QNX RTP Running on iPaq

An anonymous reader sends in: "iPaq just got new gracious looks. QNX microkernel and the gracious Photon micro GUI did wonders to iPaq. Get a sneak preview here. If you are in Boston next week, be sure to drop by Embedded Systems Boston to try your hands at the qPaq... ;)"

Comments

More info?

[cudgel]

I can't find anything about QNX on the iPaq on their website - anyone have more information? This blows anything I've seen about Linux/X on an iPaq away for usability (at least from the screenshots) and looks. Will this be available soon? And any suggestions on justifying an iPaq with the purchasing department?

Re:More info?

[A Commentor]

Doubtful they will release it for the public.. Companies typically do things like this to get the press, but they don't want the development/support costs to get everything ironed out into an actual product.

They will likely get a bunch of press/developer interest in QNX at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston..

Re:More info?

[TheeAlien]

Actually they prolly will release it to the public eventually (there are other things like the version of QNX6 inhouse running on the Mac G4 that they wont).

QSSL did not do this to get attention, as they would have released a press-relase if they did, someone (I actually know who now... their a student at IIT) who hangs around QSSL employees and other users found out and thought it would be good to post.

Ahh well, the cats outa the bag now.

damn

[nuhonda]

that looks fucking hot.

Re:damn

[Anonymous Coward]

damn, looking at the those screenshots, i think i probably would

Beautiful.

[Glytch]

In another article, I had said that PDAs were pretty much useless.

I take it all back. :)

Re:Beautiful.

[garcia]

it still looks half-useless.

we have seen several *VERY* pretty pics there, but are there enough applications to actually make this a viable choice over WinCE (which IMO looks like hell compared to this)

I would love to run something other than WinCE on my Cassiopeia... I am almost sickened everytime I turn the damn thing on. It is very slow and ugly and it gives me little desire to use it.

Maybe QNX has found its niche ;)

Re:Beautiful.

[msobkow]

The issue isn't apps, as the majority of Gnu code will compile under QNX, as will most Posix code. The issue is that the GUI code would have to be rewritten, and things would have to be tightened down a lot to fit.

Still, if there is a *nix OS out there that could make it happen, QNX would be it. Their message-based process distribution opens up some real interesting possibilities with a secure wireless environment.

For example, consider having repeaters throughout a work complex to allow techs to do more than just bounce emails back and forth from a Palm or other such unit. Your handheld could theoretically be *part* of the system, with direct integration to the applications environment.

Sure you could do that with XML or something as well, but QNX just pimp-slaps XML for network efficiency!

Re:Beautiful.

[J.C.B.]

The issue isn't apps, as the majority of Gnu code will compile under QNX,

The issue of apps is still important, most gnu code isn't suited to PDA's. You could get emacs working, but would you really want to use it on a PDA with pen input?

Where is the...

[BiggestPOS]

TuPaq??

Re:Where is the...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on, that was at least worth a +1 Funny. Moderators be bitches today.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Gorgeous.

[Delirium 21]

That is gorgeous. Simply brilliant.

wow

[enrico_suave]

holy jimeny christ that looks cool! *drool*,
*wipe*,
*drool*...
*checks online checking balance*,

*cries*

E.

So when are they going to be *real* machines?

[Uruk]

These PDAs are getting neater and more powerful every day, but when are they going to be real machines?

I mean, eventually we could have a setup where you would buy a full size monitor and keyboard for office and home, and then just buy one little Super PDA to plug the monitor and keyboard into to use as a full PC. If they can get wireless networking down into that size package (which I'm sure they will eventually) you'd even be able to network without current crappy PDA packet modems or anything like that.

Re:So when are they going to be *real* machines?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they can get wireless networking down into that size package (which I'm sure they will eventually) you'd even be able to network without current crappy PDA packet modems or anything like that.

Apparently you are uninformed as many people browse then net on 802.11 and traditional network card interfaces today with their PDAs.

Re:So when are they going to be *real* machines?

[FFFish]

You wanna check out the Psion Netbook, then.

It's got the useful applications. Colour 640x480 screen with instant zoom/reduce, so that you can make real use of the workspace. Instant-on. Etc.

Re:So when are they going to be *real* machines?

[Anonymous Coward]

the whole point of these is not to have them as desktops. and I am shure if they want they can put a VGA out connector on them but why!. anyways you can get wireless networking in these as CF cards.

Wow, wish I kept that iPaq now...

[jcostom]

I won one in a contest. After trying, and I mean really trying to use it, I couldn't "de-Palm" my brain, and the lack of organization in WinCE just didn't agree with me. SO, I sold my iPaq and got a Palm m505.

Now I find myself wishing I'd kept it for this. :(

Re:Wow, wish I kept that iPaq now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheesh, I would give anything to have an iPaq instead of a Palm m505. Unfortunately I got stuck with one and am saddened at the complete lack of wireless support. At least with the iPaq you can add on 802.11b support!

Re:Wow, wish I kept that iPaq now...

[Locutus]

Geesh, get a TRGPro or a Handera 330. Granted if you NEED color this isn't a choice. But the TRGPro had CF support for years. Now the Handera 330 has the CF slot and the SD slot.

I wish those idiots from Redmond would stop messing with Bluetooth. They have the press dis'ing it left and right. Pretty soon you will ONLY have 802.11 for good wireless and the device will HAVE to be large and bulky cause of the higher requirments.

There is a Bluetooth SD card coming this fall so that m505 isn't wasted of all you wanted it for was wireless ( wondering why you bought it if it didn't do what you wanted? ).

LoB

Re:Wow, wish I kept that iPaq now...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't really consider Bluetooth anything more than RF. It's not "wireless" in the traditional sense of the word and technology as we've become accustomed to it (802.11x).

Bluetooth has an effective range of about 7 feet. High bandwidth, low range, that's the focus. It's basically IR with higher burst.

It's definately not wireless. I won't trade in my Lucent cards and RG-1000 to get 1/10th the range for double the bandwidth.

Re:Wow, wish I kept that iPaq now...

[Locutus]

My thought is that it's a step in the direction we want to go. If we jump head first into 802.11 then we have to wait another 3-5 years for technology to shrink enough so we still have a light pocketable device at a reasonable price ($200 or less).

It took Microsoft over 6 years to come up with an adequate multi-threading OS and it requires almost 4 times the hardware of IBM's OS/2. If you don't think multi-threading and stablity are important then you've never had the pleasure of using a system that had these. Anyway my point is that we shouldn't be forced to wait til nano-hardware is available so that we can run some bloated OS and have wireless connectivity.

