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 \Program Files\qnx 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.