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Amiga

QNX give update of new Amiga OS and GUI 210

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ain't-that-perty dept.
g.macdonald wrote in to send us news of the new Amiga GUI based on QNX. It looks very perty. How long before we have a GNOME and Enlightenment theme that mimics it.
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QNX give update of new Amiga OS and GUI More

QNX give update of new Amiga OS and GUI

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  • I've always liked operating systems. I think the idea of booting up a new OS and having your computer look and act totally diffrent is soooo cool. That's why everytime I hear about a new or old x86 operating system I start banging my head againt my monitor in joyous glee. Well I don't really, but I imagine I am. Well actually that isn't really true either, if it's a microsoft operating system I imagine Bill Gates hanging over a giant pit of acid and me taking . . . never mind.

    Anyways, I wanted to express a dream of mine. I dreamed that in the not so distant future companies would place their old operating systems like os/2 1.x or next/openstep on an ftp site or something and let people download them for free(as in beer). This is realted to the Amiga's OS I think because the Amiga OS is old(date wise, not neccesarily technology wise). That does make this post on topic, right? Does that last sentence admit guilt?

  • Think what you want, but I think that IS an E theme, and with a little bit of gimp-age they called it a ``screenshot''

    You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you.

    Who is they?

    You know... THEM...

  • Transmeta is not out yet, (in spec even).
    Wait, it would be just like Amiga to depend on them wouldn't it. I can see it now Amiga Press release Circa April 9 2000
    "The AOE has recently switched its kernel to NT and will now be running nativly on the as of yet unspeced transmeta cpu. They still don't have an instruction set to show us but I firmly belive that it AOE will be out within six months."
  • I still don't understand what is meant by a real-time OS. Looked it up on CNET but their definition was opaque. Could anyone explain it?

    Thanks
  • That's a quote from Jurrasic Park when the girl sits down at the computer. A fellow geek and I say it whenever we've been forced to use Windows for a while and return back to the more familiar unices we use (Irix, Linux, Solaris, SunOS).
  • While at another time my answer to this comment would probably look a lot like the first one, today I feel nice enough not to simply tell you to keep your poor imitation of sarcasm to yourself. Instead, I will tell you what is wrong with your argument, as below.

    1. The Communist reference. Apparently, you're the only one in the Slashdot community who hasn't received the memo (maybe you're new here, which may explain your Anonymousness... or perhaps you are just a Coward): Free Software != Communism... in a big way. If anything, it's the software licenses the QNX people like so much that are communist in nature; see the GNU philosophy documents [gnu.org].
    2. The "die" portion. This was intended not as a threat, but as a warning. I personally could care less whether QNX lives or dies; it's good software, but so is a lot of stuff that the Free Software community writes (and we're many more than the QNX devel community).
    3. The "giving it away" misconception. The question here is not whether it's free as in "free beer", but whether it's Free as in "free speech" (which does bring up the point of whether QSSL has the right to severely restrict the use of their software through licenses and to sell those at arbitrarily high prices). Software that's released through a Free license is used and reused healthily, and spawns growth in the community; software that's released proprietarily stagnates, and dies off if it's not able to compete.


    I hope I've helped enlighten you.
  • One thing no other OS has: In QNX all the processes have transparent access to all the CPUs in a QNX network.
    What would you think if I tell you that with QNX you can build a 10 or 100 or 1000 machines cluster just pluging in new computers with QNX to the network and the applications can run transparently distributed between all those cpu's as if they were running on the local machine.
    And this clustering technology is different to Beowulf clusters because you don't need special applications or special libraries to make your application run in a cluster. I've already run applicatons on a 10 QNX machines network and the processing time speeds up almost 10 times.
    I would really like to have QNX-Amiga machines for a rendering cluster because if the load groqs too much I just add more machines to the network.
  • For some amusement, check out fsn [sgi.com]. It's the file manager that was used in Jurassic Park.

    "This is Unix. I know this."

  • The current photon viewer for X is phinx.
    You can use rphinx to display x applications in photon.
    You can also run QNXFree86 and have an X server running on top of QNX. QNXFree86 is a port of XFree86 to QNX.
  • The first one who answered the original post unwittingly answered it. The Macintosh snapshot (command-shift-3), for instance, outputs to PICT. But no one puts a PICT on the Web! They put GIFs and JPGs! So the reason it passed through Photoshop might well be that - to convert from PICT (or whatever) to JPG. There you go.
  • Hi Sleepy.

    it seems that many slashDOT readers are way
    behind in the QSSL Nto partnership with
    AMIGA,inc.

    its been widely known for some time that
    QSSL are as i say in PARTNERSHIP not mearly
    paying the cash and leasing the Nto OS.
    and not IT IS the Nto plus Photon NOT
    the older QNX4.