IMO, Microsoft is afraid people will start using their PDA's and PDA enabled phones to store their data. THEY want to control and charge you for use of YOUR data and they need the Windows hammer to beat that into you and every vendor who tries to do otherwise. 802.11 puts too much of a load on the smaller PDA's. Handera can do it but it takes
4 batteries and a large slot (CF). I believe that the Bluetooth for Palm will be on a SD card.

There is this thing called UWB that has potential for both your constant connected lan (ala 802.11) and is supposed to light weight/low power (ala Bluetooth). If we have to wait years then let's have what works now and move later.

I hope 7feet is on the low side. 15feet would be fine IMHO. 15feet would allow for a home to have pretty full coverage where you would want it (livingroom) and the reception area of business's, or restaurants. If you need a full blown computing platform with wireless then 802.11 comes in. That's my take on it.

Thanks for your thoughts.

LoB
(The collective didn't run Windows but was virus prone. Go figure...)

The perfect world

[InsaneCreator]

Linux on my desktop, qnx on my iPaq, Microsoft in my long forgotten history. The world is perfect! :)

Input How ?

[johnjones]

how is input done ?

I see for the shell that a keyboard popup is there

BUT for normal apps how is it done? for X their is Xscribble from the boys and girls at CRL (compaq) which is standard part of the handhelds.org distro and palm of course have the dedicated part of screen with WinCE vendors chouseing how they do it

how about voice input ?
now that would rock if only IBM recompiled their Linux ViaVoice for StrongARM I bet a bunch of vendors would be real intrested
WinCE already has this in their beta builds but its very much like the Apple Voice control (which is kind of funky) but I find that the Apple Implementation is sensitive to background noise and depends on what Mic you have: in my mind I can see the people shouting at their organisers to "mail, oh e-mail, post , arrrch how do I pick up mail ??" (-;

I really cant see how they are going to do it on QNX

any details ?

regards

john jones

Re:Input How ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever considered using commas and periods?

Re:Input How ?

[barryp]

Look at the top-right screenshot, the lower half of the screen appears to be a palm-style pen input area, with an icon to switch to a keyboard input (as shown being used in the bottom-left screenshot with the terminal window).

Re:Input How ?

[variable]

There is an application running called ipaq_input. It takes care of resizing apps and coming forward when they need/want input (handwriting, keyboard, etc). You can see from the screen shots that it is forward when the URL area is in focus and the terminal always requets to have the input area present.

Re:Input How ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the QNX/IBM/Motorola consortium created the MobileGT platform for telematics/driver information systems, there are a great number of voice recognition softwares either currently available or in development right now.

Both IBM and Motorola have demostrated their voice recognition softwares on the QNX platform since last year. A number of 3rd party developers have also demostrated their voice recognition softwares on this platform as well.

Re:Input How ?

[Anonymous Coward]

does it support the targus foldup keyboard?? that's the only reason i've been afraid to make the change.

I don't really want to throw away an NZ$300 keyboard to make my GUI look nicer.

Re: QNX, why bother?

[Bodero]

You should hear our embedded systems engineers laughing or crying about "Real Time Windows CE" depending on whether they chortling at it's response times, or miserable about being forced to use it respectively.

Your laughter is borne out of ignorance. Everybody publishes OS times for their OS when running in kernel mode only (which offers zero protection from processes run amok). But CE and EPOC don't run in that mode--you can't on these platforms since they're open and could be running malicious code.

To wit, look at QNX (http://www.qnx.com/products/os/qnxrtos.html#Perfo rmance) and On Time (http://www.on-time.com/index.html?page=rtk45.htm) . Great numbers, but only for kernel mode operation.

For protected systems using the MMU, it seems all the big players don't publish numbers. Why? Because this is a tough environment and the numbers look like shit. QNX offers nothing on their site about their Neutrino product performance. Neither do Mentor or Wind River.

Even the RT Linux folks are flaky here. http://www.zentropix.com/support/document/helpdox/ rtai.pdf claims they can deliver a 4 uS average interrupt response time with 13 uS of jitter, resulting in 17 uS worst case interrupt response time. This is on a 233 MHz Pentium II.

Microsoft are claiming 7.5 uS worst case ISR latency on a 90 MHz Pentium II for CE (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/real_pe rf.htm). We're seeing similar numbers on a StrongARM platform at a similar clock.

Clearly, CE is probably on par with the QNX/PSOS/VRTX crowd.

So, until Symbian actually publish some numbers on their interrupt performance, we can assume that, like code size, they are merely FUD'ing the industry.

As for the topic at hand, however, it's wonderful to see something like QNX running on iPac, maybe make one worth getting after all ;)

Uh, excuse me?

[Danborg]

...but isn't this supposed to be a PDA? Look at the screenshots again... look at the 10 apps.... where is "Calendar"? -- where is "Contacts"? -- where is "E-mail"? -- where is "To Do List"?

Beautiful OS, but clearly not an organizer.

Re:Uh, excuse me?

[TheeAlien]

First of all you must remember all the iPaq is a computer, the big difference between it and your dekstop is the CPU - an ARM (little endian). Now with that in mind... MAKE YOUR OWN! Download QNX 6.1 ISO at http://get.qnx.com/ and burn it to a CD. Install all the needed developement tools including those for different archectures. QNX can build binaries for other arahectures (arm, sh2, ppc, etc) nativly on your x86, so really all you have to do is fire up PhAB after everything is installed and do it yourself. Applications like PhAB make it extreamly simple and rather quick. Want a Calendar? PhAB has a pre-built Calendar widget called PtCalendar, simply drop it on a window and VIOLA! Your very own Calendar (See http://qdn.qnx.com/support/docs/photon_2.0_en/widg et_ref/ptcalendar.html for more information on it). Contacts & E-mail would be pretty simple as all QSSL would need to do is recompile Phemail (tho alternations would be best). As for a todo list it's much the same as the first example I gave except it's the PtText widget (see: http://qdn.qnx.com/support/docs/photon_2.0_en/widg et_ref/pttext.html). None of the apps you named are really 'killer apps', there simple apps anyone could make with next to no programmer knowledge - which is why QSSL diddent put such a high priority on them - they not only wanted people to play with the QNX version of the iPaq but to try to learn how to develop for Photon/Neutrino too, and once someone tried to make an app like you mentioned they'd instantly realize how truly easy it is.

Hey, it's prolly alpha

[Anonymous Coward]

It's most prolly just a tech preview yet, since noone have it on their ipaq, ofcaurse there are no real tools yet..

