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QNX give update of new Amiga OS and GUI
g.macdonald wrote in to
send us news of the new Amiga GUI based on QNX. It
looks very perty. How long before we have a GNOME and Enlightenment
theme that mimics it.
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I've always liked operating systems. I think the idea of booting up a new OS and having your computer look and act totally diffrent is soooo cool. That's why everytime I hear about a new or old x86 operating system I start banging my head againt my monitor in joyous glee. Well I don't really, but I imagine I am. Well actually that isn't really true either, if it's a microsoft operating system I imagine Bill Gates hanging over a giant pit of acid and me taking . . . never mind.
Anyways, I wanted to express a dream of mine. I dreamed that in the not so distant future companies would place their old operating systems like os/2 1.x or next/openstep on an ftp site or something and let people download them for free(as in beer). This is realted to the Amiga's OS I think because the Amiga OS is old(date wise, not neccesarily technology wise). That does make this post on topic, right? Does that last sentence admit guilt?
You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you.
Who is they?
You know... THEM...
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
> They would have been smarter to put that much
> effort into a vesion of KDE or GNOME for QNX.
> Either of them could be made to look a helluva
> lot like that desktop.
You miss a key point - this is not X, so KDE and GNOME don't apply. By creating something new that isn't X they can bypass the problems associated with X (and there are a bunch) and customize their GUI to work optimally with the underlying OS.
The tradeoff is that they can't leverage all the work that's been done on X, but it's not a bad tradeoff if your goal is a new OS.
Perhaps porting the KDE or GNOME code to the non-X environment would have been a possibility, but I'm not sure whether it could have been done as easily as simply starting from scratch using native tools.
-hitchhiker
Transmeta is not out yet, (in spec even).
Wait, it would be just like Amiga to depend on them wouldn't it. I can see it now Amiga Press release Circa April 9 2000
"The AOE has recently switched its kernel to NT and will now be running nativly on the as of yet unspeced transmeta cpu. They still don't have an instruction set to show us but I firmly belive that it AOE will be out within six months."
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I still don't understand what is meant by a real-time OS. Looked it up on CNET but their definition was opaque. Could anyone explain it?
Thanks
#include "mysig.h"
That's a quote from Jurrasic Park when the girl sits down at the computer. A fellow geek and I say it whenever we've been forced to use Windows for a while and return back to the more familiar unices we use (Irix, Linux, Solaris, SunOS).
I just read through the (very well written) Neutrino online manual and I must admit it's quite impressive. The message passing IPC reminds me of Mach, but Neutrino seems to be much better designed and also quite a bit faster. With a decent GUI (Photon looks very 'raw') this OS will definitely become a serious competitor to BeOS and MacOS X.
I hope I've helped enlighten you.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
One thing no other OS has: In QNX all the processes have transparent access to all the CPUs in a QNX network.
What would you think if I tell you that with QNX you can build a 10 or 100 or 1000 machines cluster just pluging in new computers with QNX to the network and the applications can run transparently distributed between all those cpu's as if they were running on the local machine.
And this clustering technology is different to Beowulf clusters because you don't need special applications or special libraries to make your application run in a cluster. I've already run applicatons on a 10 QNX machines network and the processing time speeds up almost 10 times.
I would really like to have QNX-Amiga machines for a rendering cluster because if the load groqs too much I just add more machines to the network.
--
"This is Unix. I know this."
The current photon viewer for X is phinx.
You can use rphinx to display x applications in photon.
You can also run QNXFree86 and have an X server running on top of QNX. QNXFree86 is a port of XFree86 to QNX.
--
The first one who answered the original post unwittingly answered it. The Macintosh snapshot (command-shift-3), for instance, outputs to PICT. But no one puts a PICT on the Web! They put GIFs and JPGs! So the reason it passed through Photoshop might well be that - to convert from PICT (or whatever) to JPG. There you go.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Hi Sleepy.
it seems that many slashDOT readers are way
behind in the QSSL Nto partnership with
AMIGA,inc.
its been widely known for some time that
QSSL are as i say in PARTNERSHIP not mearly
paying the cash and leasing the Nto OS.
and not IT IS the Nto plus Photon NOT
the older QNX4.
AMIGA,inc are takeing the Nto and working with
the QSSL teams to create the final Nto Version2
now in Beta release to the select QSSL 3rd partys,
and as you all know now its just shifted up a gear
and invited the AMIGA Developer community too
take up the offer.
seeing as many readers seem to be in need of
some acurate info, here`s something you might like
to know.
the ICOA in colaberation with Team AMIGA Central
are at this time in talks with QSSL and AMIGA,inc
as to how best serve both the Classic community
Developer`s and the upcomeing AmiQNX markets.
as for the look of the screen shots , please try to remember that QSSL are primarilly Intel based
for the Embeded Markets and it will be upto Doc
allan and team to make a personality (remember that option ?) that better suits the current and
future end-user`s AT release time.
the screenshot`s are mearly an indication as to
what the underlying Photon MC can do NOT what the
end result will be.
to repeat, QSSL still have QNX4 for the current
embeded markets, Nto version 2 Beta is shipping now to interested Developers, ICOA/TAC is getting ready to help said Developers that Knock at its door.
perhaps some serious *nix Developers might see
that there`s a very good chance they could help
shape the new AMIGA markets if they just take the time to think about it.
anyway i hope thats helped clear up some stuff for you readers.