    AMIGA,inc are takeing the Nto and working with
    the QSSL teams to create the final Nto Version2
    now in Beta release to the select QSSL 3rd partys,
    and as you all know now its just shifted up a gear
    and invited the AMIGA Developer community too
    take up the offer.

    seeing as many readers seem to be in need of
    some acurate info, here`s something you might like
    to know.
    the ICOA in colaberation with Team AMIGA Central
    are at this time in talks with QSSL and AMIGA,inc
    as to how best serve both the Classic community
    Developer`s and the upcomeing AmiQNX markets.

    as for the look of the screen shots , please try to remember that QSSL are primarilly Intel based
    for the Embeded Markets and it will be upto Doc
    allan and team to make a personality (remember that option ?) that better suits the current and
    future end-user`s AT release time.

    the screenshot`s are mearly an indication as to
    what the underlying Photon MC can do NOT what the
    end result will be.

    to repeat, QSSL still have QNX4 for the current
    embeded markets, Nto version 2 Beta is shipping now to interested Developers, ICOA/TAC is getting ready to help said Developers that Knock at its door.

    perhaps some serious *nix Developers might see
    that there`s a very good chance they could help
    shape the new AMIGA markets if they just take the time to think about it.

    anyway i hope thats helped clear up some stuff for you readers.
  • Ohh come on, perhaps you dont rate
    the classic user, but dont forget we managed
    to pull down the Ibrowse servers for several days.

    the QNX/Nto story was doing the rounds
    on the AMIGA related news/NG/ML`s for a
    fare time before SLASHdot got a sniff.

    i think its great that / and its readers are so interested in things AMIGA but Please dont think
    we are NOT able to show enough interest in a site
    so as to show it down as per the QNX site.

    it happened the same last Nov when the Nto news
    broke, and i dont remember / covering that
    for quite some time.

  • I seem to remember the thing that made the amiga so neat for it's time was the intelligent file assosciations, loadable drivers, tasking OS, _NICE SHELL_, decent process management, and good expandability... Honestly, i even like the Amiga OS better than Linux as a desktop OS, mainly because of the good compromise between GUI and CLI, and the good scriptability. I seem to remember some mem leaks and other problems made it a little tough. I don't know if there is any real future for the OS, but i miss it...
  • The problem lies in QNX's shitty bandwidth.
    I had a beta license w/ them at one time...
    Downloading from they're beta ftp server is very slow, and often timesout.

    There were a few ocassions that i got over 6k/s, but the speed soon dropped to sub 1k/s speeds.

  • The Amiga does it better than Windoze and Linux, but not as well as the Mac or OS/2's amazing WorkPlace Shell. I really hope AI addresses this issue. Death to ".info" files and lame-ass 1970s file systems!

  • Hear hear! I was an Amiga junkie from 1986 to 1993, and it hurt a LOT when Commodore went belly-up. Now that I am a Linux junkie, the fact that my new world cannot be destroyed by the mismanagement of one single company gives me a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling inside that I refuse to give up or even seriously risk again.
  • I often am unable to get slashdot, or i get an incredibally slow connection speed to it. Tracerts show that its not my connection nor intermediate routers. I don't generally take that as a sign that linux has crashed and that its not a great server os. What you are saying doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Anyways, I had no trouble getting to it just now.
    Someone claimed that they use qnx on the space shuttle; if this is true, I'd think that its pretty damn stable. Be curious to see more about that.
  • Two things I can't stand with the screenshot:

    1) They had to call the trash can garbage. That really is kind of confusing, since your files are typically trashed not garbaged (sounds to much like garbaled, and plus you don't use english that way). If you really must, at least call it something that makes sense like 'Trash' or 'Recycle Bin', etc. Afraid of lawsuit, huh?

    2) What's up with this white mouse cursor. Most normal systems use a black curser (X11 and Macs), the only reason to use a white curser is to avoid a lawsuit. At any rate, studies show that having a black cursor == less eye strain, easier to find (most work is done on white paper/white screen).
  • Is it me, or does that look like BeOS, Windows, and NEXTSTEP all warmed over?

    -awc
  • Several reasons:

    1) GNUstep is needs some work, in several areas. When it gets closer to 1.0.

    2) GNUstep requires glibc 2.1, it won't work with libc5/glibc1.99

    3) NeXTStep look is not liked by some people. But others love it.

    4) The standard GUIs people use look like Mac or Windows, NeXTStep feels quite different.
  • Heh... so, people with PC's will be able to use the "Amiga" OS before people on actual Amigas will?

    Kinda neat looking UI, but it doesn't seem so radically different than any other desktop out there... isn't there anything really *new* out there these days? Windows n' buttons. Yawn.
  • I know I shouldn't fall to this level, but I though that was pretty darn funny. hehe

    That was certainly a great joke.

    (/me returns to laughing on the floor)
  • Not a quantum leap either. They would have been smarter to put that much effort into a vesion of KDE or GNOME for QNX. Either of them could be made to look a helluva lot like that desktop.
    And since QNX is still proprietary, it wouldn't really hurt them to have a GPLed desktop on top of it. In fact, they could have contributed to a GPLed desktop, and made their theme proprietary / copyrighted, so they'd still have a unique look and feel.
    Companies need to get more creative. Let's stop reinventing the wheel, damnit!
  • Actually, somebody in like 1986 or early-1987 ported that demostation program to the Mac Plus.

