I have an old Pentium 266… I’ve been trying to decide on qnx or linux (not *bsd) for it… I intend to use it as a file-server (basic spare IDE drives), hooked up to a router with my other systems… I want it to achieve these goals:
speed and a gui… if I want info on something I want a graphical web browser to find it, etc etc… I’ve already tried the 6.2.1 iso as a livecd, and it looks good so far
stability & reliability… the system probably won’t really be under heavy load, but I don’t want to have to reboot it often or worry about it crashing and corrupting data (no raid).
ability to share files to windows and linux clients
That’s really about it… I’m an intermidiate linux user, and I’d have no problem setting up linux on it, but I would like to try qnx if it will meet these goals.
I’m not trying to imply that qnx will do a better job. I’m really just looking for an excuse to try out qnx… if it will do the job well, I’d like to try it. I’m not interested in dual-booting my box to use qnx… The fileserver will be pretty basic, and the hardware isn’t powerful, so I thought it might make a good opportunity.
QNX 6 can do the job. There are NFS server (part of QNX PE), samba server (on the 3rd party software CD). So you should be able to share files to Windows/Linux. There are also mozilla/firefox web browser ported to QNX 6 (search this site for details). Photon MicroGUI is fast (if you have a supported video card).
As for speed/stability, you will just have to try out
New to QNX, and your post is re-assuring. I have an old P75 with 48 megs of RAM that I want to turn into a fileserver also. I downloaded the 6.2.1 image, but in the install notes, it mentions that this version requires 256 MB of RAM and 1.5 Gig of disk. I always assumed that QNX was “lightweight”.
They are referring to running eclipse, and they are very serious about those being the minimum in that case. But if you simply want to serve up files your box will work (although it ain’t gonna be a speed daemon).
To speed up that p75 dont run photon, just run it in console mode and it’ll definetely speed up quite a bit (imagine a 486 with 16 meg ram trying to run linux w/xfree86 and again w/out xfree86 and you have a huge difference in speed). Using lynx/links for web browsers, midnight commander as your file manager/editor/ftp client, apache etc, and that box will make a fine server.
I have an old 200Mhx MMX / 64 Megs and I am actually testing the qnx 6.2.1 nc
Photon, voyager and all native coded works well.
Mozilla etc exit sometime for not known reasons.
FTP server is SLOW very very very slow
(100 mbits net card into a private lan with only one client)
Now I am going to test samba, apache-php and to recompile vlc to try the video streaming.
64MB of RAM is not enough to run Mozilla, the native Photon apps are generally designed to run inside less RAM, and will tend to be more reliable inside that little RAM.
