After many months of waiting, QNX RtP (now called QNX Momentics) 6.2 is released. The new version has many fixes, new features and more device driver support. It requires a PIII-650 or better (however, I have successfully ran its beta on a 233 Mhz PC with 64 MB RAM a few months ago), 128MB RAM and 1 GB disk space. QNX Momentics’ primary target are embedded developers instead of end users. Please note that QNX 6.2 does not support anymore the FAT32-installed QNX boot image, but instead, it requires its own partition. The ISO available for download is 195 MB. You can read our world exclusive preview of QNX 6.2 we published last January, here.
QNX Momentics 6.2 Non-Commercial Edition Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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The only problem I have with QNX.com, is that their web servers do not support resuming (at least, doesn’t work with GetRight)! This truly sucks, for people with less bandwidth, or even people with timed connections, or even for high-bandwidth people who may get unlucky with their connection at some point!
For two years now I emailed them 3-4 times, to fix their web servers to allow download resuming, but they do not seem to listen.
…the whole embeded thing is WAY out of my core compentence, but I just have to ask. What kind of “embeded” systems use a 650mhz PIII with 128 megs of ram? When I think “embeded” I think penta scanners, home theater mp3 players etc etc etc…
This is not a flame – I’m really curious….
i dont think those specs are for the final product. instead, they’re for the development environment. the qnx dev installs on a pc with those specs, and from there you can create embedded apps (small sizes that can fit in floppies and less, and can boot by themselves).
i feel bad having downloaded and burned the 6.1 iso just yesterday and i see this today! argh! oh well..tough luck.
Super-Ovens!
They cook, they dice, they browse online cook-books and play the lattest 3D games! 🙂
Momentics is a platform for embedded developers, not the OS for the embedded system. QNX makes that OS too, but this one is for the devs to write their software on.
— Rob
Thanks, dawg.
The specs listed are way out of wack for the “non-commerical” edition and will be changed probably tomorrow. Plus, these specs are for the development platform and not Neutrino itself. I often run Neutrino just fine in 2M of RAM on a 60Mhz PPC.
Now, the naming may confuse some since the RTP monkier is gone. In the embedded world many people cross-develop from another operating system and QNX has been supporting cross-development from Solaris and Windows for some time. However, the naming for the development environment on Solaris, Windows and nativly on Neutrino where all different (Solaris SDK, WinSDK and RTP). This development environment is now called Momentics. It is the same set of development packages on all three supported platforms.
The OS you install is now being called Neutrino (which is what it always was). Once you install Neutrino you will be given the option of installing Momentics. So RTP was, effectivly, Neutrino+Momentics but the name has been dropped to keep our other product naming aligned.
Hope this clears up things for people.
Is it still IDE only..?!
The name “Momentics” sounds like it’s just a “momentary” version of unix, or perhaps “the unix-variant of the moment” or something. Reminds me of Caldera-DR-Open-Thin-Lineo-Clients. Pick one stupid name like “Cosmoe” and stick with it. These people had a whole OS that fit on a single floppy, 16megs ram, no hard drive needed, it was utterly brilliant, but it was superceded by a jumbo full download that looked cheesy and went bonkers if you had a serial mouse, and now in this version they require a PIII 650Mhz, 128 megs ram, and a one gig hard drive??? And the advantage of this OS over say, Windows, is what exactly?
better to develop QNX-embeded-systems with? 😉
I’ve had a very strong feeling since version 6.0, telling me that QNX could give me the features that Linux was missing on the desktop. A pity they don’t see other QNX market than the embedded one, I bought the 6.0 CD from QNX, and I would gladly buy a boxed QNX that targeted the desktop. I don’t think it should be so hard to make the OS less real time and more preemtive/responsive to running multiple tasks at once.
Maybe I’m just over reacting to the clean and elegant UI that Photon is. I whish I had something like that instead of GNOME2 or KDE3.
Yes, the QNX 1.44 Demo floppy was cool, but a full development environment it wasn’t. If you are looking for a fit and trim demo system of QNX checkout the iPaq Reference Platform that is included in the 6.2 install (and downloadable from QDN). The homepage is http://qnxzone.com/ipaq.
And the self-hosted install has not been IDE only for more then a year. And in this release there are a lot more supported IDE chipsets (like Highpoint).
i have been using qnx for a couple of years now and it is brilliant, just lok at teh stability and the clean desktop and logical design.
if only they support data entry and retrieval in arabic and hebrew! i think it is unicode inside but the problem is probably with photon and not the whole OS. also, they do have a version for oil companies in the golf that supports arabic.
have a nice day.
Yeah, the qnxzone.com site doesn’t have any downloads yet. But if you get the 6.2 ISO it is part of the install. You can also download a zipfile from QDN with the iPaq docs and binary images.
http://www.qnx.com/developer/download/free/
Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough about where you can download this stuff.
>Obviously QNX people have caught the same brain-rotting >virus that makes Linux people believe they are offering >you the world when they in fact have nothing
You are a bloody idiot, you know nothing about QNX or the embedded space nor Linux, QNX has been doing well since you were in diapers & still is. Troll somewhere else!!!!
I tried out QNX RtP a while ago and it seemed really slick. However, one thing that bugged me a bit was that the 3D stuff used Glide, and would therefore only work with 3DFX cards. (Whoops!) Does anyone know if this has been fixed in 6.2? My laptop uses an S3 Savage, so I’m not expecting good support for it, but it’d be nice if Qnx would at least support the nVidia chipset. ATI would be great too..
As for other comments here, I agree that QNX almost seemed like it’d be a better choice for desktop computing than Linux. While it’s probably true that QNX could make their OS a very competitive desktop system, they’re a profitable company now. While it might be nice for BeOS refugess or people who find Linux too difficult, QNX should be looking out for their interests first. If they feel that a desktop offering isn’t a financially wise move I’d tend to agree with them.
Plus, as time goes by Linux gets more and more desktop-centric software for it. There’s nothing like Codewaver’s Cross-over products for QNX, and every game/large app that works has been ported by QNX, not by the original authors.
QSSL has some excellent coders among their team. Also Neutrino is a fantastic microkernel, but QSSL never targeted the desktop market before, as they already have a healthy market to defend within the embedded space. They really loved the idea of a Neutrino based AmigaOS as planned by Amiga Inc under Gateway some years ago, but eventually the Gateway management bowed for the might of Microsoft.
What many people don’t seem to undestand, is that Photon was never supposed to be the GUI system of a new AmigaOS, but instead only the kernel was going to be used as a foundation. Photon has some good capabilities but is in general more suitable for embedded usage, although I would agree that Photon technicly is far more suitable than Linux/X for desktop purposes still.
Nope, nothing but glide still. A side note. Even if someday a shipping version of QNX supports other video cards for 3D, it is not likly Nvidia will be one of them. They don’t release any docs or source for talking to their 3D engine. Sad but true.
As for porting things to QNX, it is true that commerical games that have been ported to QNX have been done by QNX. Mind you, look at MacOS X, BeOS, and Linux. Almost none of the games released on those platforms are ported by the original authors, just happens to be another party (not the OS maker or the game maker) doing the ports. Hell, as long as the game plays who cares right?
As for applications AbiWord is not supported by anyone within QNX nor was the photon version of vim or MAME or … SO no, you can’t play Max Payne under QNX but you can play the original version of Guantlet! Also, with QNX being an offical SDL platform now many open-source games can be built to run on QNX.
I must confess that when I want to play games I just boot into Windows or turn on my gamecube.
Microsoft’s illegal monopoly is still raging in full swing on the desktop.
Perhaps after antitrust remedies go into effect we’ll see new desktops of QNX and or PalmSource/BeOS.
ciao
yc
According to the download page, the QNX Ref Plat for the iPAQ only works with the 36xx and 37xx series of iPAQs. I wonder if it works with the 31xx line (I have a 3150). The 31xx models are identical to the 36xx line, but with a B&W screen, and 16 MB instead of 32 MB of RAM. Dare I try it? Or has someone else already done so?
The moniker “Momentics” makes sense to me. QNX is a real-time OS. Thus, it’s tiny moments between operations, context-switches, and so on. Rather than a hundreds of milliseconds. Perhaps Linux-as-an-OS (aka GNU/Linux) without RT patches applied to the kernel should be called “Millisecondics.” That way, both RMS and everyone else would be happy- it wouldn’t be called just Linux, and they wouldn’t have to tack on GNU to show that Linus didn’t write all the GNU stuff.