    It was a pretty cool demo. Some how it used a resolution hack (or at least made it look that way) so you got a high resolution (more then 72-dpi) using the standard Mac Plus video card. It's lines were smoother then smooth, but it seemed to take like a 1 1/2 minutes to initilize the screen at that resolution.

    I have seen some pretty cool demos of Super3d on a MacPlus (I still have it), which looked cool, and you could make your own 3d images, but the resolution was far inferior (think 72 dpi) then that amiga clone demo.

    If somebody could explain how that demo could create more then 72 dpi on a B&W mac plus, I would be a very happy person.
  • I think it's fairly agreed that the big defining point of the Amiga was the custom hardware. How is a completely different OS running on completely different hardware still "Amiga-like"?
  • Actually Mac OS 8.5.x and better (and I think Windows 98), don't have to have jaggy icons. Mac OS 8.5.x supports alpha-chanel transperency and 32-bit icons, but they are a tadbit difficult to edit, since the tools suck to edit them (I use clip2icons and PhotoDeluxe [I cann't afford the real thing, and no I am not booting Linux/GIMP to edit a 32-bit icon!]).

    They look nice if you know what you are doing with anti-aliased corners, and stuff.

    The reason why NeXTstep does not have jaggys on the icons is that they use tiffs. Tiffs support 32-bit color natively and support alpha-transperency (I think).

  • Seems like it's /.'ed already..

    Anybody have mirrors of the screenshots up?

    -Nic
  • My my my. My baby is still sitting here, next to my relatively brand-spanking-new Linux box. In fact, that's what I'm typing on right now! It amazes me that a system whose company dried up and vanished so many years ago is still able to stir up such strong emotions. I guess that's why I could never truly bring myself to ever leave the platform. I just hope Amiga Inc. can capitalize on such nostalgia with their marketing instead of the previous tactic of relying solely on those of us who have stuck-it-out to fuel their platform. I just hope the new OS... oh, sorry, Amiga Operating Environment v5.0... manages to retain some of the nice modular features of the current OS. Would keep me happy.

  • /.'ed (Score:1)

    by Tarnar ( 20289 )
    It seems down. Not even Netcraft will look it up for me :-) I'm just hope that /. won't one day be found legally to be performing DoS attacks, just through the /. effect.

    (;
  • I think you're ranting -- just a little.

    Are you talking QNX4 or Neutrino?

    What is it you hate about it? QNX4 has got full POSIX APIs, plus quite a few BSD and SysV libs, ANSI C/C++. With Watcom 10.6 and the unix lib PD stuff from the 'net ports pretty easily. I ported Samba in a couple of hours and I think Apache just compiles and links these days. It's got full POSIX threads and a couple of Java VMs now. Kaffe has also been ported by different people.

    Neutrino gets more QNX4 features everyday. Soon it will be QNX5 (Maybe Amiga OS5 _is_ QNX5? :)

    And in terms of raw speed and determinism it's hard to beat. This lowly 400Mhz Pentium II does a full process-to-process context switch in less than 500nS (yes, nanoseconds).

    Yes, development licenses aren't cheap but your runtime licensing is based on your volume. If you're selling thousands of units your price drops to $50 and less.

    If you are looking to switch to Linux you might be interested in a QNX scheduler for Linux here: http://linuxhq.com/doc/QNX-scheduler-2.0.31-pre3-1 .patch.README

    and QNX kernel APIs implemented as a Linux kernel module here: http://tor-pw1.netcom.ca/~fcsoft/index.html

    alternatively a shared-memory implementation of Send()/Receive()/Reply() can be found here:
    http://www.holoweb.net/~simpl

    Regards,
    --aj
  • I'll second that. I was always under the impression that QNX was touted as being that oh so great and mythical 24/7 OS that can handle whatever you throw at it.... apparently though it makes a not so great 24/7 web server.....

  • Re:So what exactly are we getting? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The new Amiga will be a new architecture. As with any new architecture, there is the problem of software available at first release.

    To overcome this, there will first be a developer machine, which is going to be an x86 based system.

    Following the development system, the really new machines will be released. The new machines will NOT be x86 based. All this info is available on Amiga's website, e.g. here. [amiga.com]

  • It's back up 14:45 PT. How long before it's /.'ed again?
  • The old OS/2 very much forms the core of the new one. NextStep was sold to Apple. And this article proves that people still see value in the Amiga OS (even if it IS just the name). Only GEM has been opened up. Maybe someday IBM will give up entirely on OS/2 (Wow, I just read THE WORST review of their new Warp Server, I think in Internet Week, but I can't remember) and set it free. Not that I'm saying it's a bad system. It could just be better if it could cross-fertilize code with other systems/programmers out there.
    --JZ
  • You have got to remember that of the 8 years, there was virtually no
    development due to the bankruptcies of C= Commodore and then Escom.
    Gateway seem serious. Indeed Amiga now has some shit hot
    heavyweight employees from the industry...
    The new Motorola G4 PowerPC will undoubtedly be the CPU
    Big announcement due soon from M. As to gfx.....
    something special me thinks.
  • Right.

