With QNX 6.2.1 there are many new features. One of them is a new multi-media system. Screenshots of one of the first apps to use this system can be found on QNXZone.
killerAudio is Coming with QNX 6.2.1
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Hah, they listen to Sloan… crazy Canadians…
So, it’s like WinAmp?
QNX would be more interesting (at least to the likes of me) with hardware 3D support, and support for console hardware…
– chrish
Well, I borrowed the nice small layout webpage from WinAMP’s radio tuner. It’s handy that the IE control under windows will give you a page’s properties fromt he right-click menu. That URL isn’t published or listed aynwhere.
I have tried QNX and really I did like it. What kept me from really using it is the desktop. Not that it was bad but I just didn’t like it. I want to have icons on my desktop and such. Is there anything out there that allows Photon to act like this??
Doesn’t look bad, but I really don’t think QNX is too great as a desktop system at all. People often talk about how fast QNX is but in my experience it’s dog slow. I get a noticeable pause before seeing the output of ‘ls’ on a 400MHz machine. They should stick with embedded systems methinks.
David – there is nothing like that currently. I understand where you are coming from though as a user.
RJW – where did you do an ls? For example, if you did an ls in /dev there would be a slight pause since the entries in /dev are all maintained by many different processes. Also, if you did an ls in say /usr/bin there would be a big pause since /usr/bin doesn’t actually exist on disk. A resource manager, fs-pkg, maintains /usr/bin and it would have to run through all the packages to see who is providing entries in /usr/bin. If you do an ls in areas that are actually on disk (like $HOME) you will see no pauses in the output. Hope that clears up things for you.
When I saw the ‘killer audio’ multimedia system, I thought that they had implemented a decent audio system like BeOS and to replace their ALSA 0.5 backwards compatable system. But no, it is just another *amp. Now thats news!
Actually, this is an application that uses the new Media Architecture that comes with QNX 6.2.1. It is a very powerfull media-graph based system for building and routing media streams (filtering, decoding, displaying, etc). You don’t talk to the audio driver (ALSA-like API) you do everything via the new Mm*() API.
http://qnx.wox.org/control.c
Look at the control_create_graph() function to see how the Mm API is used. This API was actually designed and coded by someone that worked on the BeOS media system.
Yes, Chris is right- someone who worked on beos media system worked on it, *ahem, cough cough*. Nice though- Understand it’s been at least a year since people began working on this new media system. I really liked the interface aesthetic addon .
So, have they got dvd playing(and burning) and cd(RW) burning in there yet?
First off all, QNX has never been designed to desktop for general use. The free download is used to bring more embedded developers in and if you want to learn how to develop for embedded systems, its a dream come true.
QNX is a Real Time OS and is poorly suited to be general desktop. Embedded OS’es are designed to one or two critical apps at a time, like an ATM or the controller on a rocket valve and to have no crashes. Once you start running multiple apps, the system slows down because it wasn’t designed to play MP3s, surf the web with Mozilla and word process with abiword at the same time.
The issue is that the default schedular on QNX is a fixed priority round-robin. I use QNX as my development OS, and I run eclipse, mozilla, killerAudio, killerIRC and run big builds all the time without slowdown. However, I make use of the “on” and “nice” utilities to manually manage my processes priorities.
Someday the default schedular on the self-hosted version of QNX will probably change from the fixed priority scheme to something different (for example, something based on the new sporadic schedular).
No, still no burning of any disc media.
There is support for dvd-ram, but no +/-r or cdrw. Once it comes I will finally be able to move my last box from FreeBSD to QNX. 
I like QNX, it have alot of neat stuff like it’s toolbar, webupdate interface and IMO excellent looking non-skinnable GUI.
Strangely enough reading about this awakened my interest in trying Rhythmbox again,
Howcome the fonts look better in QNX than on linux? Are they using some commercial tools? Those screen shots look as nice as bluecurve! (which is the only nice fonts you’ll get in linux)
Ugly interface. Don’t programmers realize that ?
1 – “Howcome”) Not really. QNX uses the FontFusion font renderer (the one Be licensed way back when) which is arguably the best out there. However, with the bytecode interpreter enabled in FreeType2, and the system running in standards “Windows mode” (anti-aliasing disabled for small point sizes) the output from FT should match FontFusion pixel for pixel (assuming the same fonts!). For high-res screens, the FreeType2 anti-aliasing is probably superior (it looks sharper than FontFusion’s AA) while on lower res screens FontFusion’s is nicer. So it’s pretty much dead even on which one is better, though I’d agree that more people probably have lower-res screens. As for RedHat, it’s not the only game out there. Gentoo and Mandrake have had Windows quality fonts for a long time (bytecode hack) while I’ve been enjoying RedHat 8.x quality fonts (which are largely due to a new FreeType) for several months now on Gentoo.
2 – “Ugly interface”) Not everything has to be an aqua rip-off. A lot of people consider QNX Photon to be the most beautiful GUI out there, because they prefer the metallic-silver motif to a water/crystal one. Either way, several professional artists were involved the look of the UI and the icons.
