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Building a QNX 7 Desktop

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Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#21

Post by spc476 »

Animats wrote: post #10

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 sof…

During college, I was hired by a small company that specialized in QNX based software to port several Unix utilities (I remember porting finger and at least one other program---I don't recall). It wasn't that bad as its POSIX support (even in the mid-90s) was pretty good.

What really blew me away about QNX though, was that the network was invisible. You could construct a command line on machine A, to run a program on B with a file on C, redirect the output to a program on D with that output going back to A. My boss, sitting in the office next to mine, would run a communications program on his system while using the modem connected to my computer. Wild stuff.

I also had a friend that owned a software company selling commerical X Window servers for a variety of systems. Their fastest version ran on QNX.

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#22

Post by notalaser »

shmerl wrote: post #14
Animats wrote: post #10

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 sof…

> It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux. The bummer is that it's not FOSS.

The bummer for the companies doing the home routers is really just that it costs money. The only people who give a flying fsck about the F part are hobbyists, sadly.

Source: worked in this industry.

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#23

Post by vbezhenar »

spc476 wrote: post #21
Animats wrote: post #10

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 sof…

During college, I was hired by a small company that specialized in QNX based software to port several Unix utilities (I remember porting finger and at least one other program---I don't recall). It wasn't that bad as its POSIX support (even in the mid-90s) was pretty good. What really blew me away about QNX though, was that the network was invisible. You could construct a command line on machine A, to run a program on…

I think, you could do that easily using ssh with Linux.

  program1 | ssh server1 program 2 | ssh server2 program3

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#24

Post by rcarmo »

Transparent IPC over the network was the reason I set up QNX a long time ago (back when it was freely available for a bit).

I can't help but wonder how a Raspberry Pi Port would fare - the thing would be tremendously efficient, and it would certainly increase their popularity.

Edit: well, apparently someone ported QNX 6, but licensing requirements seem to curtail its use for hobbyists - https://github.com/varghes/Raspberry-QNX

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#25

Post by Frenchgeek »

shmerl wrote: post #14
Animats wrote: post #10

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 sof…

> It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux. The bummer is that it's not FOSS.

Funny there doesn't seem to be an OSS attempt of something like it... ( Or my google-fu is weak )

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#26

Post by josh64 »

slobotron wrote: post #4

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 keyboar…

I loved BB10 and the Hub. It was my favourite smartphone OS by far.

That being said, I hated momentics!

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#27

Post by geocar »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #15
Animats wrote: post #10

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 sof…

> It's what home routers and similar devices ought to be running instead of Linux. It's what professional routers do run. Well, some of them at least. We used QNX at my last company, which made high-capacity IPSec gateways. We had control-plane boards and data-plane boards, with inter-board redundancy, which meant that if there was a failure on one of the boards, a standby was ready and functional within seconds. Par…

I find a lot of similar joy working with Erlang.

Having a proper (intra-application) messaging system makes a certain class of problems -- problems that you just get used to in Java, and Go, and Rust, and C/C++, and whatever -- just go away.

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#28

Post by geocar »

vbezhenar wrote: post #23
spc476 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During college, I was hired by a small company that specialized in QNX based software to port several Unix utilities (I remember porting finger and at least one other program---I don't recall). It wasn't that bad as its POSIX support (even in the mid-90s) was pretty good. What really blew me away about QNX though, was that the network was invisible. You could construct a command line on machine A, to run a program on…

I think, you could do that easily using ssh with Linux. program1 | ssh server1 program 2 | ssh server2 program3

It's not exactly because ssh can't forward `/dev/ttyS0`

It takes more than someone just adding a special adapter to produce such an interface, because you also have to change all of the modem applications that consume the `/dev/ttyS0` interface to also consume the unix-domain or TCP-based interface.

Meanwhile with Qnet, an application simply goes open("/net/node1/dev/ser1") and gets the modem attached to node1. Plan9 has a similar capability.

Re: Building a QNX 7 Desktop

#29

Post by i336_ »

spc476 wrote: post #21
Animats wrote: post #10

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 sof…

During college, I was hired by a small company that specialized in QNX based software to port several Unix utilities (I remember porting finger and at least one other program---I don't recall). It wasn't that bad as its POSIX support (even in the mid-90s) was pretty good. What really blew me away about QNX though, was that the network was invisible. You could construct a command line on machine A, to run a program on…

Wow. So basically Plan 9 resource sharing, ported to the real world (ie something that's usable without modification or special consideration).

D:

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