Building a QNX 7 Desktop

I used QNX as part of the day job in the 1990's, the reason for using it was real time scheduling and doing stuff for analog broadcast. We had a full 19" rack of 4 Compaq servers, each of them a very large box for a 75 Mhz CPU, with redundancy built in everywhere.

Back then QNX was definitely targeted at real time/embedded but you could also just use it like any other UNIX. Ease of installation to a functional X Windows desktop on PCs was minimal effort (one floppy?).

Somewhere along the way QNX lost this reason to exist - realtime interrupt handling etc. - and it being the easy, accessible tool for quickly putting together real time things, e.g. for broadcast, where the only coding requirement is simple scripts with the OS making it all work realtime reliably. In those days you couldn't just use a normal operating system for such things, it had to be your own EEPROM or something done higher level in QNX - a quick and dirty solution to some extent, in a good way.

Having read the article it now seems that getting started or up to speed on a QNX project is no longer something that can be done in an afternoon, it is all a whole lot less accessible.

Nice work! Very tempted to try it out on a spare machine. Sure brings back memories of the fully functional QNX desktop that fit on a single 1.44MB floppy! [0]

Tangent: It's a shame that Blackberry hasn't captured more of mobile phone market with the QNX based BB OS10 - I got myself a BlackBerry Passport couple months ago and find it is a great daily driver for my needs. Square screen (1400x1400) and physical keyboard ftw.

It's got a rather enjoyable development experience too. Momentics IDE let's you write QML/JavaScript apps that automatically refresh running instance on phone after every save, much like one would expect nowadays with React. Wrote a simple DI.fm Radio Streaming app[1] over a course of few nights - I haven't had that much fun scratching-own-itch and learning new platforms since playing with Delphi almost two decades ago...

[0] http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

[1] https://github.com/slobo/BlackBerry-10-Digitally-Imported

Does QNX really have a license that interferes with software running on it? Just being not-open/free isn't a problem for running GNU stuff.

I can run GCC on Windows, another proprietary OS....

That's nice, but sad. Until QNX 6.5, there was a full windowed desktop environment, with the Photon window manager.

I used QNX on the desktop when developing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle from 2003-2005. Back then, at QNX 6.21, you had the window manager, the Eclipse development environment, Firebird (Firefox before the name change), and Thunderbird. Then QNX marketing cut off the free version, and all the free software projects stopped making builds for QNX. Desktop usability went downhill from there.

The desktop environment had very consistent performance, because QNX doesn't swap. (It's a real time system, after all.) I could run the real-time vehicle control system and simulator at a higher priority than the desktop and not have it miss a timeout while doing compiles and web browsing at a non real time priority.

I miss QNX. It's much simpler and saner than Windows or Linux. Yet all of POSIX is available. It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux.