Tips and Tricks |
Keep the following handy:
Make sure that the hard disk you install QNX on is a primary master. Check the jumper settings on the hard disk and change if required. |
There are several ways in which QNX RTP (real time platform) can be installed
on your mac- hine. It can be made to coexist with your current operating system,
drive itself on its own (on a native partition), or even run on your PC without
a hard disk. Let’s go about understanding the process.
Look Ma, no hard disk
They call it the Incredible 1.44 MB Demo. The system requirements for this
one are: a 386 or higher processor, at least a color VGA graphics card, a
minimum of 8 MB RAM, a serial or PS/2 mouse, and a network card. This demo boots
off a floppy disk and doesn’t need any hard disk to install. It’s a complete
install with the real-time OS, a graphical user interface, a Web browser, a
dialer, and TCP/IP. And there’s more. After your machine starts up, you can
even remove the demo floppy from the drive. Interesting? Let’s see how to do
it.
The QNX RTP installation package comes with the requisite software to create
the demo disk. If your current OS is Win 9x/ NT or DOS, you’ll need the zipped
qnxdemo file. If it’s Unix, Linux or QNX, you use the qnxdemo.tar file. Also,
depending on the type of connectivity you have to the Internet, that is, network
or modem, you’ll need to use the corresponding files. These are located in the
demodisk folder on the CD.
For
DOS, Win 9x/ NT Unzip demodisk.zip. Insert a preformatted 1.44 MB floppy in the
drive and run Install.bat. This creates the demo disk. Shutdown and reboot your
machine with this disk.
For Unix, Linux or QNX Do tar -xf qnxdemo.tar to extract the files from the
archive. Insert a preformatted 1.44 MB floppy into the drive and run the
makedemo command. Boot the machine from this floppy.
In both cases, the disk boots up the machine, mounts virtual file systems and
asks you for the display settings to be used. If you’re on a network, you have
the option of letting the machine get the required information from the DHCP
server, or manually configuring the settings. If you have a modem to dial up to
the Internet, the dial-up configuration wizard helps you through the process.
And just for fun’s sake, you can play Towers of Hanoi or look at the beauty
of a vector graphics sample application, all running simultaneously just in your
RAM.
For a full-fledged OS...
If you already have an OS installed, say Windows 95/ NT/ 2000/ ME or Linux,
you can still try out QNX. Here the options are either installing QNX as a file
within your existing Windows, or as a native QNX partition install. Currently,
QNX doesn’t install on NTFS or LinuxExt2 partitions. So, you need to have a
FAT partition to install QNX. Let’s start with installing QNX under your
existing OS.
Installing QNX as a file within Win 95/98
For installing QNX as a file in your existing Win 9x, run the Windows
executable qnxrtp.exe. This installs the OS under
directory. During the installation, you’ll need to specify the size of the
root.qfs file; the default is 600 MB, but you can go up to 2 GB. This becomes
your workspace when you work in QNX. It’s better to allocate more space here,
so that you don’t fall short when you install more software later. The
installation asks for a root password and any user account details you may want
to give. It also gives you the option of creating a boot floppy in case your
system fails later. It makes changes to you config.sys file, which gives you the
option of booting into QNX or Windows at startup.
When you select to boot into QNX, the QNX image is loaded and takes control
of the hardware. An EIDE driver and a DOS file system are started, which mount
your Windows file system under QNX (as fs/hd0-dos, fs/hd0-dos-1, fs/hd0-dos-2,
etc). The QNX file system is then mounted on top of your existing DOS file
(remember where you installed QNX?). Other devices like the CD-ROM drive and
other file systems are also mounted under /fs. The OS then detects the graphics
card and asks for the display settings you want, and then shows the Photon GUI
login screen. You can select to always boot into the GUI or choose to remain at
the Command Prompt. You can go to the GUI when you want by typing ‘ph’ at
the Prompt.
On its own native partition with Win 95/98
If you want to have QNX as your primary OS, it’s better to install it on
its own native partition, which is a DOS type79 partition. For this, you’ll
have to create a separate partition before the installation. If your drive has a
single partition, you’ll have to use a third party utility like Partition
Magic to create the separate partition. After this, just pop this month’s PCQ
CD into your drive and boot off it. Ensure that your hard disk is configured to
be a primary master, otherwise the EIDE driver loaded during setup won’t
detect the disk properly and will exit the installation. Once the IDE driver
loads, it takes you to the setup and shows you the partition information on your
hard disk. Here, you can specify the partition that you want QNX to install on.
