Once you’ve installed QNX, you can configure it so that it looks and feels the way you want it to. In this article, let’s see how you can do so.

The QNX GUI is called the Photon microGUI, and its desktop is called a ‘workspace’. All menus on this GUI are placed in what are called ‘shelves’. By default, QNX has two shelves, and you can edit the settings of existing shelves or add new ones. A right click on the desktop brings up the context menu that gives you options of configuring your graphics, desktop, and shelves.

Configuring the graphics

The graphics configuration includes the resolution, color depth, and refresh rates for the display. Specific settings for these parameters depend on the display card and the monitor you’re using. You should also check the card’s hardware compatibility list to see whether it is supported under QNX. Otherwise you will end up with the default vga or ‘flat’ screen drivers, which will have limited graphics settings. Interestingly, the graphics configuration option in QNX tells you to run the OS at high resolutions and color depths to get a good feel of its capabilities.

Configuring the desktop

The desktop configuration option allows you to adjust the properties of the application windows, the desktop wallpaper, and color schemes (similar to Windows). For the wallpaper, you can choose from the available defaults or use other bmp, gif, jpg, or pcx files. These settings are the same as Windows, so you shouldn’t have any trouble with them.

Configuring QNX shelves

Shelf configuration in QNX is pretty interesting. By default, QNX creates two shelves. One can be compared to the Windows taskbar as it has a Launch button similar to a Start button, and it lies at the bottom of the screen. The other is located at the top right corner of the desktop and has buttons for launching common applications. The shelf configuration option allows you to change the way items and buttons appear in the workspace. Shelves can be made to auto-hide, and you can also add new items to them, like time, drawers, and separators.

A drawer, as the name suggests, functions like an actual drawer; when you click on it, it slides out. A drawer can hold multiple content in it. For instance, you can have a drawer to house buttons to all your favorite software and name it ‘My Stuff’.

Another interesting application that you can add to the shelves is the monitor for CPU load and memory usage, which is quite similar to the Win NT Task Manager. This is already in one of the shelves by default, but you can create another shelf and add it there. You can also enable screen savers from the right shelf. These are applied as they are in Windows. Of the many in-built savers, phattract emerged as one of the favorites of almost everyone at PCQ Labs. You can also password protect the screen saver. For viewing any images, the QNX RTP package also comes with an image viewer application. This can be used to view and do some basic editing to gif, pcx, bmp, and other images.

Now let’s look at the items in the Launch menu, which is present on the other shelf. These are again similar to Windows or Linux KDE Start menu except for some nice little icons next to the item names. Default program groups for editors, multimedia, Internet, games, development, etc, house the corresponding application links.