Nevermind, downloaded the package and read the docs- sho’nuff, it says it works with the iPAQ 31xx series. Dare I try? Looks to be quite nice!
No, please don’t try. It won’t work at this time and you will just ruin your machine.
Chris,
You should change the doc’s in the zip file because it said 31xx is supported.
Yep, that totally needs to be changed. It was supposed to have been removed a long, long time ago.
The 31xx will be supported though – check http://qnxzone.com/ipaq over the coming weeks and months for updates.
Before I download it, can anyone tell me if the Radeon 7500 is supported?
This page:
http://www.qnx.com/support/sd_hardware/platform/video.html
lists the Radeon, as it has since the Radeon was originally supported, but previous versions haven’t supported the 7500 (for understandable reasons, of course).
Adam
yes, it is supported. Here is alist of the supported Radeon cards from the device database (/etc/system/enum/devices/graphics)…..
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=5144) # ATI Radeon QD
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=5145) # ATI Radeon QE
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=5146) # ATI Radeon QF
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=5147) # ATI Radeon QG
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=4c59) # ATI Radeon M6
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=4c5a) # ATI Radeon M6
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=4c57) # ATI Radeon M7
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=5159) # ATI Radeon RV100 (VE)
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=515a) # ATI Radeon RV100 (VE)
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=5157) # ATI Radeon R7500
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=514c) # ATI Radeon R8500
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=514e) # ATI Radeon R8500
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=514f) # ATI Radeon R8500
device(pci, ven=$(PCI_VEND_ATI), dev=4242) # ATI Radeon R8500 AIW
Yarr! Doesn’t work on the 31xx yet? Oh well, I suppose it’s not a big deal- I don’t have a serial cable (yet).
Anyone used this iPAQ QNX? Have any qualititative remarks? How ‘fast’ does it feel, blah blah?
Could people with a 31xx that have interest in running QNX on the unit please send me an email? Wouldn’t mind getting a feel for the numbers. Thanks.
Thanks for the info 🙂
Too bad the Non-Commercial Edition does not support SMP…
Yep, it does. Just do…
cp /boot/fs/qnxbasesmp.ifs /.boot
…and reboot into your nice SMP machine.
Cool. All 6 processors detected. This OS rocks!!!
You can download Opera 6.0 for QNX here:
http://www.opera.com/download/get.pl?platform=qnx&force=6.0
I wrote up a little “how-to” on installing NC without actually burning a CDROM (for those Win32 install people).
http://qnx.wox.org/qnx/nc-no-burn/
Hope this is of some help to people….
Eugine.. Im able to resume my downloading of qnx 6.2 from qnx server…
or maybe you’ve noticed…
hmmmm…
now I’d getting error in resuming d/l ..
cant resume ???
*sigh*
See? Told ya, it doesn’t work!
I chatted with some qnx’ers at
http://www.joher.com/qnxchat/
and was told that qnx.com support resume d/load. They are using DAP and wget…
Im off to d/l either wget or DAP …
Banzai
GetRight does not work when trying to resume from the Qssl’s servers. GetRight is used A LOT and it works very well. And if GetRight “thinks” that the web server does not support resuming, then my friend, something is wrong in the whole setup.
“If you are looking for a fit and trim demo system of QNX checkout the iPaq Reference Platform that is included in the 6.2 install (and downloadable from QDN). The homepage is http://qnxzone.com/ipaq.”
I just followed that link, and under “news”, it just says “project renamed to eQip”!!!!
C’mon guys, knock it off!!! 😉 You’re never going to build brand-loyalty if you keep changing your brand. If Coke and Pepsi changed their names every two months where would they be? Take a lesson from Caldera, Visi-Calc, Borland, etc.
They change the name to eQip because if they continue to use QNX iPAQ or Qpaq — QSSL is going to get sued like Lindows.
eQip is the name of the open-source project that will be using the QNX provided “iPaq Reference Platform” as a starting base. We wanted a name that didn’t have ‘paq in it since the vast majority of the work will be hardware neutral so we wanted a hardware neutral name.