[cumbria_lug] QNX shenanigans ahoy

[Michael Saunders]

Anyone else here tried QNX recently?

Earlier today I downloaded the non-commercial QNX ISO and gave it a
spin. For those not in the know, it's a UNIX flavour used mostly in
embedded devices (set-top boxes, laser control devices etc.) with a
small and active community. The version I tried includes a full GUI
(Photon) and associated apps; not had much time to play with it but
it's certainly a neat little setup.

Mozilla Firebird, The GIMP, MPlayer, Abiword etc. are available for
the OS, although I haven't had the opportunity to try them as I've
been running it directly from CD. It's outrageously fast, very well
constructed and with a slick and cohesive GUI -- not quite as refined
and consistent as something like RISC OS, but still beats most of the
commercial vendors by a country mile.

With a Scribus port, BTTV driver (it's in the work) and a few other
extras, I'll consider using it as my main desktop. QNX supports a
decently broad range of hardware -- it automagically detected and
configured my vid, sound and network cards in both my desktop and
laptop (and they're recent machines). Anyway, here's a few links:  
number 1 is a screenshot I took, showing the stock browser and GUI; 2
is the download site; 3 is the supported hardware list.

1 - http://msa.section.me.uk/qnx-shot.jpg
2 - http://www.qnx.com/nc/download.qnx
3 - http://www.qnx.com/support/sd_hardware/

Definitely worth a look -- orders of magnitude faster than
Linux+KDE/GNOME, Windows XP or OS X, stacks of polish and spit-shine,
and a healthy handful of common UNIX tools (OpenSSH, Perl, Python etc.)

Mike

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk