Steve sipped his magic water, brow furrowed, listening with his head cocked to the side to the blather the record execs across the table were vomiting at him. The barfing had been ongoing for the better part of three hours, and Steve was bored. As he set his water bottle down, his mind meandered from the meeting to more interesting things.
Dammit, Steve thought, this is my boardroom. It's about time they heard my speech!
I work for a company that uses QNX, a real-time Unix-like operating system for embedded devices such as car computers, phones, medical equipment, and air traffic monitoring systems. I personally use QNX to develop QNX apps, as there's a self-hosted version of QNX for Intel that developers can download for free. It's essentially a free desktop operating system, as only the development kit is pay-for.
We work with several QNX engineers from time to time and on their last trip in they showed us a preview of the next major upgrade to the system, QNX 6.4. Like its predecessors it ran on Intel, and they said this update will take advantage of Intel's new processor architecture as well as a few new platforms. When I pressed them about it, they said they were 99% certain that QNX 6.4 would run on Apple's new Intel Macintosh.
I asked him the how and when, and he said that Apple's new Macs are going to be very PC-like, and if they can run a stock install of Windows, QNX won't have any problem supporting them either. He said Apple promised the first Intel Macs in the second half of '06, which is when QNX 6.4 would be released. He also said that QNX has at least one Developer Transition Kit that QNX 6.3 runs just fine on.
Things are looking exciting as Apple will instantly have a handful of good operating systems to run on its new Intel hardware. QNX is a good addition, and I wanted to make sure the word got out. We weren't under NDA and the QNX guys said to go ahead and tell anyone we wanted, and that an announcement was forthcoming soon anyway. So there's at least one embedded real-time Unix-like system for new Intel Macs.
Last month, I downloaded and installed QNX Momentics Development Suite 6.3, which is a full QNX Neutrino install for Intel with a temporary license for the commercial Momentics Development Suite that lasts for a month. After working with it for the last several weeks, I have some impressions of the system, both good and bad, that I'd like to share. But let's begin at the beginning, as they say, and go from there.
I was ready to boot and install QNX within an hour of first navigating to the product evaluation program page. Downloading the 500+ MB ISO file is a cinch, including the sign-up that gets your 30-day Momentics license sent to you. After that it's all just burning the image to disc. My license email came before the ISO was finished transferring and the burning went without incident.
Installing QNX was even simpler than downloading it. One thing fans of non-Windows operating systems will note, though, is the lack of a partition utility. The QNX installer is pretty obtuse, allowing you a choice of the whole disk or some fraction of it. This means you should have the disk pre-partitioned before you install QNX. In my case, I was taking the whole disk so the above was moot.
The actual install took about 10 minutes from boot to reboot and the only pause was when I had to enter my Momentics license. As an interesting note, if you choose not to enter your license the rest of the system still starts and runs, and only the Momentics suite is disabled. From what I saw in the installer, it's not even installed without the license. Effectively, QNX distributes a free real-time Unix-like operating system!
Booting was fast, less than 20 seconds. One can use QNX in text-only mode as well as in Proton, QNX's windowing system. Proton's integration with the rest of the system is almost as tight as the Windows or Mac OS X GUI, though it's not as polished. The GUI starts by default, where one enters root with no password to log on. From there you can make your own user account, which I recommend.
After logging into my own account I explored the system. The Proton system uses a panel at the right side of the screen as well as a dock at the bottom. The dock at the bottom is pretty standard, with a Start-like menu and minimized windows; the panel at right is where one can find links to programs, workspaces, and system performance monitors that give real-time feedback on processor, memory, and network usage.
QNX's applications all run very well and work seamlessly with the rest of the system. I really have no complaints. They even have a port of FireFox running as fast as ever for standards-compliant browsing. QNX's file manager is quick and gives an accurate view of the file system, and their software manager easily beats anything Linux has to offer. And everything launched in under five seconds.
My first real disappointment began when I opened the terminal and began playing with the command line. A lot of standard utilities are there, like uname, but a lot are also missing like the ever-important top and du. There's also no sudo and their version of ps is woefully out of date. If QNX wants to make a serious desktop platform, they ought sync their userland with a popular Linux or with FreeBSD as Apple does.
