The Grok

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 download for free from the Get QNX site. The demo disk can also be downloaded from the same site.

Overview
Before 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 realtime 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 realtime 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 drive
The Get QNX Program gives you the full distribution of the QNX realtime 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 Redhat 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 notes 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 ground breaking 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 (Redhat'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 Ugly
If 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 Site - Official Site
QNX Start - Jump Site
Get QNX - Download Site