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Darwin 7.0 Released
Trollaxor writes "The source code to Darwin 7.0, corresponding to the lower levels of Panther, is free for download less than 24 hours after the new Mac OS X v10.3 release! Check out the Darwin FAQ and the Darwin Q & A to get acquainted with this Open Source BSD operating system."
I cant believe Trollaxor got an article ;-) Goes to show that trolls are listened to when there's an article.
ObOntarget: So, is there any interesting tidbits in Darwin that's not in Linux? Or is it bragging rights of Apple?
Well, if you want to rely on a company that continually shafts you then I guess you could kiss their butt. Personally I think they're stupid as hell for not releasing OS X on Intel, and stupid before that for not allowing PowerPC clones. Where the hell do you think Microsoft made it's money? On making PC's???
You just replied to one of Trollaxor's old trolls.
Don't you feel smart?
YHBT HAND Douchebag
I'd like to thank Trollaxor for making this possible. Everyone else can lick my nuts.
After my third and final attempt with QNX, I felt I had to write in hopes of finding others who have had similar experiences. Hopefully someone can tell me what's wrong here. QNX has left me with a very sour taste in my mouth.
The first system I tried to install QNX on was an old 100MHz Pentium with 32 megs of RAM. This was back in the Fall of 2000. Now, since QNX was supposed to be "tiny" and run on things like watches and hospital equipment, I was expecting it to breathe new life into my old Pentium. WRONG. The hard drive practically ate itself to death every time I launched a new app, and the RAM was almost always at full use. I mean what the Hell. But I gave it another try when Patch A came out. And Patch B, which killed networking entirely. I had given up and didn't want to touch Patch C when 6.1 came out.
QNX 6.1 was a lot nicer than 6.0, but it was still a resource hog. RAM allocation was no better and processor usage was actually up. I decided I might as well upgrade the system with a new motherboard and a 500MHz Pentium II, but to my chagrin the five-fold increase in speed (not to mention MMX!) did little to boost the sagging performance. Willing to do anything to clear up this performance black hole, I installed Patch A to 6.1 the minute it was available. I noticed a slight increase in screen redraws but nothing more.
To this day, even with the new 6.2 on a 2GHz Pentium 4, the QNX performance mystery boggles my mind. Either QNX doesn't really meet the defintion of a "real-time" OS, or we need to consider changing what "real-time" means. I wouldn't want my insulin drip running QNX in the middle of a surgery. I might die while it's paging in from /swap, and that's just unacceptable.
Hi, I've been using QNX for the last few weeks on my 1 GHz Penium III system, and I'm quite baffled by the performance or lack thereof that I've been seeing.
I downloaded the QNX 6.2.1 ISO, burnt a CD, and installed onto my hard drive. This was after erasing an old Windows 2000/Linux dual-boot install. Things went smoothly, and I was easily able to connect to the Internet for updates to various packages. I was really impressed at this point.
After a couple days of playing with it, however, I was boggled at how much like Windows the system acted. Here I was with a 1 GHz processor (the minimum required is 600 MHz) and 1 gigabyte of RAM and Photon, the GUI, was lagging. If I have a few programs open and an MP3 playing in the background, I can watch widgets redraw. Tweaking some options helped a little, but this is not in line with what I have read about QNX performance.
Isn't this supposed to be a hard realtime operating system that runs on medical devices meant to save peoples' lives? How is it that it runs on 33 MHz processors with 128k of RAM in an IV drip yet skips MP3s on a system 100x beefier in every way imagineable? Do they release a different version for free that doesn't try for realtime performance or what?
After less than a full month I've grown dissatisfied with something I'd hoped I could replace my Windows and Linux installs with for leisure and hobbyist purposes. My main system is a dual 3 GHz Pentium4 box with 4 gigs of RAM, but that's a DV workstation and I can't use it just to see how QNX scales with more robust hardware and a dual processor configuration. Something tells me it might not, though.
Can anyone offer me any insights? I realize that this is a free operating system and that I have little room to bitch, but I want to make sure there's nothing I'm missing before I discount QNX altogether and go back to Windows or Linux, which while performing slugglishly are more familiar to me.
Thank you.