Another area that underwhelmed me was performance. The test system used for this article was a 3.6 GHz Pentium4 with HyperThreading turned on, 1GB RAM, and large 200GB hard drive. Performance felt identical on the second system I installed it on, a 450 MHz Pentium II with 128MB RAM. Windows XP was several times faster on this same hardware, as were several Linux distros, FreeBSD 5.4, and Zeta 1.0.
When I investigated why QNX would perform so slowly, I found — thanks to several users in various QNX forums — that QNX scheduling is much different from a typical desktop system due to its real-time nature. While real-time means that there's a guaranteed response time, this doesn't necessarily ensure lightning-quick desktop responsiveness. I'd recommend QNX allow switching between a few different scheduling schemes.
Support is another front that's confusing. A service pack was released a year after 6.3 was launched, but there's no word on whether there's another service pack in the coming. Launching the software manager is the best a user will get, and with only one service pack, the user feels left in limbo. Understandably, paying users get great support, but more updates for the software itself would be appropriate.
Overall, I give QNX 6.3 three-and-a-half stars out of five. It's stable and does not crash, installs quickly, and is easy to sit down and start using daily. Its unpredictable desktop performance, lack of a rich Unix userland, and simplistic installer are all places the developers at QNX Software Systems would be wise to focus on for the next version, however. Until then it's not quite ready for prime-time.
Ever since Be, Inc. was dissolved and its BeOS technology was turned over to the Palm OS charnel house in '01, Be fans have been eagerly awaiting a successor to their favorite operating system, with very few rays of hope since. Earlier this month, however, yellowTAB released their BeOS descendent Zeta.
Based on Dano—an unreleased BeOS 5 update that managed to sidestep Palm's meatgrinder—Zeta has been in development since early '02 and progressed rapidly due to its direct lineage from Be and so has a huge lead over other projects like Haiku, PhOS, and BlueEyedOS. Have Be fans finally found their savior, or is this just another failed attempt at reviving the dead?
Read on: this review will help you decide exactly that.
Zeta Quick Facts
Release Date: June 09, 2005 Company: yellowTAB GmbH Price: $129 ($99 sale price)
Zeta comes in a professional-looking DVD case and its packaging and manuals are surprisingly easy to read having come from a German company. And happily, installing it is painless and relatively fast, improving upon BeOS 5's installation procedure. After booting from the CD, I was at the install screen in under fifty-five seconds.
The installer first requires you to choose a language. I chose American English, though they offer localizations for British English, Japanese, German, and about twenty other languages. After the language switch, which takes about a minute, there's a standard EULA and then the hard drive partitioner. Oddly, you can't delete partitions, but resizing is supported.
A full installation takes about a gigabyte of space and around seventy minutes to finish, though times will vary with hardware. You can choose to install the BeOS bootloader. If Zeta is to be your primary operating system, I recommend this option. It can handle Windows too, but not Linux. Some might find this troublesome though I think it's just fine — after using Zeta, Linux will seem downright neanderthal.
Zeta boots fast, in about ninety seconds, and delivers you straight to the preferences program. Hardware support is excellent and everything came up roses with my system, so I had very little to configure save for personal preferences. In contrast to BeOS 5, the preferences are altogether in one program rather than seperate panels, analogous to System Preferences in Mac OS X.
The icons in Zeta still look the same as they did five years ago but the rest of the GUI looks like a refugee from an early Nineties techno album cover — the windows and buttons are now shiny, polished, and plastic and the yellow color used for the window and tabs is entirely too bold. Because of this the GUI is much more obtrusive than it used to be. Fortunately, you can switch back to the matte finish of BeOS 5.
Well, you should be able to. I also tried using the Windows, Amiga, and Mac OS styles as well but had no luck. Perhaps trying to use five different GUI skins was too much for the operating system? On top of that, some windows that dimmed in the background wouldn't return to their normal coloration after being selected and the Deskbar would grey out randomly. The GUI certainly didn't earn yellowTAB any points here.
Zeta certainly comes with a lot of multimedia applications, both updated versions of Be apps, the original Be apps, and third-party apps in various states of antiquity. Since I'm not a very multimedia-oriented person, most of these were lost on me, but I can comment on some more general programs a typical home user is likely to be interested in.