Ohh come on, perhaps you dont rate
the classic user, but dont forget we managed
to pull down the Ibrowse servers for several days.
the QNX/Nto story was doing the rounds
on the AMIGA related news/NG/ML`s for a
fare time before SLASHdot got a sniff.
i think its great that / and its readers are so interested in things AMIGA but Please dont think
we are NOT able to show enough interest in a site
so as to show it down as per the QNX site.
it happened the same last Nov when the Nto news
broke, and i dont remember / covering that
for quite some time.
I remember, two years ago, trying to order a single-workstation license for developing under QNX so I could get a feel for the whole system.. My associates and I have phobias about buying pigs in pokes. $1k for a single license? No wonder, even now, I can't find an order form. They don't intend to sell this thing to anyone outside the Ivory Tower.
Except maybe as a watered down Amiga OS version. Be still my pittering heart.
Either take off your glasses, or wear somebody else's. Poof. Instant blurry icons. =)
I seem to remember the thing that made the amiga so neat for it's time was the intelligent file assosciations, loadable drivers, tasking OS, _NICE SHELL_, decent process management, and good expandability... Honestly, i even like the Amiga OS better than Linux as a desktop OS, mainly because of the good compromise between GUI and CLI, and the good scriptability. I seem to remember some mem leaks and other problems made it a little tough. I don't know if there is any real future for the OS, but i miss it...
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
The problem lies in QNX's shitty bandwidth.
I had a beta license w/ them at one time...
Downloading from they're beta ftp server is very slow, and often timesout.
There were a few ocassions that i got over 6k/s, but the speed soon dropped to sub 1k/s speeds.
Nice dodge. The quote wasn "leading self hosted x86 RTOS" or any permutations thereof. The quote was "LEADING real time OS".
Good tech though. You just have to be able to read around the marketing (as with any other product).
The Amiga does it better than Windoze and Linux, but not as well as the Mac or OS/2's amazing WorkPlace Shell. I really hope AI addresses this issue. Death to ".info" files and lame-ass 1970s file systems!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Did he say anything about Linux or *BSD? No.
Was your comment pointless? Yes.
Did you get moderated down? Yes. (and so will this message)
You're sure of yourself and your stereotyping. Good for your dumb hard headed self.
Hear hear! I was an Amiga junkie from 1986 to 1993, and it hurt a LOT when Commodore went belly-up. Now that I am a Linux junkie, the fact that my new world cannot be destroyed by the mismanagement of one single company gives me a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling inside that I refuse to give up or even seriously risk again.
Real-time enough though.
Reactor Monitoring
Nuclear detonation detector (detects increased atmospheric radition levels caused by nuclear testing)
Advanced Space Vision System (used on the space shuttle and international space station for docking and control of the arm)
GE's trains
In car navigation system
Blood processing (pumps out your blood, extracts the useful stuff and puts the leftovers back in your body in real-time *ick*)
Numerous factory control systems including Hershey's and LEGO
And the list goes on..... and on....
Does it suppose to have something to GUI's, and I'm missing it? : )
ps. I think there should be a way to moderated your message down.
I often am unable to get slashdot, or i get an incredibally slow connection speed to it. Tracerts show that its not my connection nor intermediate routers. I don't generally take that as a sign that linux has crashed and that its not a great server os. What you are saying doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Anyways, I had no trouble getting to it just now.
Someone claimed that they use qnx on the space shuttle; if this is true, I'd think that its pretty damn stable. Be curious to see more about that.
Two things I can't stand with the screenshot:
1) They had to call the trash can garbage. That really is kind of confusing, since your files are typically trashed not garbaged (sounds to much like garbaled, and plus you don't use english that way). If you really must, at least call it something that makes sense like 'Trash' or 'Recycle Bin', etc. Afraid of lawsuit, huh?
2) What's up with this white mouse cursor. Most normal systems use a black curser (X11 and Macs), the only reason to use a white curser is to avoid a lawsuit. At any rate, studies show that having a black cursor == less eye strain, easier to find (most work is done on white paper/white screen).
Is it me, or does that look like BeOS, Windows, and NEXTSTEP all warmed over?
-awc
Several reasons:
1) GNUstep is needs some work, in several areas. When it gets closer to 1.0.
2) GNUstep requires glibc 2.1, it won't work with libc5/glibc1.99
3) NeXTStep look is not liked by some people. But others love it.
4) The standard GUIs people use look like Mac or Windows, NeXTStep feels quite different.
Heh... so, people with PC's will be able to use the "Amiga" OS before people on actual Amigas will?
Kinda neat looking UI, but it doesn't seem so radically different than any other desktop out there... isn't there anything really *new* out there these days? Windows n' buttons. Yawn.
should be qw not q
I know I shouldn't fall to this level, but I though that was pretty darn funny. hehe
That was certainly a great joke.
(/me returns to laughing on the floor)
I'm curious. How is this the LEADING realtime OS. Is it really ahead in marketshare?
If you look carefully at footage of the new space station, you will see lots of white squares with big black dots glued all over the modules.
The system uses a pair of video cameras on the shuttle and by "connecting the dots" the system can determine the location and orientation of an object.
With this data, the computer can display a 3D model of the shuttle and payload or provide a heads-up-display for the astronaut. This way they can view the payload from any angle and don't have to rely on those tiny windows or puny video cameras on the arm.
Done originally with a pair of IBM 486 Thinkpads networked together (using FLEET) for redundancy. Imagine trying that with windoze!