    We all know it's going to be based on Transmeta's MMP.
    :-)
  • Commands like "DIR" and "CD" were built into the Kickstart in later releases of the OS. Good thing to, for those pesky times I decide I need to boot without a startup-sequence and haven't assigned the command directories right away. :^)

    As for Lemmings, well, the guys at Psygnosis programmed it as an Amiga game from the outset, so I'm not surprised that it was by far the best implementation of Lemmings anyone can find.

    They better not botch the beautiful balance they've struck between GUI and CLI. That would truly piss me off.

  • Alas, it'll never happen. Keep in mind that Microsoft wrote parts of OS/2 1.x, and pieces of that are still in 4.x. There are probably license restrictions that will keep IBM from ever opening up the source. I guess they could do it if they got permission from Microsoft, but from Microsoft's point of view, the only good Warp is a dead Warp.

  • Doesn't Windowmaker use GNUstep? I'm current using windowmaker on my Slack4 box now, with libc5. Hence GNUstep on libc5. Or am I on crack?

  • Duh....you ever think that they might have run them through Photoshop in order to convert them into another format and then resample so the image size could be reduced???
  • The cursor also matches the cursor on my Machintosh exactly -- except for the inverted colours.
  • Seems like the E-theme has arrived:

    http://e.themes.org/sqlgal.cgi?themeid=931490804
  • Well, as a young'n (18), I never really got into the whole Amiga thing back in its day. My only encounter was through one of my friends who had one, we'd play games on it, but that was as far as it went. I think the coolest thing about the AmigaOS was the integration between shell and GUI. Aaaaand.....

    That's why I am a big fan of the BeOS. It's got a spiffyclean GUI, bash shell, scripting, and it's brand new from the ground up. It's really too bad that nobody uses it. Someday...

  • The same guy who did most of the BeOS icons now works in some capacity for QNX. His website is called the Artillion.

    Go here to see more of his stuff. He's even got free icons you "free software freaks" might like.
    :) (if ya can't take a joke...)
    http://www.artillion.com/

    - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
    I run BeOS. The rules don't apply.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 08, 1999 @12:18PM (#1812670)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • THIS is UNIX ? I'm confused.
  • Some months ago, you could probably get a very cheap OS/2 Warp 3 (with last fixpacks attached) from http://www.mensys.nl/ , I think.
    And even cheaper a second hand one from EBay.
  • If you think you're confused now, check out:

    http://www.amiga.de/diary/executive/linux-e.html

    That fat lady just keeps on singing...


  • Will it run old Amiga applications seamlessly? Will the API be compatible with AmigaOS? Does it have any other specifically Amiga-ish features?

    To me it looks like someone bought the Amiga marque and just decided to use it as an asset to get ahead in the OS market. Which sounds about as genuine as the "Commodore 64" PC (a Wintel box bundled with a C64 emulator and badged with a Commodore logo licensed from whoever owns it).
  • No matter whose ploy it is, until I can see a system that isn't an x86 box with QNX and an "Amiga" sticker on it, it remains a rather pathetic attempt at one for me.

    According to a Q & A [amiga.de] list at the site of the OS folks, a processor hasn't been decided upon yet.

    But why the fuss? It's perfectly normal for development systems to

    1. come out long before the actual system, so that the system will/might have software on release, and
    2. run on a different architecture than the deployment platform. Ever hear of cross-compiling?

    Heck, if they have finalized the Amiga OS 5 Java APIs people can start writing apps for it using their favourite Java 2 development tool... :-)

  • Amiga Dumps QNX for Linux Kernel (Score:3)

    by DrPsycho ( 13308 ) on Thursday July 08, 1999 @10:19PM (#1812680) Homepage
    This is not a troll!

    "July 9, 1999 - San Diego, California. Amiga has selected Linux as the OS kernel for the new Amiga Operating Environment that is scheduled for release later this year. Amiga is selecting Linux after several months of evaluating the technical progress of the OS and the tremendous industry support that Linux has gained."

    http://www.amiga.com/diary/1999/990799-e.html [amiga.com]

    Read the Executive Update article as well. Interesting dynamics between this announcement and the QNX announcement of only a few hours earlier.

  • It appears Amiga Inc. decided to change the undelying kernel from QNX to Linux - see more at http://www.amiga.com . It is wonderful, isn't it?
  • Well, IRIX, anyway.
  • i cannot think of any other big OSes is real time.

    Hello? Can you say VxWorks [windriver.com]? pSOS [isi.com]? OS-9 [microware.com]? VRTX [mentorg.com]? There is more to operating systems than just the behemoths used on peoples desktops...

  • >The new Motorola G4 PowerPC will undoubtedly be the CPU.