Instant messaging is a mess. First, the only supported protocol is AIM, which is fine most of the time, but there is absolutely no Yahoo!, or MSN support for when you might need it. Furthermore, the AIM clients in Zeta — one old one from Be, one new one from yellowTAB — support none of the newer AIM features and are buggy and crash a lot. Don't trust Zeta if you like to chat.
Browsing is handled by Mozilla 1.0.3. It launched in fifteen seconds and took only five seconds to render the Trollaxor.com home page. Everything in the browsing experience works fine, except for one show-stopping bug: Opening local HTML files causes Mozilla to crash. This embarrassing bug shouldn't have been allowed to leave the labs unsquashed, but somehow did. For shame, yellowTAB.
Review System Specifications
Processor: 233 MHz Pentium Pro (2x) Memory: 512MB 60ns EDO RAM Hard Drive: 40GB EIDE
My scanner, an Acer 320U "Prisa," was unsupported. Upon looking at the hardware page on yellowTAB's site, however, my initial curiosity was met with disappointment and surprise. Zeta supports only five scanners, and even the second Pentium Pro in my system doesn't work as yellowTAB has yet to support my motherboard. In five years, Zeta's hardware support is sadly nowhere near what it should be.
The lack of support for my other hardware quickly became infuriating: The scroll wheel in my mouse was useless, my digital video camera wasn't one of the three that Zeta had drivers for, and my monitor gave me a headache with its 50KHz refresh. Zeta has had years to write drivers for new hardware but instead has barely tip-toed beyond BeOS 5. In a word, Zeta's hardware support is unacceptable.
Zeta ships with bash, a popular Open Source shell, and a host of standard Unix utilities. While having Unix at your fingertips is nice, it seems more like a kludge than part of the system, and has since the early days of BeOS. yellowTAB pretty much kept Unix support at status quo, so don't expect the integration you get with Mac OS X. Perhaps they should start using FreeBSD as a reference platform.
Of course we're all familiar with Be's filesystem querying capabilities, which was revolutionary in the late Nineties but at this point is ubiquitous on the desktop since Mac OS X Tiger and Windows Vista. Only Linux has yet to catch up with this functionality. This used to be a killer app for BeOS, but now isn't worth writing home about. It's barely even worth writing a full paragraph.
Zeta recognizes MMX, SSE, 3DNow!, HyperThreading, and x86-64/EMT64. Zeta is just now starting to optimize for the above processor features, though it's still really a 586-and-better system. It's rumored to execute as much of the kernel as possible from L2 cache. Zeta is still only 32-bit, however, and 64-bit processor support is likely not to happen for years, if ever.
Looking at things from a Mac OS X or Windows XP standpoint, Zeta lacks polish, hardware support, and a lot of thoughtful features. Part of this is due to reviving the BeOS from its moribund state, while another factor is the small development team who simply can't compete with the 200+ engineers Apple and Microsoft have behind their offerings.
If you're a long-time Be warrior, however, Zeta is the only game in town at the moment. Haiku, an Open Source project to recreate BeOS 5, is still in developmental stages. BlueEyedOS is stalled indefinitely and PhOS has no future, legal or otherwise, in sight. Even though Zeta feels like the first faltering step of a bedridden patient after five years, it's the only one taking any steps at all.
For my senior project, I chose to design my own Unix distribution tailor-built for running web logs like Slash and Scoop. I had my choices of operating systems to build on, and after several false starts and unforeseen roadblocks, I'm well into this project. I felt it may benefit future computer science majors to document my progress so far, so here's my story.
For an upstart operating system, BeOS hit a lot of marks: It outran Mac OS and Windows on their own hardware, supported modern operating system features before anyone else did, piqued Apple's interest as the replacement for Mac OS, ideologically succeeded the Amiga platform, started a rivalry with embedded operating system QNX, and did all of the above while booting in under thirty seconds.
Such innovation does not always equal success, however, and Be, Inc. was liquidated by late '02, its intellectual property being swallowed up by Palm (and now held by PalmSource, Inc.). The last release of the BeOS was in 2000, and in five years the computer industry has leapt ahead, while Be fans remain in limbo on an increasingly outdated system with no hope for reprisal.
Or is there?