3) The most exciting news is the filesystem. The QNX FS is an anachronism. It supports only 48 letter file names, and is incredibly slow (to the point where compiles took 50-100% longer). Now this doesn’t matter a whole lot for QNX’s target market, but improvements to the FS will be quite welcome to those using RtP self-hosted.
>Ugly interface. Don’t programmers realize that ?
Don’t people realize that their opinions are subjective?
What is ugly in your mind about killerAudio? Right now it is lacking icons, it needs them in the lists and trees.
I remember when I tried QNX… I had just found this site and I saw the news report on it’s first realease! I downloaded it and installed it….let me say I found it far more enjoyable than Linux or FreeBSD–Too bad there are barely any apps, and for some reason I have problems with the webbrowser…of course I have NEVER had the chance to try the newer versions due to slow download speeds from their server…if there was a mirror server that was faster I would probably download QNX and install it on my little second HDD… but, ZetaOS is coming out soon so I will have a BeOS – clone to play with
I want to have icons on my desktop and such. Is there anything out there that allows Photon to act like this??
I don’t want to have *any* icons on my desktop !
(that’s why I use blackbox and ice window makers on Linux).
Ugly interface. Don’t programmers realize that ?
?? I think it’s very pragmatic (read, good, as in windows nt5), nobody wants something like gnome interfaces (or, worst, like Mac OS X to slow you down).
In referrence to questions about the uniqueness and general aesthetics of QNX, it has always had that covered. I was referring in discussion to KiPhoton, Jean-Louis’ interface spruce up lib.
It makes something neat, and makes it umm, spiffier. He’s modest about it a bit, just calling it a powerful C++ Layer for Photon.
It’s cool though, hope no one took that and ran too far with it to mean to say I thought their gui was bad.
It’s not- the lack of desktop icons throws you off at first. Chris is right- QNX primarily is big on embedded, for manufacturing environments where “real time” means you’re depending on a machine not to throw a rod and kill everyone. Also, “Mission Critical” is lingua franca over at QSSL, it’s understood. That’s their product.
It’s not BeOS, that’s for sure- but the various media handling capabilities have been good efforts, just never turned out effectivly. This mission is a way to approach it better. We’ll find out. ::-)
I personally think it’s a beautiful interface. Clean and neat, far from the bubblegum interface of MacOSX.
i wonder why, in times where desktop PCs start to handle video nicely in terms of processing power, “media” is still a synonym for “audio” for most people. As a MediaKit lover and GStreamer-adopter, i am highly interested in this new QNX’s graph-based media architecture. Can someone point me at some resources where i can find out more about it?
I tried using QNX just a week ago, but it doesn’t seem to support dual processors. Either that or it was just incredibly slow on a dual 1ghz PIII system compared to a single Athlon XP 1700+ system.
beek: You will have to wait for 6.2.1 to ship in order to get any detailed information on the new media system. The best I can do is point you at the source used in killerAudio for setting up the audio playback graph (in an earlier post).
about smp: You need to copy over the smp kernel. Simply do:
cp /boot/fs/qnxbasesmp.ifs /.boot
And reboot. If it has issues, hit ESC when it asks to boot /.altboot and then copy back qnxbasedma.ifs to /.boot.
Thanks for the tip Chris. I’ll try it out.
Is it possible? I am planning on wiping my current system and installing RH 8.0 on my main hard drive and dropping QNX on my second hard drive. How can I boot either/or?
Would just using a boot disc work or does QNX’s boot manager add Linux installs correctly?
To make your life 10x easier, leave some space for QNX on your main disc. You only need about 2G to have LOTS of room to spare for your root (/) partition. Then you can setup a /home partition on your second disc for QNX (or, use your /home from RH8 with fs-ext2). To add QNX to lilo just follow the same steps as when booting a DOS partition.
other=/dev/hda2
lable=qnx
I wonder whether it would take much work to make QNX more suited for desktop environments internally (that is, in the kernel, involving scheduling priorities and whatever else), i.e. is it possible that we will have a sort of ‘forked’ version of kernel that is very good at desktop and another one that is for embedded stuff. Will it require a complete redesign or just a smaller patch?
Is there any support for the Radeon 8500 yet? This is one of the few things keeping me from switching to QNX…
Adam
This was my own personal problem with QNX last time I tried it. Daft thing won’t even recognise the drive.
Radeon 8500 is supported in 6.2.0.
The Promise EIDE controler is supported in 6.2.0 as long as you aren’t using it in a RAID configuration.
To make QNX perfect for desktop use simply requires an adaptive schedular. Right now there are three schedulars in the QNX kernel – fifo, round-robin, and sporadic. The first two are fixed priority systems and the last (an adaptive schedular) just becoming stable with 6.2.1. Most people’s complaints about QNX with respect to desktop useage come from the fact that in the fixed priority schemes a process at a lower priority is starved indefinatly if a process of a priority higher then it never gives up the CPU. So the future looks bright (to me).