PDA != organizer.

[aussersterne]

The definition of PDA == organizer is far too restrictive. After all, PDA is supposed to be a 'personal digital assistant' or 'personal data assistant' or something else involving 'personal' and 'assistant.'

An assitant assists, in whatever a person needs done with data when on the move. That does not mean calendar, contacts and to-do for every person; some people do other stuff with data and with their lives. Should they not have PDAs? The Palm crowd especially seem violently opposed to devices assisting anyone but executives who have too many meetings to keep. I for one am glad that the PocketPC has become more flexible, so that it can assist everyone to some extent, rather than only assisting the rich, anal executive in the expensive suit.

Keep your Palm, but I have no use for it. I will, however, continue to use PocketPC/WindowsCE.

Re:PDA != organizer.

[MKalus]

I agree,

for me personal a Palm never made sense, I have appointments, contacts etc. I need to keep my hands on but in the end it simply didn't offer anything else.

The big thing I was looking for to have access to e-mail (or if possible a shell) anytime I need it. My compromise was to get a Blackberry, it has two things I really like about it:

1. a Keyboard.
2. Wireless.

Now if someone could combine a Blackberry and an iPaq I would be happy, the idea that a PDA shouldn't have a keyboard but rather be used with a pen in my opinion is a bad decision anyways.

Michael

Hmmm

[Beowulf_Boy]

I was going to use Linux as the OS for a lab at school for web surfing, but I'm gonna look at QNX, does Netscape run on it?
How fast is the bootup?

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Bootup? there is no bootup, less then 3 seconds on the one I tried.

Netscape? EWWW! that is huge
the browser that are on the iPAQ which you see on the screenshot are Voyager.

Re:Hmmm

[TheeAlien]

Mozilla 0.9.2 runs on it (see: http://developers.qnx.com/Ports/)...

Opera also runs on it (see: http://www.opera.com/qnx/)....

But I'd personally recomend Voyager for most things are both Opera and Mozilla need alot of refining before their truly ready for QNX.

Re:Hmmm

[TandyMasterControl]

you might want to check out the software of ThinkNIC. Using basic stripped down Linux/ Xfree building blocks and Netscape 4.76 they have made a "browser-only" kiosk from PC hardware. In other words X starts automatically with no login necessary and with Netscape already running.There is no menu based access to other programs or terminal emulators and no taskbar. (Those things are all available to you if you hack a custom cd) It comes with java and plugins, SSL, ssh client, VNC client, helper apps etc, so it imposes no compromise on the web experience. If you were looking for excitement you could try dropping in Mozilla 0.9.x in place of Netscape.

You can download the iso for the ThinkNIC system free of charge from their site and see how they do it.

They also sell really inexpensive hardware ( $199 US) to run all that but it sounds like you already have the hardware.

Gracious??

[cygnusx]

iPaq just got new gracious looks. QNX microkernel and the gracious Photon micro GUI

Can anyone please tell me how the hell the adjective "gracious" is justified in this context??

Re:Gracious??

[jedwards]

Gracious
1 a obsolete : GODLY b archaic : PLEASING, ACCEPTABLE

Perhaps the author is learning English, and starting at the beginning.

Re:Gracious??

[mritunjai]

If you've seen CE on a iPaq, you'd know what "gracious" means when you look at the screenshots

Re:Gracious??

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it is kind of weird.
I've never seen QNX look that good before.
Is it some kind of skin they put on it?

Re:Gracious??

[Mike Buddha]

Can anyone please tell me how the hell the adjective "gracious" is justified in this context??

Perhaps he meant graceful. Either way, he way overused a two-dollar word. He should have said: "The Ipaq just got a new graceful look with QX microkernel and the elegant Photon micro GUI".

Then again, this is "news for nerds" not "news for over-educated literate-types".

Nyuk

Re:Question

[TheeAlien]

As far as I know QSSL (QNX Software Systems Limited) will release a supplement to QNX 6.1 (Or 6.1.1) that will contain what is needed, however I doubt it'll be out any time soon.

MathCAD

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be nice if someone ported MathCAD/Maple/Mathematica to the iPaq using QNX.. that would be a wonderful thing

Re:MathCAD

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes that would be great, I could sit outside on the grass and process complicated mathematical structures instead of having to do so within my office. Unfortunately those programs seem to be rather on the big side and the ipaq may not have the required processing power .. maybe wireless networking to a host computer running such a program would be better.

Re:MathCAD

[mritunjai]

Sure ! QNX has a native networking in addition to TCP/IP. Using this you can turn a group of computers connected via network into a cluster running mathcad or whatever. You can as well run mathcad on a huge computer and see its display on your iPaq (no its not X) -- Keep Smiling - mritunjai

swheet

[Anonymous Coward]

that is the F***ing coolest thing i have seen are they actually real shoots if they are this could be the best thing that has happened to the handheld market ... oh i also hope it uses the power button as thats one of the important things on my ipaq

Re:Question

[vrmlknight]

you can pay me to put cool stuff together for you i will set up linux or do all that 'hard' stuff to get cool stuff to work so you dont have to actually know or care how the technology works

Re: QNX, why bother?

[mritunjai]

Man, at first take a look how the jitters etc are looked into and how OS deals with them. Read the following articles Concepts of Time - I, Concepts of Time- II and What is Realtime.

And please! don't tell me that M$ too lets you know the architecture and philosophy behind the OS and how exactly it does Realtime execution. Plus, You don't get to develop on a desktop class gracious OS and transfer it as it is to target.
You can test/debug/compile your realtime progs on an x86 listening to MP3's (Yeah! everything is prioritised!) and when you're satisfied, compile it for arm,sh-8, or whatever. The screenshots you saw were almost direct ports of the stuff existing for QNX RTP desktop OS!

Re: QNX, why bother?

[mritunjai]

And man there is more to QNX... 1) transparent networking: so your desktop computer and your iPaq become one machine! you can control GUI, audio, applications (even run and kill) from any on any machine. 2) fault tolerant OS 3) Micro kernel: no kernel mode drivers. You can kill off everything including HDD drivers, network, and filesystem. just leaving a shell and console driver, and can get back to a full GUI playing MP3's. So if anything goes down, the system still ain't dead!

the problem is installation

[mj6798]

I think this is another existence proof for a nice, non-Microsoft OS on the iPaq. I'm not quite sure why I would want to run it, though: Linux for handhelds is quite functional (even if its icons are not as nice), and it is free, open, and standard.

The biggest problem I have had with running non-WinCE operating systems on the iPaq is the installation, which is a very laborious and slow process that takes hours to download stuff over the serial line. What is really needed is the ability to overlay a new OS from Flash and/or to install a new OS by clicking on an application in Flash memory. Or, of course, Compaq might finally preinstall Linux on the iPaq; even HP will be shipping a Linux PDA.

Re:the problem is installation

[variable]

QNX on the iPaq will be free for personal use, QNX is a POSIX based OS (from the outset, so things like threads are not a hack onto the side of a UNIX kernel), and, to top it all off, it runs really well on the iPaq. :)

Re:the problem is installation

[Anonymous Coward]

I've installed the bootldr, Familiar v4.0 and QPE 1.3 in roughly 30-45 minutes via serial line.

but it's still a pain tho =(

PDAs are a fad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Once someone releases decent display glasses these things will be completely useless.

Re: QNX, why bother?

[variable]

First of all - those numbers are for QNX4 (our previous generation kernel, x86 only). The iPaq is running QNX6. And we do have numbers - I am not sure if they are posted on our website yet or not but they are going to be made with each and every release. And yet another thing - QNX isn't your average monolithic kernel. There is no "kernel" mode for timings that mean anything. Everything is based on a message passing infustructure (from device drivers to networking to filesystems to the GUI).

My gracious!

[tswinzig]

iPaq just got new gracious looks. QNX microkernel and the gracious Photon micro GUI did wonders to iPaq.

Hmmmm all this graciousness from an anonymous coward. Any chance they work for QNX?

Re:My gracious!

[PhotoGuy]

Come on... Have you ever tried Photon? QNX has it booting from a floppy in their demo disk (*small* footprint), it *flies* performancewise, and it looks better than most X window manager. It fits all my definitions of graciousness. Can the non-Linux knee-jerk reactions, okay? :-)

-me-

Re:My gracious!

[mritunjai]

Well, yeah. That floppy demo is QNX4 demo, the old and not-free-even-for-non-commercial-use.
the one showed here is QNX 6.1, which has a gorgeous GUI and runs on a lot of processors. Get it yourself free-for-non-commercial-use at get.qnx.com!

Re: QNX, why bother?

[variable]

Eeeek! I just implied that QNX was a monolithic kernel - it isn't. It is a micro-kernel where the OS only provides a limitied set of features that enable all the rest of the system to be built. ACK!

I want a PDA

[Anonymous Coward]

which has like a normal keyoard and a big screen and normal mouse and I can put 4 PCI cards into and a couple of harddisks and a 300W ps and an athlon.

Re:I want a PDA

[Anonymous Coward]

I want a beowulf cluster of 'em.

Re: QNX, why bother?

[alfredo]

I love QNX. I work for the Post Office. our letter sorting machine is powered by QNX. the Techs, who used to be Windows drones, now love QNX. I think if you could. Pitch QNX for the desktop, replacing Win 95 they are using. Sooner or later MS is going to make them upgrade, and the cost will be astronomical.

They are, I believe using WebObjects for their intranet, so show them how well it works with that.

I am sure you can under bid MS.

Filesystem?

[be-fan]

When are they going to fix the QNX filesystem? It runs real bad on every machine I've tried it on (and it is #1 on the qnxstart.com wishlist). Eventually, people are going to put those cool IBM microdrives on their PDAs and start noticing the deficiencies of the filesystem. They have Dominic Giampalo (of BFS fame) working for them, so what's he doing?

Re:Filesystem?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been fixed in the new QNX6.1. That thread on qnxstart was before the new release.

Re:Filesystem?

[be-fan]

Really, could you point me to some details? (Not facetious, I just want to find out more!)

Re:Filesystem?

[be-fan]

Actually, as far as I can find, the only thing that has been fixed is that the old libc (which wrote a few bytes at a time) has been replaced by a new one from Dinkumware. Nothing drastic, though.

Re:Filesystem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dominic's and I think Howrad (BONE) are both working at QNX.

HarJTT

QNX? QPE!

[marm]

QNX on iPAQ looks sweet...

But I don't see anything that the Qt Palmtop Environment doesn't do already, and with similar style and panache.

Not to mention that QPE has a web-browser available FAR in advance of anything on any other handheld platform - Konqueror/embedded which has the full KHTML rendering engine that normal desktop Konqueror has, but with a UI optimized for a handheld's screen.

Of course, I shouldn't have to mention that both QPE and Konq/e are fully-fledged GPL'ed projects, which I'm pretty sure QNX isn't, last time I looked...

Re: QNX, why bother?

[variable]

Check out get.qnx.com.
It is a full download of the QNX6 Realtime Platform that you can try out. Full desktop system. It is pretty nice if you don't need to run Word. ;)

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Re:QNX? QPE!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care which one, they both aren't CE, and they both make me want an iPaq. Badly. Ooomph.

Re:QNX? QPE!

[vrmlknight]

i was look (quickly) on their web site is for the ipaq? can i download it and install it on my ipaq???

Re:Gorgeous

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, QNX just doesn't "get it".
They should GPL all their software immediately and file for bankruptcy, we don't need those capitalist bastards !

Does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it matterwho they work for? I"m glad someone brought it up. It looks great. I haven't seen a PDA yet that has that nice of a GUI. I worked with the QNX OS about 7 years ago on the desktop and it was great. If they have a PDA with that much power and that looks that good then I think they've got something. After all, the PDA OS market is still up for grabs. Neither palm or MS really have anything to offer other than being the only games in town. Palm's OS is just an organizer and MS still wants to make a windows desktop OS in a handheld computer. It's nice to see that there are others doing some work. Even the linux flavor OS's I've seen for PDA's look like windows CE. I say keep the ideas coming no matter where they come from. In the end it will be the users who decide what wins no matter who is promoting it.

Free download for non comercial use, too

[DABANSHEE]

Well QNX 6 RTP X86 is, I don't know about the rest.

Also bootup time with QNX makes Linux look like a 90 year old grandma doped to the eye balls on stelazine & benzos to make things easy for the nursing home staff.

Except for the fact it has a login dialogue popup QNX makes BeOS bootup look slow.

Re:Free download for non comercial use, too

[rjamestaylor]

The excuse for Linux is incredible time between reboots.

Which ignores the reality of dual-booting laptops. :-(

Re:Gorgeous

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not actually a bad idea.

Watch them go under and all the marvellous IP's gonna be lost forever.

If they would GPL it all, they could rest assured that QNX would live forever!

An anonymous reader..

[Anonymous Coward]

..should probably try looking up the definition of the word gracious, see if it actually fit the sentences that he used them in, then use it less than he's doing.

