a general purpose computer as the platform to operate the system. That you can install MS Word and play Quake on it is besides the point. As a matter of fact, these systems are replacing machines which were built up from discrete IC as dedicated controlers.
One of the problems you encounter is that the designers of an operating system have to make some basic assumptions about what the priorities of certain common tasks should be. Right now we are selling a system running Windows NT which is controlling an outdoor electronic sign (such as the scoreboard at a football stadium). Our fiber-optic output device is trying to send data real-time to the scoreboard 30 times a second, but we are being pre-empted by the hard drive controller. The fact is that we want the hard drive (and the mouse for that matter) to take a back seat for what is the main task, running that sign.
If you are in the medical products industry, the situation becomes even more important. If your computer crashes and needs to reboot, you've just killed somebody. It can cause some problems if your system needs to pause for a couple of seconds to perform a heap cleanup routine. In these situations a lousy operating system is an embaressment when you are selling your product. Industrial controlers are another area where this is important, such as a controller which mixes ingredients in a modern food processing plant. (Opps, I guess we didn't turn that valve off soon enough. I guess we need to dump this batch of food worth $10,000 and try again)
I'll admit that Linux is probabally capable of doing just about everything I've mentioned, but there are some other considerations: As somebody else posted here recently (and I apoligize that I can't remember who or on what article) you can't go wrong buying Microsoft. Like it or not, MS has a reputation with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and they consider Linux still to be an upstart OS. This is very similar to how IBM has been (and for the more part still is) percieved by these same people. They write in to the bid proposals that you must provide a controller which runs a certain operating system. Sometimes we can influence the people writing the bids and suggest a certain operating system or another, and if you do suggest something they aren't familiar with you need to explain some very clear benefits that a very non-technical person can understand with about one or two minutes of explaination.
The CEO of the company I work for has read about Linux in the Wall Street Journal and some other general magazines, and has suggested we investigate the possibility of developing controllers with it. I'm also keeping an eye out for other OS products, like QNX, which may also help out with our product lines. I will say that I don't think Microsoft products are up to the task for real-time applications, and this is one operating system area that MS has significantly ignored or neglected. It is also an area of OS development that can be extreamly expensive to develop if you havn't planned for it from the very beginning of the OS development.
If the makers of QNX want to show that they understand and implement Real Time Solutions, why don't we find out whether or not we are among the "first 5000" to request the Free CD, i.e. just after we request it from their Web-site? ;)
And they had the "Towers of Hanoi" game on there, and any OS that comes with that can't be all bad. *grin*
-B/W/
QNX is different. Unlike MS Windows, MacOS, UNIX, BSD, or Linux, it's a real microkernel operating system. All the kernel does is manage memory, handle task switching, and pass messages between processes. Everything else is outside the kernel - file systems, networking, graphics, device drivers, windowing, and of course applications. Any of those can go down and restart without taking the kernel down. This is the way operating systems are supposed to be written. And QNX demonstrates it can be fast.
They're giving away QNX Neutrino, not classical QNX; this is their new OS. The old QNX kernel is rock-solid (I once read that the last kernel fix was made in 1992), but x86 only. Neutrino is available for x86, PPC, and MIPS, although the free version seems to be the x86 distribution only.
CodeWarrior is available for QNX Neutrino. The current version just invokes GCC from the CodeWarrior IDE, but the next release will use the usual CodeWarrior compilers. You can also cross-develop with CodeWarrior on MS Windows, targeting for QNX Neutrino.
The applications aren't yet available for QNX as a general-purpose desktop OS, but I think the intent of this free version is to encourage moves in that direction. Mozilla could probably be ported, for example.
Photon, their GUI, has a rather nice architecture from the programmer's perspective. If you're used to the uglyness of X or MS Windows, it's a relief.
All in all, it's a powerful, highly respected system.
I would hazard a guess that their planning is flawed. While they are releasing versions of their OS's for free, the free versions don't have the full benefits of the commercial versions. freeBe, as we all know, is a PITA to get to boot without another OS to kick the boot off. Not to mention, freeBe doesn't come with all the cool programs that make it such an acclaimed system. After 30 minutes of playing with it, I was ready to format that 'partition' and make some useable space. I haven't tried this version of QNX yet, but I'm guessing it'll be similar.
They seem to be aiming at getting developers to make a crossover. But from my experience, why would a developer go from a system he uses and is free to improve, to a system he doesn't like quite as much and costs to improve?
It's MHO, but I think others feel this way too.
Let's see now... There's QNX, BeOS and a few other real-time OS' that are free->beer.
For the OSS side, there's ExoPC (exokernels are fun!), L4/OSKit, L4Linux, Mach, Hurd, vanilla Linux, Real-Time Linux, *BSD, FreeDOS, etc.
What's interesting is that development and take-up does NOT appear related to price, quality, licence or source availability. ExoPC, for example, has a decent licence, the code's available via CVS, it's very well-designed and VERY fast, costs nothing, yet next to nobody uses it.
On the other hand, the Mach microkernel is notoriously slow, bulky, bloated and deserves to be the first against the wall when the high-power magnet comes. Yet it's used by several microkernel OS' today, including some Linux ports.
I'll bet there are more active BeOS 4 developers than there are people who've ever even looked at L4 or the OSKit.
