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QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

blackberry.qnx.com

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Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#91

Post by stevesimmons »

Tomte wrote: post #62
Animats wrote: post #45

If only you could believe them. QNX has been "opened" twice before. Each time, there was a rug pull, and it went closed again. Before the first rug pull, open source groups routinely added QNX to their target list. There was a Firefox for QNX. Eclipse had QNX as a target. GCC and most of the Gnu command line tools could be built for QNX. There was a desktop environment, Photon. I used that as a primary desktop for th…

For everyone else, your QNX comment from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872640

As someone who knows only that QNX is a RTOS and that "real time" is good in some vague hand-wavy way, I found this 2015 comment a very succinct, concrete and illuminating description of one aspect of QNX's architecture that makes it properly real-time.

So thank you very much for the link.

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#92

Post by ksaj »

Please consider bringing back some legacy software.

When I was learning computers, we learned on QNX (poor kids younger than I started on Windows!) and there were some very interesting software packages that I think don't exist anymore.

For example, QPaint. What made it interesting, is that you could save your image in a few image formats, or as a C header for inclusion in a C program. It could also import/export Logo generated images.

There was also a software voice module. I assume it had different voices because when it was demoed to us, it was a robot guy voice, but later there was an educational graphical interface that looked like a girl's face, and it of course had a female voice when it spoke. It would be strange to have two things do exactly the same thing, so I suspect they were the same software for speech.

I think it was simply invoked with 'speak'. We used to prank other students by speak -something- /dev/tty.... where the tty pointed to other people's nodes on the server network. Fun times!

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#93

Post by JohnAtQNX »

criddell wrote: post #48
simlevesque wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the brains of a ton of cars on the market, like all Ford cars. Used for complex calculations like automatic transmissions.

QNX was the OS behind the ICON computer that was used in schools across Ontario in the mid-80’s. At the time, I thought they were pretty cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer)

Wow, I didn't know this! Thanks for sharing!

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#95

Post by bregma »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #16
tlack wrote: post #7

Kudos on your bold undertaking! I've been a side-lined QNX admirer for some time, though not a potential user in most cases. A good next step would be a series of blog posts where the author takes on common types of enthusiast projects and unpacks how QNX's strengths can be applied in those scenarios.

I’d love to see this. I’m curious about QNX but at a loss as to how it could benefit me as someone who tinkers with robotics at home. I also work for a non-profit org which does coastal margin research. We have several people working on custom hardware. Could this benefit us?

Start with https://gitlab.com/elahav/qnx-rpi-book/-/blob/master/pdf/qnx... as an intro to tinkering at home.

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#96

Post by vundercind »

QNX and BeOS were the only operating systems I tried in the early '00s that could make old single-core mid-90s Pentiums feel excellent and snappy to use. Far, far better than any Windows version, or Linux.

I assume it's mostly scheduler stuff and much better multimedia stacks, in both cases. I always hoped the operating systems of the future would feel more like that. Closest we've got is probably iOS and it cheats by killing processes all the time. The future is lame.

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#97

Post by bregma »

fulafel wrote: post #65
fauria wrote: post #60

In case you are wondering: QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system owned by BlackBerry, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. From https://www.sealevel.com/2023/01/02/what-is-qnx

The "unix-like" characterisation seems it might be be from the Wikipedia QNX article and repeated by a lot of web content. But it doesn't seem really accurate to me and it's not used by their own web site or documentation. It seems quite opposite to Unix in a lot of ways even though it has some API compatibility.

How does it seem like the opposite? It's POSIX.

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#99

Post by bregma »

bexsella wrote: post #73

I’ve had a lot of experience in developing on QNX over the years, and with each successive year, the call to migrate to Linux got stronger. The day to day developer experience is great, you can very easily setup a CMake toolchain and bypass the need for QNX’s Momentics, which if you’re just developing for QNX is something you will want to do. But, in my experience the driver support simply isn’t there, and that becam…

I use CMake for QNX all the time. It just works, out of the box.

Re: QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image

#100

Post by justin66 »

criddell wrote: post #48
simlevesque wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the brains of a ton of cars on the market, like all Ford cars. Used for complex calculations like automatic transmissions.

QNX was the OS behind the ICON computer that was used in schools across Ontario in the mid-80’s. At the time, I thought they were pretty cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer)

Wow. 80186. That's something you don't see every day.
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