Try downloading 6.1 RTP

[DABANSHEE]

It's Photon GUI looks heaps better than even the 6.0 version.

Only 1 App missing

[BrookHarty]

x-mame.

mame and ssh are the only 2 apps i use on my ipaq. The only problem with ipaqs it doesnt handle multiple buttons pressed at the same time.

Re:Only 1 App missing

[TheeAlien]

HA!

I've personally submited MANY patches to xmame/xmess (see: http://x.mame.net/download/changes.unix) tho I havent checked it in awhile I assume it should be good.

I'm also mantaining the official port of MAME for QNX; PhMAME. Download it here or see an old screenshot here.

Re:Only 1 App missing

[serial frame]

Look on http://www.qnxstart.com/ for phMame. And I've rested my case.

Plus its easy to install

[DABANSHEE]

Whether installing it on its own partition or in a virtual partition, it makes installing even Mandrake 8 seem horribly complicated.

Re:QNX? QPE!

[import]

IMO, from the screenshots on the QPE site you linked to, the QNX interface is much, much, *much* nicer.

But I guess the difference is that one is available for download and one is just (so far as I'm concerned) pretty pictures.

QNX is definitely cool

[pinkpineapple]

I have been running QNX for a while now. I recently got a PictureBook with a Transmeta chip and decided to use the machine with QNX. Since MS does want people to dual boot, I zapped their OS and put QNX instead. I am pretty happy with the machine. Needs a few more drivers (working on the camera support) but things are running smoothly. It's a very reliable OS. I just wish they would do a port to the iBook too.

Actually QNX makes money

[DABANSHEE]

I've yet to see a Linux distribution par a 'fair dinkum' dividend.

There forte is being the OS of choice for nuclear reactors & 'machines that go beep' in hospitals.

Re:QNX? QPE!

[TheeAlien]

I have two different replies for you; one to why QPE is not better, and one about your GPL zinger....

Firstly reasons to chose QNX over QPE for your iPaq...

(1) QPE has alot of legacy attached to it.

(2) Qt applications can already run fine in QNX so all they really need is a recompile to work.

(3) It's cheeper to develop on QNX then QPE.

(4) It's bulky, really bulky - QNX can run quite comfortably in 5 megs of RAM - QPE requires much more.

(5) It's prettier... sorry, it just is.

Now the GPL issue..

Sorry to tell you but the GPL is not a good thing (TM).

Software on the QNX version of the iPaq can use the GPL if the author desires, however many real embeded developers have a great dislike for it (for many reasons). In fact, I'd like to tell you a little story.

Back before QNX 6.0 was released to the public QNX uses ALSA for sound... for it seemed like a good idea at the time - "simply tweek the drivers and recompile for QNX" said the QSSL engineers "It'll make our jobs alot easier!" they said.

But it diddent! See, many of the big audio corporations had what is known as "propritary hardware", and in order to have a real, fully-accelerated driver they'd have to relase all their secrets to the public and their competition.

QSSL soon figured out the problems with this; Is it better to have an OS that has rocking sound with a few-closed source drivers or an OS with okay sound and a couple of problematic drivers beacuse big busness dosent wana share technical specs?

So, the poor old QSSL engineers rewrote the sound system from the ground up so it wouldnt be tainted (yes, thats the right word - tainted) by the GPL. Now big busness likes them! As they can make driver or submit secret information to QSSL under a NDA for them to make excellent drivers, plus most of the sound system is open-source (download the Audio DDK and see for yourself). It's really a win-win situation.

And remember - Many pats of QNX -ARE- open-source (not just the sound system!), and the open-source parts (for the greater part) can be used for both comercial and non comercial purpose, but are not GPL'ed.

One must NOT confuse the GPL and the open-source philosphy, as they are two different things.

Superfriends

[LighthouseJ]

The screenshots look nice, but the mere fact they have the Superfriends Wazzup parody makes it awesome.

Check also...

[Anonymous Coward]

The other screenshots under this tree. They're from the
desktop version of QNX, and they look cool too.
Definitely lovely. I just hope they'll sell the PDA at a
reasonable price.

Re:Check also...

[boxless]

ooh, QNX has a find files utility and a basic calculator. How 1990.

box

Your Sig: [was: Re:Gracious??]

[scotch]

2*b || !(2*b) is a tautology

From dict.org

Tautology

A repetition of the same meaning in different words; needless
repetition of an idea in different words or phrases; a
representation of anything as the cause, condition, or
consequence of itself, as in the following lines:

Your sig is composed of two phrases, 2*b and !2*b, the second is not a repetition of the first. A trusim, perhaps, but not a tautology.

Re:Your Sig: [was: Re:Gracious??]

[cygnusx]

See the dictionary.com entry for tautology (search for "logic" within the page) -- Most people who've taken a course on discrete math would be familiar with this usage.

Btw, the antonym for tautology in this sense would be "contradiction": an expression which never evaluates to (boolean) truth, irrespective of the values assigned to its sub-expressions. "It is raining outside my house and it is not raining outside my house" would be an example of a contradiction. Replace and with or and you have a tautology.

You can do it yourself

[DABANSHEE]

Download the 'free beer' QNX 6.1 RTP (X86), it has all the tools for Porting software to IPaq's ARM QNX setup (well from what I heard, anyway)

Re: What makes you think they havent'? ;-)

[TheeAlien]

What makes you think they havent ;)

In-house QSSL has QNX running on a G4 (tho not much work is being done on it now, as if you'll pass by your more then likely just going to see the now infamous phmatrix screen saver)...

Re:QNX? QPE!

[Andante]

Since we are talking about personal preference it would probably be a good idea for you to scatter a few IMHO's here and there in your response. ;)

Your little story is very cute but it is not very concrete as a reason against the GPL. All that your example demonstrates is that companies should be more forthcoming with their specifications.

It's all well and good that QNX was able to afford the cost of paying their engineers to manufacture drivers for their OS. If these drivers are as 'rocking' as you make it seem wouldn't it benefit more people if they were made available to the general public?

It seems to me that the closed-source method you propose results in large amounts of duplicated effort. This is neither cost effective nor efficient at producing the most optimal drivers.

To paraphrase your last sentence:

One must NOT confuse open-source and the free software philosophy as they are two different things.

Re:QNX? QPE!

[sakti]

• If you'd worked in hardware much you'd know that reverse engineering hardware specs is a breeze with the right equipment (ie. your competitors have it). And from all reports, its mainly the lawyers you just don't seem to get this point. So in the end you're only hurting the open source/free software developers and users.
• As you pointed out the open source philosophy is not the free software philosophy. One is about Freedom, while the other is about building a better mousetrap.

