Get Started with QNX

QNX is a widely accepted real time operating system for embedded systems. It is based on a POSIX compatible micro kernel, which makes it easy to embed it into devices with a small memory footprint. As a result it can be used to power mobile phones, PDAs, and even intelligent household electronic devices like ACs, washing machines, etc. We’ve given QNX Momentics Development Suite v6.2.1 non-commercial edition on this month’s PCQExtreme CD for you to try out. Here, we’ve explained how you can get started with it. You’ll find more technical info, white papers, etc on the CD. The CD is bootable, so you can either boot the OS directly from the CD or install it on a free partition. The first option is good if you just want to get a feel of QNX before installing it on your hard drive.

Configuring Background Wallpaper and pattern in QNX

Installing QNX

To run QNX directly from the CD, boot from the CD and press F2 when prompted to select the boot option. This will load QNX with the basic components like the desktop, file manager, web browser (Voyager), an installer, media player, text editor, dialer, and some configuration tools. Sounds like a lot of stuff and wondering what’s left? We’ll ease the suspense here--it’s missing a development environment and mail client. If you need them, go for the full installation, which also starts from booting from the CD. For this, simply press F3 when it asks you for the boot option. From here just follow the onscreen instructions. It will first ask you to create a new partition for Neutrino and then ask where to install the boot loader. You’ll need a clean partition for installing it. It will first copy the basic OS and ask you to reboot the machine and then boot from the hard disk. Once it boots up, it will pop up the windowing system (Photon) and ask you to select the proper VGA card, resolution, colors and refresh rate of the monitor. Provide these options according to your hardware, click on Change Mode and after the changes take place, click the ‘Done’ button. It will load the GUI and start the installer, which will ask you to install additional or third party software. From here you can install Momentics, the development suite for QNX. You will also find some new and useful software in this version of the OS, like mozilla-0.9.8 browser and a mail client.

Configuring QNX

We’ll now configure the OS and familiarize you with its GUI. First comes the graphics configuration. To do so, login to Photon, click on the graphics button under Configuration Menu from the tool bar, which is at the right side of the window.

From here you can configure the card driver, resolution, colour depth and vertical refresh rate of the Monitor. You should also check the card's hardware compatibility list to see whether it is supported under QNX or not. Otherwise you will end up with the default vga or 'flat' screen driver with limited graphics capability.

The desktop configuration next and allows you to adjust the properties of the application windows, the desktop wallpaper, colour schemes, etc. 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. To configure the desktop, select the Appearance button from the Configuration menu, either by right clicking or from the tool bar.

Moving on to network configuration, go to the configuration menu and select the Network Option. Select the Devices tab, which will show you the network Device (NIC) detected by your system, and will allow you to set different properties like IP address (manually or via DHCP), activate/deactivate device, host name, domain name, default gateway, DNS Server
Address, etc.

You can use Voyager or Mozilla web browsers to access the net. To configure Voyager, go to its Edit menu and select Preferences. Select the connection tab and enable the Use Proxy Server option and enter the IP and port number. In Mozilla, go to Edit menu, select Preference>Advanced and then Proxy option. There is lots of third party software available for multimedia as well and QNX also has some good built-in stuff as well. From the Launch button, select the Multimedia menu and you’ll find an audio mixer, media player and a sound recorder. QNX also supports most popular sound cards you can play all the regular media extensions like WAV, MP3, MPEG, etc.

For more information on QNX, Contact:  SPA Computers,
Bangalore. Tel: 5265348/7981. E-mail: info@spacomp.com,
URL: www.qnx.com, www.spacomp.com 

Anindya Roy