See http://www.qnx.com/realworld/space/seespace.html
Not a quantum leap either. They would have been smarter to put that much effort into a vesion of KDE or GNOME for QNX. Either of them could be made to look a helluva lot like that desktop.
And since QNX is still proprietary, it wouldn't really hurt them to have a GPLed desktop on top of it. In fact, they could have contributed to a GPLed desktop, and made their theme proprietary / copyrighted, so they'd still have a unique look and feel.
Companies need to get more creative. Let's stop reinventing the wheel, damnit!
Actually, somebody in like 1986 or early-1987 ported that demostation program to the Mac Plus.
It was a pretty cool demo. Some how it used a resolution hack (or at least made it look that way) so you got a high resolution (more then 72-dpi) using the standard Mac Plus video card. It's lines were smoother then smooth, but it seemed to take like a 1 1/2 minutes to initilize the screen at that resolution.
I have seen some pretty cool demos of Super3d on a MacPlus (I still have it), which looked cool, and you could make your own 3d images, but the resolution was far inferior (think 72 dpi) then that amiga clone demo.
If somebody could explain how that demo could create more then 72 dpi on a B&W mac plus, I would be a very happy person.
I think it's fairly agreed that the big defining point of the Amiga was the custom hardware. How is a completely different OS running on completely different hardware still "Amiga-like"?
Actually Mac OS 8.5.x and better (and I think Windows 98), don't have to have jaggy icons. Mac OS 8.5.x supports alpha-chanel transperency and 32-bit icons, but they are a tadbit difficult to edit, since the tools suck to edit them (I use clip2icons and PhotoDeluxe [I cann't afford the real thing, and no I am not booting Linux/GIMP to edit a 32-bit icon!]).
They look nice if you know what you are doing with anti-aliased corners, and stuff.
The reason why NeXTstep does not have jaggys on the icons is that they use tiffs. Tiffs support 32-bit color natively and support alpha-transperency (I think).
Seems like it's
Anybody have mirrors of the screenshots up?
-Nic
Updating a driver:
/usr/src/linux/arch/x86/boot/bzImage /vmlinuz;
Windows:
System has changed, please reboot... please reboot again... again... one more time... done. (a few minutes frustrating minutse)
Linux:
make config; make clean; make dep; make bzImage;
(20 minutes later) make Install; cp
QNX & nto:
slay
&
(how fast can you type?)
Is it just my damn 'puter, or is this thing /.'ed already?
Does anyone else have a problem connecting to that server, or is my dear junkbuster causing problems?
My my my. My baby is still sitting here, next to my relatively brand-spanking-new Linux box. In fact, that's what I'm typing on right now! It amazes me that a system whose company dried up and vanished so many years ago is still able to stir up such strong emotions. I guess that's why I could never truly bring myself to ever leave the platform. I just hope Amiga Inc. can capitalize on such nostalgia with their marketing instead of the previous tactic of relying solely on those of us who have stuck-it-out to fuel their platform. I just hope the new OS... oh, sorry, Amiga Operating Environment v5.0... manages to retain some of the nice modular features of the current OS. Would keep me happy.
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
It seems down. Not even Netcraft will look it up for me :-) I'm just hope that /. won't one day be found legally to be performing DoS attacks, just through the /. effect.
(;
I think you're ranting -- just a little.
:)
1 .patch.README
Are you talking QNX4 or Neutrino?
What is it you hate about it? QNX4 has got full POSIX APIs, plus quite a few BSD and SysV libs, ANSI C/C++. With Watcom 10.6 and the unix lib PD stuff from the 'net ports pretty easily. I ported Samba in a couple of hours and I think Apache just compiles and links these days. It's got full POSIX threads and a couple of Java VMs now. Kaffe has also been ported by different people.
Neutrino gets more QNX4 features everyday. Soon it will be QNX5 (Maybe Amiga OS5 _is_ QNX5?
And in terms of raw speed and determinism it's hard to beat. This lowly 400Mhz Pentium II does a full process-to-process context switch in less than 500nS (yes, nanoseconds).
Yes, development licenses aren't cheap but your runtime licensing is based on your volume. If you're selling thousands of units your price drops to $50 and less.
If you are looking to switch to Linux you might be interested in a QNX scheduler for Linux here: http://linuxhq.com/doc/QNX-scheduler-2.0.31-pre3-
and QNX kernel APIs implemented as a Linux kernel module here: http://tor-pw1.netcom.ca/~fcsoft/index.html
alternatively a shared-memory implementation of Send()/Receive()/Reply() can be found here:
http://www.holoweb.net/~simpl
Regards,
--aj
I'll second that. I was always under the impression that QNX was touted as being that oh so great and mythical 24/7 OS that can handle whatever you throw at it.... apparently though it makes a not so great 24/7 web server.....
To overcome this, there will first be a developer machine, which is going to be an x86 based system.
Following the development system, the really new machines will be released. The new machines will NOT be x86 based. All this info is available on Amiga's website, e.g. here.
Looks sweeet. I'll start working on an E and/or GTK theme when I get back from work, once I installed gimp on my new computer. I suck at art, but I'm good at cut and pasting the widgets from the screenshot.
Lighten up on them, dude. At my company, we have
a Linux web server that suits our needs 99% of
the time. If we ever develop something that justifies being slashdotted, it would be overloaded too...
It's not always the OS running the server that's the problem. It's the budget/planning/needs/bandwidth
of the company and people running the show that make the real difference. Hell, even with NT and
a *lot* of money, I could build you a web site that never went down.
The old OS/2 very much forms the core of the new one. NextStep was sold to Apple. And this article proves that people still see value in the Amiga OS (even if it IS just the name). Only GEM has been opened up. Maybe someday IBM will give up entirely on OS/2 (Wow, I just read THE WORST review of their new Warp Server, I think in Internet Week, but I can't remember) and set it free. Not that I'm saying it's a bad system. It could just be better if it could cross-fertilize code with other systems/programmers out there.
--JZ
Right.
We all know it's going to be based on Transmeta's MMP.
:-)
Alas, it'll never happen. Keep in mind that Microsoft wrote parts of OS/2 1.x, and pieces of that are still in 4.x. There are probably license restrictions that will keep IBM from ever opening up the source. I guess they could do it if they got permission from Microsoft, but from Microsoft's point of view, the only good Warp is a dead Warp.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
That is a good point. Although the PlayStation has all the bells and whistles of a latter-day Amiga, it is too closed a system to aspire to loftier ideals. Open hardware is just as important as open software. On the other hand, there are rumors that Sony might market it as a general purpose computer too. They do use Linux as the game development platform for the PlayStation.
That's funny because I noticed the exact same thing. Actually, I guess that's pathetic.
At least there are two of us.
The subject sais it all!
How can a brand new gui don't use keybindings... Are all users mouse oriented ?
Alt + F is way faster than grabbing mouse and klicking on menu
/AC
Doesn't Windowmaker use GNUstep? I'm current using windowmaker on my Slack4 box now, with libc5. Hence GNUstep on libc5. Or am I on crack?
Duh....you ever think that they might have run them through Photoshop in order to convert them into another format and then resample so the image size could be reduced???
The cursor also matches the cursor on my Machintosh exactly -- except for the inverted colours.
Seems like the E-theme has arrived:
4
http://e.themes.org/sqlgal.cgi?themeid=93149080
How about instead of ./ a site, just to get one image, why not put it on slashdot.org instead?
Wouldn't that be a nice and polite thing to do?
Especially, for these bandwidth poor companies like QNX.
That's why I am a big fan of the BeOS. It's got a spiffyclean GUI, bash shell, scripting, and it's brand new from the ground up. It's really too bad that nobody uses it. Someday...
Wah!
The same guy who did most of the BeOS icons now works in some capacity for QNX. His website is called the Artillion.
Go here to see more of his stuff. He's even got free icons you "free software freaks" might like.
:) (if ya can't take a joke...)
http://www.artillion.com/
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I run BeOS. The rules don't apply.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I run BeOS. The rules don't apply.
In the press release, it says that it will support running X applications under Photon.
From the release:
Photon microGUI - Complete windowing system with full Unicode support for integrated internationalization. Also includes visual application builder (PhABTM), powerful development
environment (layered libraries, over 50 widgets, built-in image support, online documentation, etc.), web browser, multimedia player, 3D graphics, and gaming support.
Although Photon represents a unique new graphical environment, it works seamlessly with existing windowing systems. You can, for example, connect to a Photon desktop from a Windows desktop or connect to a Windows desktop from a Photon desktop. And because a large number of existing source bases use the X Window System, we allow developers to compile an application for X and then run the application under Photon.
Here is a cool link by Collas the president of Amiga (former Vice President of GW2K) where he tries to explain the Amiga vision currently and where they want to go. Scetchy details, but (as always) they sound pretty damn cool.
h tml
P.S. Woulndt it be cool if the Amiga used the Emotion Engine graphics chip from Sony? *drrooolll*
http://www.amiga.com/diary/executive/ol-0699-e.
It's the "Boing" ball. One of the first ever Amiga demos had a 3D "Boing" ball bouncing around the screen, making a "boing" noise whenever it hit the border. In the post-Commodore era, the "Boing" ball got adopted as an unofficial Amiga logo. Somewhere along the line it became the official logo. Just as well; I think it's way cooler than the old rainbow tickmark logo that Commodore used.
u are weird.. heheh
Some months ago, you could probably get a very cheap OS/2 Warp 3 (with last fixpacks attached) from http://www.mensys.nl/ , I think.
And even cheaper a second hand one from EBay.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
prevent me from switching to linux.
1/ The hope that Amiga will rise from the ashes.
2/ Linux users like yourself who slag of anything but linux.
A friend of mine is way into linux but when he got a new graphics and sound card he switched back to microsloth because there wasn`t any drivers available. He is back on linux now that you can get TNT drivers but he is back to using his old sound card for the sound.
Sounds to me like Linux is mega overrated.
If you think you're confused now, check out:
l
http://www.amiga.de/diary/executive/linux-e.htm
That fat lady just keeps on singing...
Look around, and choose your own ground. -PF
Will it run old Amiga applications seamlessly? Will the API be compatible with AmigaOS? Does it have any other specifically Amiga-ish features?
To me it looks like someone bought the Amiga marque and just decided to use it as an asset to get ahead in the OS market. Which sounds about as genuine as the "Commodore 64" PC (a Wintel box bundled with a C64 emulator and badged with a Commodore logo licensed from whoever owns it).
According to a Q & A list at the site of the OS folks, a processor hasn't been decided upon yet.
But why the fuss? It's perfectly normal for development systems to
Heck, if they have finalized the Amiga OS 5 Java APIs people can start writing apps for it using their favourite Java 2 development tool... :-)
http://www.amiga.com/diary/1999/990799-e.html
Read the Executive Update article as well. Interesting dynamics between this announcement and the QNX announcement of only a few hours earlier.
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
It appears Amiga Inc. decided to change the undelying kernel from QNX to Linux - see more at http://www.amiga.com . It is wonderful, isn't it?
It is the Amiga "boing" ball. The unofficial logo.
When the Amiga was first eleased (1985) there was a demo with the
boing ball rotating andbouncing around the screen. It was bsolutely
astounding..... C=64's & Spectrums were the norm and PC's were still
using MS Dos let alone Windoze whilst Amiga had a fully WIMP realtime
multitasking OS (in 1985 for godsake)
Alan Day - Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland, UK
My pointer lines up exactly, pixel by pixel wit that pointer. The colors are just inversed. I use E and not sure where my pointer came from. Anyone else? Xfree at 1024x768
Face it, there will be no generous support from companies with established products (and niche markets) to revive the Amiga scene, they're after your money while trying to minimize the necessary investments. The Amiga fans are known to be very faithful and commited to their platform and not at all reluctant to pay large amounts of money to keep their system up-to-date. It therefore makes much sense for companies like QNX (for whom the number of Amiga devotees is significant compared to their own user base, btw.) to attempt to lure the Amigans to their platform.
If you want an interesting alternative OS (which will hopefully continue to support non-x86 platforms), choose BeOS now, or wait for a more multimedia-desktop-friendly face of Linux.
I wish NeXT hadn't vanished so quickly...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Click a couple of links and you get to this one that explains the whole relationship.
It's not Amiga-like, it's Amiga - Revision 5.
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
I think the tick was actually the logo for Workbench.
I liked the tick though.
I like the boing ball also
But I prefered the original red AMIGA logo rather than the new black
font that Escom introduced
Alan Day - Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland, UK
I just have one question. Who are they expecting to buy this stuff? I can't think of any reason, except for maybe sheer curiousity, to buy this system.
The key to any OS is long-term credibility. People have to believe that your OS will be around in 5 years, or they won't develop for it, they won't invest in it, and they sure as hell won't buy it. There are a few different ways to get long-term credibility. QNX has none of them. You can be the 2000-pound gorilla of the OS world, so big that you are guaranteed to still be around in 5-10 years. This is how Microsoft does it. You can be Open-Sourced, thus guaranteeing that your "air supply" will never be cut off, and you cannot be killed. This is how Linux does it. You can attempt to squeeze in between these two by selling to a market that the others fail to address, a market which is guaranteed not to go away. This approach is somewhat shaky in terms of long-term credibility, which is why Be (selling to multimedia types and computer proffessionals) and Apple (selling to newbies and home users) are so shaky. QNX doesn't even have that. They seem to be pushing QNX as THE platform for QNX developers. Hmmm...
Other than that they seem to be offering features that are already done better by other OSs. POSIX support and X windows? Linux. Broad range of hardware support? Linux. Developer tools? Windows. The only original feature they seem to be offering is a superspiffy new hi-tech kernel, and a new GUI. My custom-compiled Linux kernel is running just fine, thank you very much. OS kernels are one area where newer is definitely not better. I want my kernel to be thoroughly tested, tried-and-true. As for the GUI, words fail me. In the extremely unlikely event that QNX has discovered some key aspect of GUI design that will revolutionize my productivity, I'll just download the Gnome/Enlightenment theme for it in a couple of weeks.
Taking all this into consideration, and reading between the lines on their web page, I think I've figured this out. Lacking any concrete market, they've somehow gotten ahold of the Amiga label, and intent to slap it onto a product that has nothing to do with Amiga (Whose real merit was its hardware, anyway) and hope that they can sell it to nostalgic Amiga-lovers. You Amiga folks out there, stay away. You're about to be saddled with an incompatible, dead-end OS with technical merit but no real-world value. Again.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
Notice that the site never claimed those screenshots were of the new Amiga OS. The page probably exists to throw a bone to all the Amiga enthusiasts who are grumbling about the lack of news.
The page is a QNX/Photon advertisement. Amiga Inc. is the one responsable for selling the Amiga OS, not QNX.
Becuase my little friend...
Slashdot isn't just about linux and its zealots. As so many of you seem to forget.. =)
Wanna get turned off of Linux? Listen to some of the fanatics that post here.
Peace my friend.
I work with a large, mixed QNX/Linux system for my day job. This Photon GUI is all very well, but it only runs on QNX and Windows (through something called Phindows). Phindows needs a licence - QNX loves licences.
:v)
So if I'm using a Linux/X desktop, I can't access Photon applications. There is no current Photon viewer for Linux (phindows-in-X got dropped way back, and needed a licence), plus it's closed source so you won't get to develop your own.
It is possible to run Phindows under WINE, but WINE ain't so stable and if you lose the focus you may not get it back.
So it begs the question asking: What the heck has Photon got to do with Linux, and why is it on Slashdot?
Vik
I speak for nobody but myself.
It's from the famous Amiga graphics demo from back in the day. What was even cooler than simply watching that demo was grabbing the top edge of the screen (it was a full screen demo) and yanking the demo up and down, exposing the Amiga desktop (known as WorkBench) in the background which was RUNNING AT A DIFFERENT RESOLUTION!!!! I still haven't seen that kind of integration in a system other than the Amiga.
Interesting trivia: The sound from the Boing! demo was made by putting an Amiga in a U-Haul truck, whacking the side of the truck with a Whiffle-Ball bat and recording the resulting BOOM. Cool, eh?
