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Project: QNX  Reviews
QNX RTP: What lies beneath?
By Amit Chattopadhyay <amitc@technologist.com>
Posted: ( 2000-11-23 13:11:34 EST by )
When was the last time you remember booting off a floppy to run an
Operating System? QNX can do that and pack in a full featured web
browser, internet dialing capability and support for many hardware
devices. Now, they are giving away the entire OS and development tools
for free... but is it worth checking out?
QNX, or Qee-nix, is one of the latest entrants in the free operating systems
market. If you mistakenly thought that QNX is a new kid on the block, you
couldn't be more wrong! The QNX Real Time Operating System ala RTOS (What the
heck does that mean? A: We'll get to that later) has existed for nearly 20
years. QNX Software Systems claim that they were the first to bring
transparent distributed processing to the PC, built-in fault tolerance and
embedded microkernel windowing system, to name just some of the pioneering
features. How could such a technologically advanced piece of software remain
out of the sights of computer enthusiasts? This brings us to the nature of
QNX's target market, the embedded systems - i.e. kiosks, digital watches,
automotive technologies and electronic devices. The company has a very
comprehensive web site with details of the growth of their OS, which can be
found at http://www.qnx.com/company/compover.html.
QNX has been trying to make their OS and Real Time Platform (RTP) popular with
computer enthusiasts for quite some time. Many people came to know about QNX's
compactness after the release of a demo disk, which showcased a 1.44MB disk
containing an operating system, Internet support, GUI interface and a
full-featured web browser!
There is of course no better way to publicize software than by giving it away
for FREE. The QNX OS/RTP can be downloaded free from the Get QNX site. The
demo disk can also be downloaded from the same site.
OverviewBefore I proceed, let's get that one big question out of our way. What does
real time platform mean? If you have worked on an overloaded Windows machine,
which takes 1 minute to start an application, you already, know what a real
time platform is NOT! As I have discussed earlier, QNX has always been
targeted at the embedded systems market, which require precision and
high-speed performance with reliability. QNX Real Time Platform provides such
capabilities for applications running on it. This means, it is possible to
startup a web browser and start surfing within a second in QNX RTP, in
contrast to ending up with a blue screen of death and trying to reinstall
Windows (a non-real time platform) for the next 30 minutes! The QNX RTP draws its strength from reliable architecture, scalability and
real time performance provided by the QNX Neutrino OS. It also features a full
implementation of the TCP/IP protocol suite and utilities including PPP, DHCP,
NFS, RPC and SNMP, making it possible to serve as a powerful Internet host.
QNX Networking is message-based native networking that gives access to
resources. It is complemented by features like fault-tolerant networking, load
balancing on the fly, efficient performance and transparent distributed
processing. The real star is QNX's GUI called Photon microGUI. It is a high
performance graphical environment with an extremely small memory footprint.
The GUI is Internet ready and multimedia compliant. QNX also serves as an
excellent platform for developers creating embedded applications. Some of the
best development tools and Linux compatibility give it a strong edge.
Taking QNX RTP on a test driveThe Get QNX Program gives you the full distribution of the QNX real time
platform. It comes nicely packaged in a single CD ROM. The QNX RTP is a
self-booting CD. My test machine was a Celeron 300 running overclocked at
450MHz with i810 chipset (integrated audio/video). It has a single partition
containing Windows98. Since most new OSes are not happy with sharing partition
space, I was afraid that I would have to repartition to install the QNX OS,
but I decided to pop in the CD and give it a try. After bootup, I was greeted
with a message asking me to repartition the hard disk (ack!). Fortunately, it
had an option create a boot and file system within an existing Windows or
Linux partition, which I chose to use. Going back into Windows, I ran the SETUP program, which was quite
straightforward and walked me through the OS installation (basically copying
files and setting up a working space). The entire process hardly took 20
minutes and I was ready to boot into QNX.
Installation
After booting into QNX, it ran through some device detection process and
presented a (very) nice and clean looking GUI. Now, not even Red Hat 6.1 was
able to load a driver for my video card without some manual help by
downloading drivers from Intel's site!QNX is very impressive as far as installation is concerned. It is easy to
setup and ideally suited for a new computer users. Installation impressions
count, but do not make an operating system. The Photon microGUI is the core of
QNX RTP's environment. Booting into the GUI presents the user with a Release
note, which introduces the RTP, covers the file organization of the OS and the
various packages present in the CD ROM.
By default the Photon microGUI has a task bar located at the bottom and a
favourite programs bar on the right (which takes up a lot of real estate!).
All items are customizable and even on a lowly P200 the GUI performs
operations fast. There are no groundbreaking technologies at work in here, but
full points go to it for an easy and fast user interface.
All the applications present in the core package are well written and rarely
crash. The usual set of applications like terminal, web browser, file manager,
Internet dialer, e-mail software and media player are included. The package
manager is a surprisingly clever RPM (Red Hat's packaging system) like system.
I found that it was much easier to keep track of packages using QNX's system
in comparison to package managers in Windows and Red hat. The package manager
can download up-to date packages from the QNX site or from a CD ROM
repository. The QNX RTP CDROM contains some development packages like GCC/GDB,
APIs, TCP/IP tools, browser upgrades, language extensions and games. The game
in question is Quake 3, most likely to catch the interest of people running
the OS.
I tried installing the Quake3 Arena demo but failed to run it as QNX presently
supports only the 3DFX chipset technology for 3D acceleration. The full Mesa
API, 3dfx Glide API and Renderware 3 API have been thrown in to keep game and
graphics programmers happy. For the net savvy people, RealPlayer 7 provides
streaming content and Flash 4, interactive web media. If you are a developer, the CD is packed with documentation and tools that you
will find invaluable if you intend to start developing under QNX. QNX RTP
includes PhAB, a Visual Basic type RAD tool. I did have problems compiling a
C++ program using qcc/g++! The documentation covers programming topics related
to the OS, making final images, development techniques and other useful areas.
The Good, The Bad and The UglyIf you specifically chose QNX as your target platform for development, you
will not be disappointed. The strong set of tools, the accompanying online
documentation, comprehensive web support and the RTP make QNX an excellent
choice if you are into embedded applications development.
While there have been quite a few comments that QNX has too little to offer
and possible late in its entry, I feel that it has a solid potential for not
only becoming embedded application developers favourite platform but also
encouraging normal application developers to develop for embedded devices! If
you are already developing under Linux, the extra little porting effort will
increase you target and audience. While the comparison it Linux is inevitable, it has to be said that QNX is
only being given away for free. This does not mean that you get to tinker with
the actual operating system, i.e. work with the kernel source code! QNX
promises developers that this is not necessary but some hardcore developers
will definitely feel the dent. For the desktop users, QNX can provide the momentum to jump towards the Unix
platform, even promoting Linux. It is also one of the few operating systems
that require little tinkering to run. The 1.44MB demo disk can come handy if
you need to quickly surf the net on a system void of a hard disk!
The QNX RTP is absolutely worth the download/ordering if you intend to develop
embedded applications. Don't download it if you only want to play Quake 3 :-)
QNX Home
QNX Start
QNX Download
Other articles by Amit Chattopadhyay
Current Rating: [ 7.9 / 10 ]
Number of Times Rated: [ 41 ]
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