The setup also asks for the amount of space that you want QNX to use. In this
case too, it’s best to give as much space as possible to QNX
Now comes the important part. QNX allows you to use your existing boot loader
(if you have one) or you can install its own boot loader. Please read the
recommendations at this point very carefully. If you have Win 9x installed and
choose not to install the QNX boot loader, your PC will boot up from the active
partition. QNX installation, by default, sets the QNX partition as active. So to
boot into Windows, you’ll then have to use fdisk to set the Windows partition
as active. We’ll discuss how to make QNX and Win 9x coexist without using a
boot loader a little later.
Once all the parameters are specified, the drives are remounted, and the file
system restarted for initiating file copy. This doesn’t take very long. Once
it’s through, remove the CD and hit Enter to reboot when you’re prompted to
do so. Your machine then boots up into QNX.
Now let’s come back to the choice of booting into either OS without using a
third party boot loader or resorting to fdisk every time. The procedure is a bit
cumbersome, but once you understand the basics, there won’t be any problem. We’d
seen earlier that when QNX was installed as a file within Windows, it modified
the config.sys file to give you the option of booting into Windows or QNX. The
loadqnx.sys driver is the one that’s exploited to do this .
Now that you already have QNX installed on its own partition, use fdisk (by
booting off a Windows bootable CD or floppy) to set the Windows partition as
active. Reboot into Windows. Install QNX as a file into a Windows partition as
discussed earlier. This modifies the config.sys file. Now, effectively, you have
two boot images of QNX on your hard disk–one on the native partition, and one
within Windows. Go to the path where you installed QNX (
Files\qnx) as a file within Windows. Here, in the fs directory, rename the QFS
files to something else, so that they’re not identified at the next bootup,
and reboot your machine. When prompted for the OS in the Windows startup menu
(which is derived from config.sys), choose to boot into QNX. And there you are,
booted into QNX that was installed on its native partition (because the renamed
QFS files within Windows are not identified). You can go a step further and
delete those renamed QFS files within Windows.
As far as performance goes, QNX documentation clearly specifies that there’s
no difference between an installation as a file in Windows and on a native
partition. So, the choice is yours.
QNX with Windows NT/2000/ME
For Windows machines with NTFS, you’ll need to allocate a FAT partition for
QNX to install. For this, use any of your existing free partitions after
converting them to FAT. Use a partitioning utility like Partition Magic to
resize your partitions to avoid losing data. You have to, however, keep certain
things in mind while doing this. The partition that you want to use for QNX
should preferably be a primary partition and should be bootable. The easiest way
to do this is dynamically resize your existing primary partition and allocate it
for QNX. Format this partition with a FAT file system.
Boot your machine with the CD. QNX should recognize the free partition. If it
doesn’t, look at the partition information and opt to delete the partition
that you allocated. When prompted for the amount of space to be used for QNX,
select ‘Complete’ and hit Enter. Also, choose to install the QNX Boot Loader
when asked for. The installation will do the rest, including converting the
partition into DOS type79 (which is essentially a non-DOS system) and copying
the OS files to it. Reboot the machine and you’ll boot into QNX. The QNX Boot
Loader waits for two seconds for you to enter your boot partition preference.
You have to make this choice really fast if you want to boot into Windows NT/
2000 or you might end up rebooting your machine a number of times.
If you use Linux as a primary OS, QNX can be installed there too. But you’ll
need to create a separate dedicated FAT partition for QNX, because the current
release of QNX doesn’t support the Linux Ext2 file system. Appropriate changes
will also be needed to LILO, the Linux boot loader.
Post-installation procedures
Now that you’ve installed the QNX RTP on your machine, how do you go about
installing more software? Installing software in QNX is done through what’s
called the Package Manager. Although software packages can also be installed the
way we do in Linux (untar archives, compile source codes, etc), Package Manager
makes the process of distribution and installation much easier. Package Manager
uses the concept of Repositories. These are basically directories where the
software and its information are stored. The contents of a Repository consist of
an index file (an ASCII text file that stores the names of packages), the
package manifest (an XML document with the extension QPM that stores information
about the package, its version, date, etc), and the data as a QPK file.
The Package Manager can be connected to such a valid repository for
installing the packages. The information is downloaded to the Package Manager
and then you can select the packages to be installed. By default, QNX shows up
two repositories–the CD-ROM Repository pointing to the stuff on the CD-ROM and
the WWW Repository which points to the repository on QNX’s Website server. You
can also manually add repositories by adding the paths of the corresponding
directories.
You’ll find additional installation information and troubleshooting FAQs at
http://qdn.qnx.com or from newsgroups at news://inn.qnx.com
Happy Real Timing.
Ashish Sharma