    That wouldn`t be a bad idea as a lot of stuff is being ported to ppc already thank to the efforts of phase5 and Hague+Partners. That said the first press release at WAO in London stated that the new CPU definately wasn`t coming from Motorola.
  • It is the Amiga "boing" ball. The unofficial logo.
    When the Amiga was first eleased (1985) there was a demo with the
    boing ball rotating andbouncing around the screen. It was bsolutely
    astounding..... C=64's & Spectrums were the norm and PC's were still
    using MS Dos let alone Windoze whilst Amiga had a fully WIMP realtime
    multitasking OS (in 1985 for godsake)
  • My pointer lines up exactly, pixel by pixel wit that pointer. The colors are just inversed. I use E and not sure where my pointer came from. Anyone else? Xfree at 1024x768
  • As you correctly observed, this is mostly a marketing ploy to get some die-hard Amiga fans to the QNX platform. Note that the article avoids to answer the question whether this is going to be the next AmigaOS or something different, it just suggests that this is "something for the Amiga community".

    Face it, there will be no generous support from companies with established products (and niche markets) to revive the Amiga scene, they're after your money while trying to minimize the necessary investments. The Amiga fans are known to be very faithful and commited to their platform and not at all reluctant to pay large amounts of money to keep their system up-to-date. It therefore makes much sense for companies like QNX (for whom the number of Amiga devotees is significant compared to their own user base, btw.) to attempt to lure the Amigans to their platform.

    If you want an interesting alternative OS (which will hopefully continue to support non-x86 platforms), choose BeOS now, or wait for a more multimedia-desktop-friendly face of Linux.

    I wish NeXT hadn't vanished so quickly...

  • Click a couple of links and you get to this one [amiga.com] that explains the whole relationship.

    It's not Amiga-like, it's Amiga - Revision 5.
  • BeOS WAS the next AmigaOS until they found QNX
    Be has Dave Haynie ect who is one of the Amiga foundes.
    Carl Sasenrath who created REBOL/REBOL2 for just bout all OS
    Amiga/Amiga PPC/ Linux/Win? Mac.......
  • I think the tick was actually the logo for Workbench.
    I liked the tick though.
    I like the boing ball also
    But I prefered the original red AMIGA logo rather than the new black
    font that Escom introduced

  • Huh? (Score:2)

    by Gromer ( 9058 )

    I just have one question. Who are they expecting to buy this stuff? I can't think of any reason, except for maybe sheer curiousity, to buy this system.

    The key to any OS is long-term credibility. People have to believe that your OS will be around in 5 years, or they won't develop for it, they won't invest in it, and they sure as hell won't buy it. There are a few different ways to get long-term credibility. QNX has none of them. You can be the 2000-pound gorilla of the OS world, so big that you are guaranteed to still be around in 5-10 years. This is how Microsoft does it. You can be Open-Sourced, thus guaranteeing that your "air supply" will never be cut off, and you cannot be killed. This is how Linux does it. You can attempt to squeeze in between these two by selling to a market that the others fail to address, a market which is guaranteed not to go away. This approach is somewhat shaky in terms of long-term credibility, which is why Be (selling to multimedia types and computer proffessionals) and Apple (selling to newbies and home users) are so shaky. QNX doesn't even have that. They seem to be pushing QNX as THE platform for QNX developers. Hmmm...

    Other than that they seem to be offering features that are already done better by other OSs. POSIX support and X windows? Linux. Broad range of hardware support? Linux. Developer tools? Windows. The only original feature they seem to be offering is a superspiffy new hi-tech kernel, and a new GUI. My custom-compiled Linux kernel is running just fine, thank you very much. OS kernels are one area where newer is definitely not better. I want my kernel to be thoroughly tested, tried-and-true. As for the GUI, words fail me. In the extremely unlikely event that QNX has discovered some key aspect of GUI design that will revolutionize my productivity, I'll just download the Gnome/Enlightenment theme for it in a couple of weeks.

    Taking all this into consideration, and reading between the lines on their web page, I think I've figured this out. Lacking any concrete market, they've somehow gotten ahold of the Amiga label, and intent to slap it onto a product that has nothing to do with Amiga (Whose real merit was its hardware, anyway) and hope that they can sell it to nostalgic Amiga-lovers. You Amiga folks out there, stay away. You're about to be saddled with an incompatible, dead-end OS with technical merit but no real-world value. Again.

  • the exciting new look-and-feel for Photon

    Notice that the site never claimed those screenshots were of the new Amiga OS. The page probably exists to throw a bone to all the Amiga enthusiasts who are grumbling about the lack of news.

    The page is a QNX/Photon advertisement. Amiga Inc. is the one responsable for selling the Amiga OS, not QNX.

  • I work with a large, mixed QNX/Linux system for my day job. This Photon GUI is all very well, but it only runs on QNX and Windows (through something called Phindows). Phindows needs a licence - QNX loves licences.

    So if I'm using a Linux/X desktop, I can't access Photon applications. There is no current Photon viewer for Linux (phindows-in-X got dropped way back, and needed a licence), plus it's closed source so you won't get to develop your own.

    It is possible to run Phindows under WINE, but WINE ain't so stable and if you lose the focus you may not get it back.