Bart 'Not AC, just too lazy to set up an account' Grantham
Notice the jaggy edges on the desktop icons? That irritates the hell out of me. I think Nextstep is the only OS that doesn't have jaggy icons thanks to the use of tiffs and DPS (I think). It DOES have un-antialiased fonts, which sort of sucks when looking at things in bold helvetica.
I like the looks but it's all due to good ...right ?
Motif programming
Last I checked, QNX has no swap space and no plans to ever incorporate any such technology ( Their marketers said so explicitly in brochures they sent me ) . Out of actual ram and you are out of luck. That's fine for very controlled and specialized/real time apps but won't fly for a general purpose OS.
To be honest my first impression of the Photon interface lead me to believe that they were making a lean X clone. The desktop pane manager is a direct pull from X. The 'task' bar is a direct copy of the Win98 (yuck) task bar. I didn't see the word Amiga anywhere on the page.
I remember seeing the Amiga when it came out, I was just a child, but I remember it well. This interface doesn't have the right to be called Amiga.
The Amiga is defined by new ideas, new hardware, and innovative-yet-powerful ways of tying it all together. You cannot 'bitch' the Amiga for some easy Slashdot press, people will see right through it!
That's my $.02.
-P
Looks like good competition for BeOS :)
I'll just stick with Redhat and work on an Amiga theme. On second thought, maybe I'll just continue with Windowmaker.
first commodore dies. then escom and viscorp. Gateway takes over and it seemed Amiga was still stagnating. Then Collas takes over and it seemed like there's new hope. Now this. I give up-Amiga is dead if it's Yet Another Linux Distro. Can't we have a NEW operating system instead of tinkering around with unix for the 50th million time? Imagine a hard real time kernel as the basis for a consumer OS? ha. Look, I believe in promoting linux as much as the next slashdotter but what linux needs is more focus-not more fragmentation. Ya I'm upset
---
It's not Open Source, so it sucks!
There, I said it.
Now back to our regular program...
J.
You know, Linux is not the only POSIX OS out there! QNX bears modularity, scalability, expandililty, reliability at its best. Get to know QNX before you flame it.
--exa--
Window Maker is part of GNUstep, but it doesn't actually make use of the GNUstep libraries, so whether you can use Window Maker or not says nothing about whether you can use the actual GNUstep framework.
I don't get it! QNX kernel seemed to rule, and Photon UI is really usable. Hey, it's great that Amiga Inc. are on the free software bandwagon. I do hope to see their distros, and perhaps a really cool desktop environment. Sorry E/GNOME folks but I still can't use the desktop on a regular basis. As an ace Amigan I'm pleased with whatever happens with Amiga. What can I do?
--exa--
I also agree with the above posters: Where's the Amiga? This looks like 100% QNX software and x86 hardware.
--Lenny
In one of the screenshots there was a "media player" that had a DVD button on it. Anyone know if it really plays DVDs or not. Seems like if this OS is as POSIX compliant as QNX says it is maybe the DVD part could get ported to Linux. Then again its probably not open source...sigh...
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
I've just been told that PhinX is still available so I thought I'd put that record straight.
:v)
We've not got it apparently because there are about 4 different versions and don't know which one we want. They all cost A$155 at the time of asking. If anyone can tell me which one works with XFree86, that'd be cool. (Of course I'll be asking those nice people at QNX technical support too).
Vik
how bout afterstep ? its has a virtual desktop thing and next look and feel.
Hmmm.. If you look at the JPEG header data on these snapshots, it clearly shows that the images were processed with Photoshop 5.2. Hell, pop one into vi and see for yourself.
If they were scaled down with Photoshop in order to be shown on the webpage, thats one thing -- but if we're to believe that these are direct 1:1 pixel snapshots of the interface, what were they doing in Photoshop?
Things that make you go "hm......"
Bowie
Bowie J. Poag
Can you spell "eye-candy"? This is probably one of the best-looking GUIs I've ever seen. Honest-to-god. These people at QNX look like they have great artists and marketing people. From the whitepaper, it looks as though the system itself is pretty good too, very well-designed.
But it's not Free Software, so it's instantly confined to a niche market. If it were Free, we'd already be porting the whole shebang to PowerPC (the "demo disk" is only for x86), writing a Scheme meta-compiler for it, rebuilding Photon to replace X, and creating a myriad of spin-off projects. But it's not Free, so it just may be dead and forgotten in five years. Oh well.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
These days people seem far too concerned about the way things look and not enough about how they work.
It used to be that people would just try to copy features of the Mac UI without fully understanding the thinking behind them, now it seems that even Apple isn't even doing that well.
what hardware you use! The programs just compile and work. Linux holds much promise for this! Hardware manufacturer's can work on making the fastest hardware; Software manufacturer's can concentrate on making killer applications - the OS should just be some forgotten enabler that just works and works.
BeOS, QNX and all those other non-free OS's are promising cool stuff but moreso the lingering threat of proprietary lockdown. Not for me!
Amigas introduced us to alot of interesting and advanced concepts. Most of those things are already in today's COTS systems!
What we need is an OS that is not in the control of one proprietary vendor! The software could advance as fast as the hardware; not being reigned in by that proprietary vendor. My money is on Linux.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Well they seem to have gone PPC friendly recently. PPC support for
OS3.5 (for classic Amigas) and the possibility of the new Amiga
Operating Environment (as they are calling it) being ported back to G3
accelerated classic Amigas.
