What might this be?

[Toaster]

Hello folks,
Hpro made a link to www.qnx.com
This seems to be an OS of sorts, anyone mess with it yet?
Anyone know the licensing? (I'm hoping GPL)
It looks promising but looks are skin deep.
So...dash over and get a looksie.
The ISO image is about 400MB and there are other D/L of about 30MB.
Seems the ISO is an "everything" type thing.
The download site was slow at 25kb/sec so for the moment I aborted.
Maybe you folks could D/L the goodies faster and test drive.
This might be something and then it might be.....be.....

[Statica]

Hi Toaster .. QNX is beyond unbelievable, of course I havent used it for a while, but it is amazing. Its a realtime OS far above anything out there. Was on the scene far before RTLinux; the application support is fenomenal .. i remember using it c. 1993; used for very core applications .. like petrochem plants and the like. You will like it immensely.

[dead_eye]

They talk about it a lot in the arstechnica forum. It is a *nix OS (derived from unix much like linux), and yes, it is GPL.

[juanito]

I have "played" with it -- never used it for anything worthwhile. The version I had would fit on a single 1.44 floppy, yet correctly identified all of my hardware (take notice, Linux), had a browser, word processessor, and a GUI.

Long Live all alternative OS's

Down with Redmond

[Hpro]

I use it here on two computers for over one year now - never crashed - the only thing I have to complain is that sometimes it forgets the sound - but this can be fixed with a few clicks - and there it sounds again - sound is AWE64Gold...

I like the GUI of it and the speed and Multitasking - yeah billy could learn some stuff there....

It will whatsoever not install on diakmanager or EZ- drives..you could also download the 29 Mb version install it from within win98 and then execute it from the desktop - runs fine - ..on the next restart you will be back to Win98 desktop again..

[Floppyman]

Hi guys,

This sounds very cool indeed, and I'm willing to give this a try. Being it's a 400mb dload and I got dialup is there a way I can buy it? Also, how does this OS compare to linux? It's CLI and GUI? How's hardware support, like SMP for example? How easy is it to install it? Is it possible to dual boot it with linux? Thanks in advance for answering my q's.

[Hpro]

Floppy - there is also a 29Mb version and a floppy disk version on it - you will not belive it RUNNING A OS from a floppy - and playing internet.. I think it's by fas the smallest OS on the world.

Gui looks great - Here -
Toaster has the full version on CD - may you can ask him to send it to you - otherwise you can order it from QNX.com -It's fully plug and play - detecting almost all hardware - at least on the computers here - you can tripple or Quad boot also - it has it's own bootmanager - and a good one on top..Finnish installed with all the stuff which comes with it and the Swap partition it creates on itself - it will be alsmost be 1 Gb in size as the ISO image will create a CDROM of almost 650 Mb..

I have used all three versions of it = the floppy the Win98 and the full version - there is only one thing to say - It works..

[Toaster]

Howdy,
First off, I'd like to thank Hpro for pointing me in the direction of QNX.
Currently, I'm "torturing" the OS by throwing everything in the book at it in the most hostile method I can devise. I found the browser lacking but the OS as a whole to be QUITE hearty.
I also found this OS to load on as little as a 540MB HDD and 32MB of RAM.
The smallish HDD install worked well leaving some 200MB free but the OS could not create a "swap file" as it needed 256MB free to create a 128MB swap file.
A 1GB HDD would be a fine size for "exploring" the OS.
However, I think I found a problem in licensing.
I don't think its GPL but rather "free" to non commercial usage.
I think this OS would run quite well on low end Pentium gear and 64MB of ram.
The OS loads VERY fast on fast equipment. So fast in fact that it takes longer to "log in" then it does to boot.
This OS has allot going for it save the browser and the licensing.
As far as browsers, Mozilla has been released and is FAR better.
The "voyager" browser that shipps with QNX had difficulty with my DSL gateway box.
I don't know about security as yet but it being a UNIX variant has to be far superior to Micky$oft.