    So it begs the question asking: What the heck has Photon got to do with Linux, and why is it on Slashdot?

    Vik :v)

    I speak for nobody but myself.
  • Are there any hard numbers which compare QNX with Linux in this "Real Time" context? I'd be very keen to get hold of some hard facts here.

    If it shows a weakness in the Linux kernel, someone might improve it!

    Vik :v)
  • It's from the famous Amiga graphics demo from back in the day. What was even cooler than simply watching that demo was grabbing the top edge of the screen (it was a full screen demo) and yanking the demo up and down, exposing the Amiga desktop (known as WorkBench) in the background which was RUNNING AT A DIFFERENT RESOLUTION!!!! I still haven't seen that kind of integration in a system other than the Amiga.

    Interesting trivia: The sound from the Boing! demo was made by putting an Amiga in a U-Haul truck, whacking the side of the truck with a Whiffle-Ball bat and recording the resulting BOOM. Cool, eh?

    Bart 'Not AC, just too lazy to set up an account' Grantham
  • To be honest my first impression of the Photon interface lead me to believe that they were making a lean X clone. The desktop pane manager is a direct pull from X. The 'task' bar is a direct copy of the Win98 (yuck) task bar. I didn't see the word Amiga anywhere on the page.

    I remember seeing the Amiga when it came out, I was just a child, but I remember it well. This interface doesn't have the right to be called Amiga.

    The Amiga is defined by new ideas, new hardware, and innovative-yet-powerful ways of tying it all together. You cannot 'bitch' the Amiga for some easy Slashdot press, people will see right through it!

    That's my $.02.

    -P
  • I'll just stick with Redhat and work on an Amiga theme. On second thought, maybe I'll just continue with Windowmaker.
  • There are legal issues to this.

    I think that Slashdot would have to get written permission from the source of the images.

    --I think this will start to happen as /. becomes more and more popular, however.

  • YALD? (Score:1)

    by arielb ( 5604 )
    first commodore dies. then escom and viscorp. Gateway takes over and it seemed Amiga was still stagnating. Then Collas takes over and it seemed like there's new hope. Now this. I give up-Amiga is dead if it's Yet Another Linux Distro. Can't we have a NEW operating system instead of tinkering around with unix for the 50th million time? Imagine a hard real time kernel as the basis for a consumer OS? ha. Look, I believe in promoting linux as much as the next slashdotter but what linux needs is more focus-not more fragmentation. Ya I'm upset
  • It's not Open Source, so it sucks!
    There, I said it.
    Now back to our regular program...
    J.
  • You know, Linux is not the only POSIX OS out there! QNX bears modularity, scalability, expandililty, reliability at its best. Get to know QNX before you flame it.

  • Re:Huh? (Score:1)

    by exa ( 27197 )
    why don't you check the Amiga web site, the new gen. Amigas are based on QNX, that's what the whole story is about. And guess right, the new amiga is probably going to work on a variety of hardware. and QNX is NOT a dead-end OS. Linux sucks in terms of programming skills, flame me if you will. but QNX is a superior OS.

  • Re:Huh? (Score:1)

    by exa ( 27197 )
    okay, linux is chosen by Amiga. Instead of QNX. Fokk me.
  • I don't get it! QNX kernel seemed to rule, and Photon UI is really usable. Hey, it's great that Amiga Inc. are on the free software bandwagon. I do hope to see their distros, and perhaps a really cool desktop environment. Sorry E/GNOME folks but I still can't use the desktop on a regular basis. As an ace Amigan I'm pleased with whatever happens with Amiga. What can I do?
  • actually RTLinux which is basically a realtime extensions set to linux *is* considered a realtime OS.
  • One quote I cannot let lie...the articles mentions that QNX is often compared to Unix, Linux and BSD, and counters, saying:
    Based on 20 years of OS experience, QNX has a radically more advanced architecture.
    While Linux may be relatively young, Unix and BSD are older than that, my friend. And about the most advanced "architecture" that I've ever seen is the BeOS, which is far from old. Age means maturity and often stability, but its correlation to how "advanced" an OS is just isn't very solid.

    I also agree with the above posters: Where's the Amiga? This looks like 100% QNX software and x86 hardware.
    --Lenny
  • RTLinux and linux are different. RTLinux are the realtime extensions which allow linux to compete with the likes of OS/9, QNX etc etc...and they (RT extensions) arent as good as a full rtos designed from scratch. OS/9 is superior to QNX, imho, but thats prolly cos ive used it more. it may not havea fancy gui and other crap but its small fast and reliable and rtos stuff like real time scheduling etc.
  • In one of the screenshots there was a "media player" that had a DVD button on it. Anyone know if it really plays DVDs or not. Seems like if this OS is as POSIX compliant as QNX says it is maybe the DVD part could get ported to Linux. Then again its probably not open source...sigh...
  • I've just been told that PhinX is still available so I thought I'd put that record straight.

    We've not got it apparently because there are about 4 different versions and don't know which one we want. They all cost A$155 at the time of asking. If anyone can tell me which one works with XFree86, that'd be cool. (Of course I'll be asking those nice people at QNX technical support too).