Re: QNX, why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have they fixed all their problems then with Real Time in CE then?

Firstly there was the 'not real interupts' problem.
The problem was that in an interupt routine it wasn't safe to call a lot of the OS Api. So instead you had to fire an event, the event in turn released a thread set to 'real-time' priority which did the bulk of the work.
Since a thread could also be running in Real Time priority when the interupt occurred, the interupt might not processed until that first thread has finished and the next real-time thread could be released.

Second problem was interupting an interupt routine. There was real time and nothing else, if a higher priority interupt fired, it could not interupt the existing thread you'd released.

It was a real hack.

IMHO nobody should call an OS real-time unless the bulk of the API of the OS can be called safetly from an interupt routine. Can you do in QNX?, never used it myself so I'm not sure.
Can you do that in CE now? Last time I used CE it was a no-no.

You make the point about Kernel vs Non Kernel, yes thats valid in terms of performance (Kernel is faster), but CE does not protect against *malicious* code, only *accidental* corruptions of other processes memory. Its better than nothing but short of a full User mode.

Not an organizer

[Anonymous Coward]

You've just piqued my interest by pointing out it is not an organizer. You see, I'm not organized. Organization is very low on my (ephemeral) list of priorities.

I guess I'm a preemptive multitasker...look out or I'll blow my stack!

use FLTK

[mj6798]

Of course, I shouldn't have to mention that both QPE and Konq/e are fully-fledged GPL'ed projects

Qt costs lots of money if you want to write commercial apps for it. Fortunately, there is a cheaper and better choice for writing embedded apps: just use FLTK. It's much more compact than Qt, you can use it freely for writing commercial apps, and it runs on Linux.

Just no use at all ....

[Anonymous Coward]

The embed platform interrest is define both by the quality of the OS and a powerfull dev-kit.

The quality of the OS is important for the end-user, but the power of the dev-kit is important for the dev costs (easiest is the dev time, cheapest is the application).

But this was yesterday statement .... today, a new OS just blast all this and change the init data !

SavaJe (a Lucent spin-off) released betas of XE, their OS for StrongARM.

What's the difference ... simply cristal clear : dev process is speedlight fast !

What's the trick ?

Just one word : it's Java !

Ok, i heard Java "friends" that says, : "but how can you expect to run a java application on such a device ?"

I will add, it is not simply a java platform compatible but GUIs applications are also written in Swing !

The same "sceptics", can say not : "Gosh ! Are you kidding ?"

And there i must add : and it is damned fast !

You don't trust me, just go to www.savaje.com and download the latest beta of XE and set it up to you iPaq ....

But beware, it's a drug-like : once you get into no way out !

Ok, so about the specs :
- It's fully Java2 SE 1.3 compliant
- It is also JNLP compliant (cf JavaWebStart and JNLP)

Just imagine : your develop you application, click on deploy as JNLP, the type-in the URL on your ipaq and voila : the application is running on it !!!

For those who still consider that Java is just one more stupid language and not a complete new way of programming ... they ckeck XE and you will be part of the fun.

Of course XE still lack some features (only few CF & PCCard supports), no IRDA at this time ... but the Java part is pretty impressive !

XE for me is quite interresting in a enterprise architecture as it offer a great opportunity to leverage all the skills and legacy systems available. Creating a mobile device application has never been so easy !

As a conclusion, XE just prove that when stilled peoples work on something then impossible things can became true.

Don't get me wrong, Linux is the greatest OS for PC desktop applications ... but who can expect a whole bunch of application there when using XE we already GOT them ?! It's Java babe :)

Please note that i am sure this message will be moderate down as it will hurt the /. linux-geeks as were my previous posts related this topics :( Thanks for the censorship ... )

4R34'.

Re:Just no use at all ....

[Anonymous Coward]

> Please note that i am sure this message will be moderate
> down as it will hurt the /. linux-geeks as were my previous
> posts related this topics :( Thanks for the censorship ... )

I found interesting your post, though I'm a Linux geek, and
also a plain ISO C programmer.
What I'd like to point out is that every single piece of code
you write in OO languages like C++ and Java will become,
once compiled, a flow of structured and sequential machine
code.
OO languages don't allow you to do more things, but
put another level of abstraction between programmers
and computers. If OO allowed you to do things you couldn't
do with "old" structured programming, we never had the
first C++ compiler, because it wasn't possible to write one
with, for example, plain C.

Re:Just no use at all ....

[Anonymous Coward]

This has nothing to do with anything, but where are you from? I just want to be able to imagine an appropriate accent when I read that in my head.

Re: QNX, why bother?

[alfredo]

I don't have an Intel box. I am a PPC kind of guy. They used to have some PPC stuff. I will dig to see if it is still there.

I wonder if it will run in VirtualPC?

TKS

Re: QNX, why bother?

[alfredo]

Hmm it shows PPC as supported, but on the download page there was no PPC download shown.

Al

Awesome!!

[Juln]

QNX is a nifty little operating system, as I determined by installing it on my desktop system.
Those screenshots from the qPaq look totally awesome. That + Opera and that little thing will just rip!
QNX definitely has the art of making pretty interafces down, and the code behind it is super solid and interesting (too bad we don't get to see it...).

Open source?

[be-fan]

I thought that I saw somewhere that QSSL was making parts of QNX open source? Anybody hear anything about that? An Photon Linux port would really rock. Photon has tons of features, is really small and fast, and the fonts and UI graphics look orgasmically good. QNX's kernel is nice for embedded systems, but on the desktop (which RtP tries to support) it is kinda flaky due to an anemic VM and filesystem. For example, it doesn't support paging directly, an app has to be coded with it in mind. Great for RT, but for GCC.

Re:Open source?

[TheeAlien]

Ahem...

> I thought that I saw somewhere that QSSL was making parts of QNX open source? Anybody hear anything about that?

Download any DDK and you'll find driver source and more, also check out http://cvs.qnx.com (It needs an update but it's gitting there).

>An Photon Linux port would really rock.

Bah... it's been ported to windows, but it aint gonna be ported to Linux anytime soon.

>Photon has tons of features, is really small and fast, and the fonts and UI graphics look orgasmically good.

Yep...

>QNX's kernel is nice for embedded systems, but on the desktop (which RtP tries to support) it is kinda flaky due to an anemic VM and filesystem.

