QNX RtP 6.2 World Preview

Jason writes: "OSNews is running an exclusive preview of the brand new version 6.2 of the QNX realtime operating system. The article is going through the installation process, the Photon user interface (lots of screenshots included), the internals, and the advantages and disadvantages of the OS as a desktop system. QNX RtP 6.2 is expected to be released for free (for non commercial usage) before March."

Comments

Why would anyone use

[wiredog]

A real time OS as a desktop system? I've worked with embedded/real time systems and performance in that world is different from performance in the desktop and server worlds. QNX has a nice looking GUI, but who would need it in an embedded or real time application?

Real time OS's Have Issues with performance on the desktop, just as desktop/server OS's Have Issues in the real time space.

Re:I gave up on QNX...

[Koim-Do]

Maybe their newsgroups are intended to answer QNX, rather than FreeBSD questions ?

Please consider this hypothesis. you can easily excersise it by posting a valid *QNX related* question to their newsgroup.

BTW, as the whole FreeBSD kernel runs in a single address space, and supervisor privilege, a faulty device driver may crash your (otherwise stable) kernel.

Re:First Impressions

[jaavaaguru]

Hmmm... Eye Candy.

I know people think that that is one of the least important things in QNX, but if I'm gonna be sitting in front of my PC for >14 hours a day I want at least two things out of it:

• Reliability
• Useability

Please note, I left "A Life" out of the list deliberately ;-)
Correct me if I'm wrong here - I only started reading about this today - QNX's main plus point is reliability, right? This is what makes it such a good server OS. This article is talking about it as a Desktop OS (look, he mentions FAT32 and NTFS). Why not go the whole way to becoming a popular desktop OS and make eye candy too? there's no reason it can't be there but be kept to a minimum so that it's reliable.

As for the calculator...
I couldn't get it to work in KDE 2.2-x (i think x is 13) from the RedHat 7.2 distro. I know it used to work though. If not being "bleeding edge" means doing without the paste function in my calculator I think I'll install Mandrake.