    Vik :v)
  • Note how they avoided any references to "next generation Amiga systems", they only mention "an advanced operating system that would once again put Amigans at the forefront of technology." (which would be nothing more than a slightly modified QNX, as the rest of the article suggests). So while you could optimistically read the article like they're building a new AmigaOS for a non-mentioned new Amiga system, it seems like they'll try to sell a sufficiently hyped version of x86 QNX to the Amiga fans.

    No matter whose ploy it is, until I can see a system that isn't an x86 box with QNX and an "Amiga" sticker on it, it remains a rather pathetic attempt at one for me. I suspect that it'll take more than the purchase of the "Amiga" brand name for the purpose of marketing something under it, to get the Amiga-fans to throw away their 68k boxes and buy something new (especially if it's going to be x86-based!).

  • how bout afterstep ? its has a virtual desktop thing and next look and feel.
  • Hmmm.. If you look at the JPEG header data on these snapshots, it clearly shows that the images were processed with Photoshop 5.2. Hell, pop one into vi and see for yourself.

    If they were scaled down with Photoshop in order to be shown on the webpage, thats one thing -- but if we're to believe that these are direct 1:1 pixel snapshots of the interface, what were they doing in Photoshop?

    Things that make you go "hm......"

    Bowie
  • Dankeschön!
    Yup... seems to be working... and I can manglefish the text.
    --
    - Sean
  • Can you spell "eye-candy"? This is probably one of the best-looking GUIs I've ever seen. Honest-to-god. These people at QNX look like they have great artists and marketing people. From the whitepaper, it looks as though the system itself is pretty good too, very well-designed.

    But it's not Free Software, so it's instantly confined to a niche market. If it were Free, we'd already be porting the whole shebang to PowerPC (the "demo disk" is only for x86), writing a Scheme meta-compiler for it, rebuilding Photon to replace X, and creating a myriad of spin-off projects. But it's not Free, so it just may be dead and forgotten in five years. Oh well.
  • These days people seem far too concerned about the way things look and not enough about how they work.

    It used to be that people would just try to copy features of the Mac UI without fully understanding the thinking behind them, now it seems that even Apple isn't even doing that well.
  • what hardware you use! The programs just compile and work. Linux holds much promise for this! Hardware manufacturer's can work on making the fastest hardware; Software manufacturer's can concentrate on making killer applications - the OS should just be some forgotten enabler that just works and works.

    BeOS, QNX and all those other non-free OS's are promising cool stuff but moreso the lingering threat of proprietary lockdown. Not for me!

    Amigas introduced us to alot of interesting and advanced concepts. Most of those things are already in today's COTS systems!

    What we need is an OS that is not in the control of one proprietary vendor! The software could advance as fast as the hardware; not being reigned in by that proprietary vendor. My money is on Linux.
  • Well they seem to have gone PPC friendly recently. PPC support for
    OS3.5 (for classic Amigas) and the possibility of the new Amiga
    Operating Environment (as they are calling it) being ported back to G3
    accelerated classic Amigas.
    Although Transmeta is also a strong contender

  • Re:Huh? (Score:3)

    by kma ( 2898 ) on Thursday July 08, 1999 @02:26PM (#1812728) Homepage Journal
    Ah. So you didn't read the press release.

    The key to any OS is long-term credibility.

    QNX has been around since 1980. 19 years ago, I figure Linus Torvalds was hacking helloworld in AppleSoft BASIC, maybe. Plenty of long-term credibility, I'd think.

    Other than that they seem to be offering features that are already done better by other OSs.

    Real-time. QNX owns real-time UNIX, and always has. SGI and Sun didn't weren't building real-time systems worthy of the name until '95-ish. If you're building a system that lowers the control rods into a nuclear reactor in response to temperature, and a 1ms delay will cause a meltdown, would you turn to Linux? Oops! I'm sorry, you just irradiated a large chunk of North America. Perhaps you'll consider QNX next time 'round :-)

    Notice that all the engineering that goes into making a real-time system can help out with other stuff too. E.g., those low low dispatch times presumably help multimedia apps.
  • Overzealous aren't I? It's hard to remember the rest of the world sometimes - like when people always ask for ZIP codes and States on web forms.

    I think perhaps I need to increase the dose and lie down in a darkened room until my Linux glands calm down :)

    Vik :v)
  • Just a thought, but most of the snapshot programs I've seen output to lossless formats...
  • It's nice to see a -consistent- looking GUI for a change. The icons, the buttons, the sliders, they all appear to be created by a single artist, or at least by a well managed team. I havn't seen that kind of consistency since Kieth Ohlfs left NeXT. (He's now at PixelSight [pixelsight.com] if you care...)