Anemic VM and filesystem? The VM and filesystem are fine - it'd be good if you gave a real example of how they were bad (the one below dosent count as I nip it in the bud...).

>For example, it doesn't support paging directly, an app has to be coded with it in mind. Great for RT, but for GCC.

munlockall() - is that so hard? Watch...

int main()
{
printf("info: enabling swapfile...");
munlockall();
printf("info: swapfile enabled!");
return 0;
}

The ability to enable or disable paging in an application is an asset in any device including desktops, not a fault.

Re:Open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would 'windows' be a candidate for photon to be ported (as you say it has already), while you act like the idea of a port to linux is silly or impossible?
Not propietary enough or what?

Re:Open source?

[be-fan]

Anemic VM and filesystem? The VM and filesystem are fine - it'd be good if you gave a real example of how they were bad (the one below dosent count as I nip it in the bud...).
>>>>>>>>>
How 'bout these?

1) The filesystem is as slow as molasses. Untarring an archieve takes twice as long as on Linux. Throughputs above 10MB/sec (on my 7200RPM drive that gets 27MB/sec in Linux) are hard to come by. Apparently, something in libc has been fixed with 6.1, but the underlying FS problems are there. Also, no journeling, no softupdates, no features of any kind.

2) The VM cannot keep an mmap()'ed file in sync with with the disk if you use read/write to modify the file. That tells a lot about the deficiecies of the underlying implementation.

3) The VM and buffer-cache are not integrated. This was a big fault of BeOS's, and really hurt its I/O performance. BeOS and QNX are apparently the last big OSs without a unified buffer-cache/VM.

As for "nipping" the swap problem, you haven't. You still have to call munlockall(). So you either have to modify program source, or (if you have binary programs that don't call it) just live with it. Also, it was apparently put in just to support GCC, so I wouldn't be too sure that the underlying impelementation is very good.

Re:Open source?

[mritunjai]

>> 1) The filesystem is as slow as molasses. and other blah

ext2fs is a PIG (just as all else of Linux stuff!). Robustness is the thing embedded system filesystems are designed with in mind. The filesystem drivers are deterministic in nature. Infact each and every core driver is deterministic and overned by realtime execution rules. In an ext2fs, if you loose a few superblocks in badblocks you're doomed. In qnx even if you loose most of it, you can still recover most of the data. Because every critical portion has a magic identifier. Reliability is what matters in an atomic reactor (that's like where QNX is being used!) than a filesystem that gives 27MB/s one day, and bombs (:P) the other day!

And man, does it need to have a journaling filesystem, if it checks and corrects my 10 GB partition in under 20 seconds! (don't wipe your eyes, its correct!). while in lab I administer no *nix does it in 5 mins. also talking about NTFS (a journaling fs), W2K takes around 5 mins to check entire 6GB volume for inconsistencies.

Infact that's why I made a QNX boot image for myself with mandatory disk checking after mount (yep! after mount ;) )

I suggest you to take a few readings on qnx.com about realtime OS and you'll know what does it take to make a realtime OS.

Re:Open source?

[be-fan]

I suggest you to take a few readings on qnx.com about realtime OS and you'll know what does it take to make a realtime OS.
>>>>>
I think you missed my point. I never said anything about QNX in the embedded space, I was talking about RtP in desktop space. According to QNX's docs, RtP is competing in desktop space. In that space, speed is more important than determinism. Maybe QNX doesn't want to fork the OS or change its deterministic policies, but then they shouldn't be competing in desktop space!

PS> Yes, all modern FSs should have journeling. Its not the fsck that matters, but the fact that in order to achieve good consistancy, it must use synchronus writes to the disk for metadata. That why the old BSD's without softupdates were so slow for compiling and untarring (very metadata intensive uses) and which is why QNX is slow for the same tasks.

PS2> QNX RtP really isn't used in nuclear reactors. QNX4 is used for those tasks. So far, the only thing QNX RtP (or QNX6 in general) has been used for embedded devices, which don't have the same life-or-death requirements of determinism that do nuclear reactors.

Re:Open source?

[TheeAlien]

Ick...

I think you've missed the point ;o

You say you werent talking about qnx RtP in the embeded space but as a desktop - yet this entire slashdot post was on QNX RtP on the iPaq, an embeded device.

Frankly, I can use QNX6 as a desktop and have for quite some time. The issues you present are trivial at best in my view.

Re:Open source?

[TheeAlien]

The windows port I was refering to was a (pay) product known as Phindows. The reason for the existance of phindows is simply beacuse the number of windows developers is massive. The number of linux deverlops is a great deal less. If enough QNX developers (with developement seats I'll add) demand a linux port it'll happen, but until then you'll just have to live with QNX as the only free host environment.

Oh Yes!

[fm6]

I'm old enough to remember when QNX was first introduced. They actually claimed to provide reasonable performance on an 8086! More than that, clustering was a basic feature, so you could boost performance just by accumulating hardware. (Skeptical? CTOS used the same approach and worked very well.) Quite an appealing alternative to DOS.

Alas, high licensing costs prevented most people (including me) from giving it a try. Never captured a wide audience, but they always seemed to find enough fringe markets to survive.

Ironically enough, Linux has given QNX a second stab at becoming a mainstream OS. At least, that's the attitude the QNX marketeers are taking. Instead of viewing Linux as competition, they've decideded it's a source of Posix-knowledgable programmers. One can but hope...

Re: QNX, why bother?

[pherris]

VPC 3.x: no, VPC 4.x: yes (a bit slow but that's not QNX's fault).

pherris

Re:QNX? QPE!

[TheeAlien]

There seem to be many things that you cannot fully comprehend... firstly...

QSSL IS NOT MAKING MONEY FROM OPEN-SOURCE/FREE-SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS.

They are making money from large corporations that like to keep secrets. Now dont get me wrong - they like the ideas they hold and in a utopia there would be no secrets and everyone would be happy... but this isnt a perfect world.

Next, reverse-engineering is unacceptable for a company like QSSL - QNX when used in the real world depends on being as acurate as possible and alot of the time reverse engineer is unaccurate or impossible on some devices (I'd tell you a little story about the Dallas MCU and Mr Coffe but I've told a bit to many stories today...).

Not only is reverse engineering a bad choice as mention above it's also an ILLEGAL choice in many places where QSSL has brances, and illegal activity is not good umm-k? QSSL dose not like to pay million dollar lawsuits for the free-software community.

You seem to misunderstand that QSSL as an OS developer is always stuck between a rock and a hardplace, between end-users who want the world to be open and developers who feel knowledge corrupts and absolutely knoledge corrupts absolutly.