Although Transmeta is also a strong contender
Alan Day - Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland, UK
Her's my take on the GUI
1. Icons are inconsistent. No consistency in presence of lightsource or orientation. The 3 quarter view is poorly done.
2. A white mouse arrow. Uggh! Make it high contrast! Damn it! Doze got it wrong, Be got it wrong and now Amiga!
3. Jaggies on an icon! Thats so 1984 mac. Damn it add a gray scale effect to offset the jaggies on icons.
4. Veroniqe font looks very good. Compares very well to the fabulous Geneva on the Mac.
5. Unlabeled chiclet buttons ala MSoft, hullo! Bad, cat bad cat bad cat...
6. Process drawer is very well implemented! Good job!
7. Barber poles on scroll area? You must be kidding (Note that they are also using Barber poles on progress bars ala Mac...)
8. What no Amiga menu? Bring back the checkered ball!
9. What no pop-up folders, drawers, spring loaded folders, what no 64x64 icons ?
10. What no standard icon color palette?
11. What no new ideas? Damn it! Must we wait for Apple for *ALL* GUI innovation?
Overzealous aren't I? It's hard to remember the rest of the world sometimes - like when people always ask for ZIP codes and States on web forms.
:)
:v)
I think perhaps I need to increase the dose and lie down in a darkened room until my Linux glands calm down
Vik
It's nice to see a -consistent- looking GUI for a change. The icons, the buttons, the sliders, they all appear to be created by a single artist, or at least by a well managed team. I havn't seen that kind of consistency since Kieth Ohlfs left NeXT. (He's now at PixelSight if you care...)
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Baby? Is that you, my little Amiga? Oh my GOD how you've grown!!! Come here... what new things do you have in store for me. What new wonders and excitement do you have, my Angel of an OS. It was you who got me into this whole computer world long ago... and you can bet you'll be mine again... finally... at long last. My Amiga is comming back....
It looks cool, but how easy will it be to program for? One thing about the amiga was that it was pretty easy to write multimedia applications for it, I hope Photon/Its media stuffs are developer friendly.
:).
Right now however, I'd have to say BeOS is the most developer friendly. I run Linux tho, cuz im such a farkin geek
It realy looks like a hacker trying to fun.
Hint: Look at the source and compare it to
the sources of the other news.
Granted, quite a number of people apparently think the custom hardware is what defined the Amiga, but it's hardly "agreed." There's also a lot of Amiga people who feel that the performance of the custom hardware, relative to what else was available at the time, is what defined the Amiga. When off-the-shelf hardware caught up to (and passed) the Amiga chipset, plenty of Amiga users jumped ship on the hardware, and are now using graphics cards (and sound cards, etc.) made up of off-the-shelf components.
I still use an Amiga every day, but I would have defected years ago if I still had to use the Amiga graphics hardware.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Kindof off topic, but. Although I always like to see code in someones writing especially Perl :) , I feel compelled to note that you have a bug in your signature. Looking at it, everything seemed right, except that reverse() is based on characters and string. Being the geek that I am, I fired up an xterm and tested my theory:
:-)
tsuJ rehtona lreP rekcah,
Ooops!
A couple of years ago, my friend & I looked into QNX very heavily in terms of developing a complete desktop solution on it. QNX was very interested in expanding their market & even offered to adjust their pricing for distribution to be competative w/ windows. A $ shortage prevented my friend & I from doing so-well, that & we found out about linux. Check out qnx, they have a free downloadable single disk demo. I have also examined their api & os model. From the look of it, it should be simple to program. What is even more interesting is QNX permits you to debug device drivers, cpu schedulers, and more w/o rebooting. You can start & stop the code-trace it real time while it is running. It is also some of the tightest code I have ever seen. The OS is fast & responsive & I would say it would even beat linux out in a lot of categories. I would like to see linux go the microkernel direction (or atleast have the choice-micro or mono when you compile the thing). Or even better, make linux an exokernel, that beats them all out. I encourage investigation into QNX-download the free demo & try it out. They have a micrgui (photon), a web browser/web server (voyager), a explorer/file manager app, & of course dhcp & network functionality. Plus it comes in two flavors, nic & modem version. Before you say anything against it, check it out. It is one of the few commercial software products that is well written & thought out. I am surprise Bill M$ hasn't bought it yet-it would save them a decade or two of work. Over and Out...
Enlightenment and gnome can mimic it with themes, but they are still bloatware, memory hogs and unstable. Three factors which I value over looking pretty.
Comrades, it's time for us of the OpenSource and OpenWallet community to start murdering those capitalist pigs! If we see something great, and they're not giving it away, THEY DESERVE TO DIE.
Yet Another Misleading Slashdot Headline perhaps?
Typical Linux user.
A lot of people are looking at what QNX did and saying, this looks neat, very well designed, and everything fits well together. Unfortunately, making an E and GTK theme will not replicate what you see. The desktop QNX has created has purpose to it, there was a specific goal and they reached it. The problem with the Linux desktop is that it lacks purpose, and everyone coding has a different goal and different idea of what it should be and should look like. It is doubtful that this will ever change, so long as there are a diverse number of people all coding different parts of it. Throwing together the countless libraries, countless GUI toolkits, and countless Window Managers together will only result in an ugly, awkward beast.
That new PlayStation will be what the real Amiga would have been if it had survived. The new "pretend" Amiga is like an X term with a web browser.
Of course not. NeXTstep still kicks ass in terms of usability and interface, while still being unix underneath. I don't know why the hell everybody's jumping on the gnome and KDE bandwagons when GNUStep is around.