  • Is that you baby? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Baby? Is that you, my little Amiga? Oh my GOD how you've grown!!! Come here... what new things do you have in store for me. What new wonders and excitement do you have, my Angel of an OS. It was you who got me into this whole computer world long ago... and you can bet you'll be mine again... finally... at long last. My Amiga is comming back....
  • The Amiga was born in a time when the OS didn't matter as much - and indeed most game programmers found it an unnecessary slowdown and just bypassed it. :-) But it's got an essence most of today's OSes lack in some measure or another - consistent user interface, speed, responsiveness, shell and GUI living side by side in harmony, etc. I mean, many of the problems KDE and Gnome are trying to solve in X, the Amiga solved a decade ago.

    That said, everyone defines Amiga-like differently - and I don't define Amigalike the same way as some of the obnoxious "amiga r00lz d00d" purists who think UAE is blasphemous. I think the Amiga - or whatever it ends up reborn as - can exist independent of its hardware (so long as it doesn't end life on the shelf as "yet another failed x86 OS" alongside OS/2 and NeXTSTEP/x86).

    But I have also been hearing some sweet things about the new hardware we're getting next year... :-)

  • Re:GUI (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let's get some things straight...

    1. The whole new OS is being built on QNX, not just the GUI.

    2. The GUI shown is Photon, QNX's GUI. The Amiga GUI will most likely be different.

    Do some homework first.

  • Re:Leading Realtime OS? (Score:3)

    by ajedgar ( 67399 ) on Thursday July 08, 1999 @10:54AM (#1812776)
    They are the leading realtime OS for the x86 platform.

    The Amiga project is based on their new Neutrino kernel which runs on x86, PPC, MIPS(and whatever the Amiga is going to run on :-)

    From their corporate backgrounder at: http://www.qnx.com/company/compover.html

    "We lead the realtime industry not only in innovation but in experience as well. No other realtime OS vendor has over 18 years on the x86 platform. As a result, no other realtime OS offers more options for this environment. (We are now porting our advanced OS technology to several other platforms.)

    QNX also leads the industry in marketshare. According to a recent Emerging Technologies report, "QNX Software Systems has the largest realtime OS market share in the Intel x86 marketplace". IDC Consulting and First Technology discovered similar findings. According to their recent Industry Report, QSSL has almost 22% of the marketshare for self-hosted development environments while the next largest share held by a realtime OS competitor is just over 11%."
  • > They would have been smarter to put that much
    > effort into a vesion of KDE or GNOME for QNX.
    > Either of them could be made to look a helluva
    > lot like that desktop. And since QNX is still
    > proprietary, it wouldn't really hurt them to
    > have a GPLed desktop on top of it.

    Could it be that they want a Desktop that works?

    While their version numbers might have climed past 1.0 neither Gnome nor KDE are ready for comercial release. To say that they are rough around the edges is putting it mildly.

    If they are serious about competing in the OS market. They need to have a GUI that is slick. (KDE does not look slick. Gnome looks slick but can't be considered slick because of its performance and unreliability.) The success of their OS is going to be based on first impressions. A User that walks away with a bad taste in his mouth because the GUI locked up are not goig to give them a second look. Certainly not with all of the alternative OSs that are now available (os/2, BeOS, Free BSD, NT, etc...).

  • So what exactly are we getting? (Score:5)

    by Tiger ( 9272 ) on Thursday July 08, 1999 @11:04AM (#1812781)
    So what exactly are we getting?

    That whole thing sounded like a sales pitch for QNX and their windowing stitch-on, Photon.

    Gods, I have such a love-hate relationship with QNX. I think it'll make an amazing foundation to a new OS, but on the other hand I've developed under QNX for the last year and I hate it - it's a RTOS and gods help you if you aren't writing a specialised realtime app for thousands of installations. And I don't see much in that press release telling you what you get that you can't already have:

    - QNX OS foundation - The QNX OS is already available for the x86. (A license'll cost you, at last check, $1K+ cdn unless you can get major volume discounts. A new pricing structure, actually, and the straw that broke our little software house's back and is pushing us to a free, full-featured OS that starts with an 'L')

    - Photon Micro-GUI - I've never used their Photon. We have no licenses for it. QNX likes licenses. (Did you know that QNX requires a separate license for their TCP/IP package?) Oh, but Photon does already exist anyway.

    - x86 architecture. So we're using the same machine guts too.

    What Amiga? where? Is this going to be QNX on x86 with a slightly enhanced GUI with its own look-and-feel - and the Amiga label.

    Another thought. QNX charges big bucks for their OS. More big bucks for development licenses. A new Amiga is going to be a consumer machine, right? So if this wonderful new OS /is/ different, and /is/ built on top of the QNX OS, what the heck are they going to rip out to justify charging consumer OS prices for Amiga and industry OS prices for their existing clients?

    Of course, I may just be ranting, after spending another month working on a minor release number on QNX rather than the next major release on Linux. So take what I say with a grain of salt.

    --Tiger
  • Might I refer you to freshmeat.net?
  • I think (last time I read) that www.qnx.com runs on QNX. I guess it's not that great under heavy load since it's slashdotted already. Anyone got the images in their cache so I don't have to wait until tomorrow to view them?

    perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-: ,hacker Perl another Just)'

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