Frankly QSSL is doing the very best possibly, there making as much source code free to everyone (busness and privite users alike) while keeping powerful friends that might later bless them for their patronage. I hope you can understand where their comming from.

Re:Gorgeous

[TheeAlien]

What chu talk'in bout Whillis? It's free...

VSTa would be nice too

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people don't know that a free near-realtime OS exists that draws its architecture from QNX and Plan-9.

Its called VSTa, or Valencia Simple Tasker. One of the main features of VSTa and QNX is that of a true microkernel architecture. The entire kernel runs in on-chip cache in around 40k of memory.

VSTa has been around for a while and is GPL'd. It has an elegant design, but unfortunately it doesn't have a large group of developers working on the kernel and associated software. Too bad, I say.

As much as I love linux, I think that VSTa would be an ideal kernel for the iPaq and similar devices. Now someone needs to do a port for StrongARM.

If you're interested try www.vsta.org

jim burnes jburnes@vonu.net

Re: QNX, why bother?

[slashdot2.2sucks]

You are so full of shit.

1. Your QNX numbers are out dated
2. QNX doesn't run stuff in kernel mode you dumb fuck
3. Your microsoft link doesn't exist
4. I am not aware of a 90MHz Pentium II ever existing. To my knowledge, the lowest clocked PII was the 233MHz
5. Who the fuck cares what Microsoft claims

I can't tell if you are a troll, liar, or stupid.

Re:QNX? QPE!

[BlowCat]

I bet that the above message was moderated as flamebait from MSIE. It's a shame for a site that promotes free software to allow moderation from closed source browsers.

Re:QNX? QPE!

[Andante]

It was not my intent to criticize QSSL for not using the GPL, but rather eliminate a misconception that the original author had regarding the GPL.

He implied that it was the General Public License itself that results in ALSA being less optimized than its closed-source counterparts. Admitedly, companies may not want to help create GPL drivers for fear of divulging secrets to the competition. That does not mean that the GPL is inherently to blame for less efficient drivers. This is just an indication of an overly-competitive marketplace with less than honest practice of business.

However, let's not forget closed-source drivers:

If "reverse engineering hardware specs is a breeze with the right equipment (ie. your competitors have it)" [see other reply] then what does it matter if your competitors have the driver source code? Assuming that there is a legal disclaimer associated with the product barring people from reverse engineering the hardware for commercial gain then the end result is the same. Their illegal reverse engineering of your product is just made ever so slightly easier than it already was.

If a competitor wants to make a copy of a product you're selling their going to do it regardless of whether or not you produced open source or closed source drivers. However if you open source your drivers you allow reap the benefits of allowing the end user to optimize the end product. For example look at the reverse engineering being done on the now-defunct 3dfx Voodoo 4/5 cards. Without going into to much technical detail, the developers working on the drivers are toying with features of the card that were never fully explored in 3dfx's officially released drivers. This features greatly enhance 3d performance on the cards. Also, since the reverse-engineered drivers are open-source someone who desires to port the drivers to another visual platform (i.e. Berlin perhaps) would have much less trouble in doing so. Especially considering 3dfx's untimely demise and nVidia's general lack of interest in supporting the old 3dfx users.

Re: QNX, why bother?

[mritunjai]

Hi

Yeah PPC is support as a target not as a development platform. You can install QNX RTP, then make a target buildfile for your PPC with all stuff you want and go!

The only hitch! though OS runtimes are available for PPC target, you'll need to recompile the applications you need for PPC target. Thus even though its just a straight recompile on QNX, but you need to have the sources.

--
Keep Smiling
- mritunjai

Why does QNX excite people?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked with QNX for years now, and always wonder why people get excited, it is garbage for a wide range of applications, and just acceptable for others. try doing desktop development without VM, you need a LOT more resources.

It is non standard enough to make porting software difficult, it's admin (especially network) structures are at times insane, it is slow (try benchmarking the disk drivers some time) and very expensive once you get into the commercial realm.

Then again, it does have it's niche, and does ok there, but linux (and the embeded flavours) does better just about everywhere.

I guess it's just a 'if it ain't windows it must be good' mentality, which is a pity.

Re:Why does QNX excite people?

[variable]

Years now? Sounds like you are used to using QNX4. And under QNX4 I think you are correct that it is just non-standard enough (mostly due to the use of watcom instead of gcc) to make porting a pain. However, QNX6 is a major step forward from QNX4 and most of your issues are no longer a factor. Just FYI - might be waste since you are just an AC. :)

Re:Why does QNX excite people?

[Anonymous Coward]

QNX4 predates the involvement of the Amiga community. QNX Neutrino which was at a time meant to be the basis for a new Amiga platform is very slick and multi-platform. This kernel is now at the basis of QNX RtP.

My advise: Pursuade your company to use new QNX technology instead of a very old one. The are migration kits available for QNX4 which will help you port your own stuff over to this new platform.

Re:Why does QNX excite people?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, ok. It seems that you have wasted a lot of your time without knowing a piece of what QNX is. I have been working with QNX 4 since 1991. I have also worked earlier with QNX 2, but this is another story. With QNX 4, I was able, for example, to log to *disk* a lot of enginnering data variables taken from a PLC, taking 100 samples/sec., while displaying data trends in another five nodes *at the same time*. Of course, these nodes booted from the same node where data was gathered, and used the same filesystem.

Right now, I am using QNX in a financial app. that collects 6M transactions per month, via ppp connections, >20 TXs/s, etc, etc. with operative interfaces built with Photon and Web technology.

By the way, networking with QNX is a *lot* easier that TCP/IP. It's not so easy now with QNX 6, but you have a *lot* of new features that justify the increasing complexity.

I have also been working with Linux since 1994. Ok, it's fine, it's the right choice between a low cost UNIX solution and Windoze NT. But don't try to do *hard realtime* with it, you will be surely in problems.

If you where trying to use QNX for word processing, you missed the right boat. Try with a Mac. Please, avoid Windoze.

Re: QNX, why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

QNX machines at the post office have 5 times fewer bulletholes than do windows machines.

Yes!

[cluening]

If I could go out and get one of those little things running QNX and Photon instead of WinCE, I might have reason to move past my wonderful Palm device - Manos, the Handspring of Fate... That thing looks really slick and quite exciting

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

nowina.pl serwis chrzecijañski.

Re:QNX? QPE!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can install QPE over Familiar Linux distribuition. First, go to http://www.handhelds.org and install Familiar. Then go to Trolltech's site and download QPE for iPAQ