Is this to say that the suits are right, that freedom isn't worth it? Not at all! What it DOES say, IMHO, is that enough people are conditioned to believe that paying is, in and of itself, proof of goodness that alternatives are invisible.
IMHO, I would like to see an "Alternative OS Day", in which OSS users actively make use of the lower-profile OS' during the day.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Neutrino uses either the original crypt or the standard BSD crypt.
:)
Some would argue that QNX's original crypt is stronger as their are no duplicate generated strings; a brute crack would have more strings to go through before finding a password. Bear in mind that you cannot gain access to the password file without being root (or through an entirely different exploit). In which case you don't need the decrypting crack because you can just edit the file and delete the password.
So basically the whole argument is moot, but fixed any way you look at it. Shadow passwords, BSD style crypt...make ya happy?
Just so there's clarity; this isn't a slightly crippled version.
It'll be the complete development toolset which we use. The only occasion where we may seperate out portions of our OS is where we have royalty (or ownership) considerations. In those cases we'll either allow the owner of the product to bundle the package or we'll sell the component for a nominal fee to cover the royalty cost. (More than likely we'll bundle these into suites of packages which you can buy as a set...but nothing has been officially decided.)
All in all, it's our intent to give the development community at large the ability to use what we use everyday. All of it, nothing sneaky or tricky, our money is made from OEM's and commercial development seats: Not free development.
-William Bull
The client for download on the Distributed.net site is a very old version for use on the QNX4 OS. The free download will be based on the QNX/Neutrino OS, and isn't compatible with the QNX4 binary. However we have ported the client to Neutrino for x86 and ppc platforms. A beta of the x86 client has been submitted to d.net and the ppc client is currently being tested in-house. Both should be up for download well before the OS is made available.
Jeff Baker
I used to develop on QNX. I used to admin and support $BIGNUM QNX production servers, and until a recent employment change, I remember the struggle to bring our systems and our QNX-based software into the 90's (no points for spotting the irony). I may be biased, because I left hoping I'd never have to struggle with QNX again.
If you happen to be thinking about setting up your house server with QNX, because it's so cute and tiny, allow me to provide the following arguments against doing so:
QNX has one of the smallest array of available applications on it. The situation is better than it once was, however, you will have to face the fact that even with GNU or other open-source tools, you either port it yourself, or you remain a few versions behind.
My servers, especially my own house server, ends up being a swiss-army-knife (sorry, leatherman) system providing more than an internet gateway, but also a miriad of different services internally. Linux is a wonderful choice for this, because it has some of the most flexible networking tools in it, most sources compile very nicely for it, etc. etc. QNX... can fit on a floppy (or a handful, for a full install with its (cough) optional TCP/IP module). Forget IPMasq, forget tcpwrappers, forget it all. Unless, of course, you port/find someone who's ported something more recently than '98.
If you happen to be thinking about using QNX commercially: QNX is expensive. Actually, QNX was always expensive. It's even more expensive if you don't want thousands of licences - I think in terms of features per dollar, it's sucking pretty hard.
Finally: if you happen to be thinking about using QNX in a realtime or timing-critical application/environment, GO FOR IT. That's QNX's specialty. It's a niche OS designed for this role, and it also has a nice fit for embedded uses (like iOpener). It is not, however, a general purpose OS.
In the end, free QNX is kinda like free llama-skin pajamas. It doesn't cost any money, but I don't see it meeting any of my needs. And it might just cause me to itch.
Here endeth my rant.
Well, generally hard real time systems have much more strick conditions under how stuff operates. Ie. processes *must* be done within a certain time or they aren't allowed to run.
:)
Your patient's heart monitor shouldn't be kept waiting while Unreal Tournament is trying to calculate where the body parts land
I don't know how rigidly QNX adhears to a hard real time design, though.
>and situations where stability and predictability
:)
f -the-trademark' flamewar, you know what I mean) but UNIX has been pretty good for me in terms of "stability" and "predictability".
>are more important than unix's cornucopia of >applications and features.
Is this to lead us to believe that UNIX isn't stable or predictable?
Well, certainly, you can set it up that way, but UNIX has been pretty stable for me for a long time. Of course 'UNIX' is kinda vague, (and please don't start a 'linux-is-not-really-unix-because-it-isn't-part-o
Kinda sounds marketing fluffish. But if you're going to go that path, go all out.
QNX provides a world-class enterprise server based information technology solutions enabling people in all teirs of applications development rapid access to empowering decision making information in an Object Oriented (TM) framework built to provide the ultimate in flexibility.
So what if it's nothing but absurd lies? It moves product, particularly to PHB's.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Has always been it's real-time capabilities... In some processes (such as a backup monitoring system for a nuclear reactor) you need a predictable, and assurable interval for monitoring.
So when interrupt driven events just aren't good enough... QNX does the job admirably.
BlackNova Traders
Try Real Time Linux. It has the normal linux with X, ethernet, etc running as the lowest priority task. And it's open source...
using lxrun, it can run directly linux binaries, WordPerfect is known to work!
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Also, before you guys get to work programming, I ask that you please read the on-line manuals on the functions Send() Receive() and Reply() and that you actually use those functions (along with qnx_register_name() and qnx_name_locate()) together those functions form the basis of the best inter-process communication i've seen to date.
Anyway, I'm rambling now
-- Jon Olson