Issue 138 January 2002
EXPLORING QNX NEUTRINO

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Start • Installation • Tools • Hareware • Examples • What's Missing?• What You Get • Sources & PDF

INSTALLATION

Let’s get started by exploring the x86 installation. I’ve installed QNX on generic 1997 PC hardware, a Dell Dimension 4100, Dell Inspiron 7500 notebook, as well as the PC/104 platform (Panther/K6 from Versa-Logic (see Photo 1)). As with any installation, there are quirks. Here are some recommendations if you want to get started quickly.

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Photo 1—This is the Panther K6, low-power (no cooling fan) board on a PC104 stack with a Sealevel serial card, all housed in the VersaLogic development box. Note the IDE to CompactFlash adapter in the foreground.

First, get a second x86 platform and install QNX as the only OS on that platform. With a Pentium processor, PCI bus, PS2 mouse, IDE hard disk, and 32-MB RAM, you shouldn’t have any problems with the installation. Use a keyboard/ video/mouse (KVM) switch to avoid having to give up desktop space. If your old hardware isn’t supported by QNX, look for supported hardware on eBay. I picked up a fully supported VGA card for $20 on eBay.

If you don’t want to use a second box, I suggest installing QNX into a Windows partition with a FAT file system. This way, you won’t have to work those ugly issues with the boot sector and will avoid the possibility of corrupting your system. Sure, you’ll have to use a boot floppy to boot to QNX. But the floppy isn’t required after the OS is running, so you won’t suffer performance problems because of floppy I/O. On my Dell Dim-ension, I use the Windows boot loader to select between Win2k and Linux. If I want to boot QNX, I use the QNX boot floppy.

My third recommendation is to ante up the $30 for the QNX CD. Yes, you can save a few bucks by downloading the 29-MB Windows installation, but it includes only the basic operating system. It does not include all of the packages, so you’ll have to install the packages over the Internet. The download for the CDISO image is 442 MB. It is much easier and quicker to do the installation with the QNX CD.

It’s always good advice to make a QNX boot floppy to use for recovering from problems that might occur after making changes to your system.

I have one last suggestion. I don’t like to boot directly into the Photon GUI because it becomes difficult to maneuver in the GUI if you have a problem with your mouse (like I did with a Logitech bus mouse). Fortunately, there are keyboard shortcuts you can use. The "Windows" key pulls up the menu, and then you can use the cursor keys to select items from the menu. From a window, you can use the tab, space, and return keys to select the various menu items. To avoid this, I prefer to boot into a terminal interface and then start Photon with the ph command.

You can install QNX to its own partition, but you’ll have to work through the boot sector issues. The problems you may have depend on six conditions: which operating system(s) you have, the order in which it was installed, which boot loader you want to use, if you have more than one hard disk, the size of your hard disk, and the age of your BIOS.

There isn’t room here to cover all of the possible combinations (Win9x/ NT/2k, Linux, QNX, etc.). A newsgroup archive site (such as groups. google.com) can be a good place to search for this information. For example, go to comp.os. qnx and search for "dual boot." If you decide to install QNX on its own partition, you’ll have to boot your system from the CD.

If your BIOS doesn’t support booting from a CD, you may use the Make Floppy menu item displayed in Photo 2. After you boot QNX, you may complete the installation from the CD to a separate hard disk partition. If you have problems with the installation, try pressing the escape key at the beginning of the installation when prompted. This option uses a boot image that does not use DMA and may solve some installation problems.

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Photo 2—You can install QNX Neutrino from Windows to a Windows FAT partition. The installation main window also provides an option to make boot floppy disks, should you want to install the system on a QNX partition and your system does not support booting from a CD-ROM.

To avoid discussing issues with boot loaders, let’s explore the installation of QNX to a Windows FAT partition. After inserting the QNX CD under Windows, the procedure will start if the CD auto-run feature is enabled. The installation procedure detects which Windows OS you are using. If you’re running NT or Win2k, the installation informs you about installing to a FAT file system and booting from a floppy. If you proceed with the installation to the FAT32 partition, you’ll be prompted to insert a floppy disk.

You may reboot into QNX after the installation is complete. After booting, QNX will locate the installation on hard disk. QNX mounts a QNX file system that is located in a file on the FAT file system. This whole procedure is fully explained in the readme.txt file on the QNX Neutrino CD.

After booting into QNX, you will see a log on screen within the Photon GUI. Next, a welcome screen appears, which will provide an introduction and overview of the system (upper left-hand corner of Photo 3a). Photo 3a shows the Photon GUI with several windows open, including the Voyager web browser, calculator, and a terminal window.

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Photo 3a—Once you have booted QNX Neutrino and started the Photon GUI, you’ll see a number of familiar applications, including a web browser (Voyager), calculator, console, and online help.

One of the first things to do is configure your network. You can use the network configuration tool from the shelf. The shelf is the menu shown in the enlarged view in Photo 3b. The network configuration tool is a front-end to phlip, the Photon TCP/IP, and dial-up configuration utility.

Photo 3b—The Launch push button in the lower left corner provides access to a menu of commands, (called the shelf). From the shelf, you can configure most application settings. (Click here to enlarge)

It should start with Devices, Dial-ups, and Network tabs (see Photo 4). If you don’t have a Devices tab, it means that the network driver did not automatically start. But, this isn’t proof that your hardware isn’t supported, rather, it probably means QNX couldn’t do it automatically. You’ll have to troubleshoot the network start up.

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Photo 4—From the shelf, you can configure the network settings. If there is a Devices tab, it means that the system has automatically recognized your network card during the boot process. If this tab is missing, you’ll have to manually start the driver for your network card, assuming that it is supported.

The debug process is outlined in the QNX welcome screen, under "Setting Up Networking" and "Quick Start—Direct Internet Connection." The latter brings up an HTML page in the browser and provides a "Network Troubleshooting" section. You can see if the driver is running in a terminal window by piping the output from the process status command (ps) to grep and searching for io-net as follows:

ps | grep io-net

You can use nettrap to detect network cards and start the driver, but if nettrap didn’t start the driver originally, you’ll have to do some manual work. Compare your network driver chipset to the supported chipsets displayed on the QNX web site. When you find an appropriate driver, you can force the system to use that driver using io-net.

In any event, the network configuration tool allows you to assign a fixed IP address or have one assigned using DHCP. At this point, you should have a functional desktop machine. Likely, next you’ll want to invoke the package manager to install the various other utilities and tools, like a C and C++ compiler.