NetBSD: the cathedral vs the bizzare.
I second this! I learned to program on an Amiga. I remember panicking as the stores that sold Amiga hardware and software starting closing one by one........ :-(
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Yeah, it does make things much nicer and cleaner, doesn't it?
Please help! I'm stuck inside my virtual reality headset!
This is confusing, and I wonder if we're being misled. (And no, the previous sentence is not the new Amiga motto, in case anyone is wondering. ;-)
I thought that QNX's kernal and some components were being licensed, but that AI was going to do their own GUI. If that's so, then the screenshots are likely to have little in common with the new Amiga's real GUI. Or have the plans changed (again)?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
So what exactly are we getting?
/is/ different, and /is/ built on top of the QNX OS, what the heck are they going to rip out to justify charging consumer OS prices for Amiga and industry OS prices for their existing clients?
That whole thing sounded like a sales pitch for QNX and their windowing stitch-on, Photon.
Gods, I have such a love-hate relationship with QNX. I think it'll make an amazing foundation to a new OS, but on the other hand I've developed under QNX for the last year and I hate it - it's a RTOS and gods help you if you aren't writing a specialised realtime app for thousands of installations. And I don't see much in that press release telling you what you get that you can't already have:
- QNX OS foundation - The QNX OS is already available for the x86. (A license'll cost you, at last check, $1K+ cdn unless you can get major volume discounts. A new pricing structure, actually, and the straw that broke our little software house's back and is pushing us to a free, full-featured OS that starts with an 'L')
- Photon Micro-GUI - I've never used their Photon. We have no licenses for it. QNX likes licenses. (Did you know that QNX requires a separate license for their TCP/IP package?) Oh, but Photon does already exist anyway.
- x86 architecture. So we're using the same machine guts too.
What Amiga? where? Is this going to be QNX on x86 with a slightly enhanced GUI with its own look-and-feel - and the Amiga label.
Another thought. QNX charges big bucks for their OS. More big bucks for development licenses. A new Amiga is going to be a consumer machine, right? So if this wonderful new OS
Of course, I may just be ranting, after spending another month working on a minor release number on QNX rather than the next major release on Linux. So take what I say with a grain of salt.
--Tiger
I didn't say anything bad about QNX, I was just griping about a part of their press release, which was probably inserted by marketing-types.
I understand that QNX is a solid RTOS, and very stable. As for POSIX, even NT has a a POSIX layer. However, the "20 years" statement was misleading, because it implied that Unix and BSD are young, immature and somehow less "advanced". I expect they define advanced to mean "hard real-time". Well, QNX will definately win that battle because it is designed to be RT, and Linux/BSD are designed to be general purpose.
I'll also tell you that I have no need for a RTOS, and wonder how they think having one will benefit the next Amiga. Amiga has long been a tool of the video editor, but I would like to point out that video is a *soft* real-time application. Where you really *need* something like QNX is in medical or industrial machinery.
Also, any QNX fans out there should check out RTLinux :
http://rtlinux.cs.nmt.edu/~rtlinux/
Its not just a hack on top Linux...in fact, its a hack *under* Linux since they run a Linux kernel as a user process on top of a hard real time kernel. It looks very interesting to me and supposedly gets good performance.
Certainly it is less expensive than QNX. It would be great for anyone who just has a personal interest in learning about hard real time systems.
--Lenny
Linus himself says that microkernels are a sham. But if you really want to run linux on top of a microkernel, that's what mkLinux is all about.
Yeah, never mind the fact that as soon as you have to decide policy, you have to start implementing what basically amounts to a microkernel. The exokernel idea is rather neat from a theoretical standpoint, but simply not workable in practice, at least not without some hardware help. (OS/390 anybody?)
NetBSD: the cathedral vs the bizzare.
Never mind that sony won't give you docs on the thing without signing an NDA, whereas hardware information on the Amiga was free and plentiful, hence all the nifty demos. Even if sony does the Net Yaroze thing with the new playstation, you can bet your pants that it'll be the same old black box (no pun intended) routines without true hardware docs.
The playstation is just a super-nifty-whiz-bang console game playing machine. The Amiga was an artist's tool.
NetBSD: the cathedral vs the bizzare.
yeah, pretty cool.. (about the whole, we-get-to-use-it-before-amigans-will thing)
but yeah, it really isn't so amazingly new. kinda looked like Windows to me
(a hush falls over the crowd.... "oh no!")
I'm waiting for somebody to make a completely 3D desktop environment, more like an adventure than tinkering with your OS.. wouldn't that be cool?
Insert mind here.
The Emotion Engine is a (MIPS-based?) RISC processor with added vector instructions. Quite similar to the PPC G4, IIRC.
It seems a little too Mac like for me. I'll stick with my Windowmaker. I ditched GNOME/Enlightenment because it was too Windowsy. But now I miss my true virtual desktop. Maybe someday if I get a wild hair up my ass I'll try to make a virtual desktop (pager) capability for Windowmaker. "Workspaces" are a poor excuse.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I think (last time I read) that www.qnx.com runs on QNX. I guess it's not that great under heavy load since it's slashdotted already. Anyone got the images in their cache so I don't have to wait until tomorrow to view them?
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Just Curious...Were you working at Nicolet Biomedical?
See my Home Theater
So is it Open Source? If so I'll be on line to switch! If not... sorry, but I'm not setting myself up for another Commodore Fiasco.