Questions from a complete newbie

GENERAL Help
1

Hi! I’m really new to QNX, I don’t know much yet and I can’t find an FAQ or anything, nor can I find basically any info about it, so here are all of my questions:

  • Does EOL also mean “free”? I downloaded QNX 6.4 off of archive.org, and the QNX website says that it’s EOL and offers a free download, but if I distribute it for free, will I get a cease and desist letter from Blackberry in the mail?
  • Where can I get programs for QNX? Is there some sort of package manager or central repository? Even a site maybe?
  • How do I learn QNX? How can I really get familiar with the terminal and the like?
  • Is there a tutorial on how to code for QNX? I wanna learn programming and making applications for QNX seems like an interesting goal to work towards.
  • How can I compile things for QNX? I can’t find anything on it. Is there a port of make for QNX?
  • Can I run QNX 6.4 on a 64 bit machine?
  • What is “BSP”?

Sorry if these are dumb questions that are addressed elsewhere, I really just don’t know that much right now and I can’t find places to learn more that aren’t extremely confusing Blackberry pages targeted towards corporate consumers or a page about hacking the original 1.44MB demo floppy that hasn’t been updated since 2008.

2

You can get 3rd party programs that have been ported to QNX here:
http://myqnx.com/download/group.html?programid=8066&sort=bydate

BSP stands for Board Support Package. It’s mean to boot QNX on a specific set of hardware (CPU, Video, Disk Controller etc). You might for example see a BSP for running QNX on say a Raspberry Pi or a BSP for running QNX on a non-Intel processor motherboard.

I am not sure what you downloaded contains the development environment (ie a compiler, make utility etc). It could just be a a runtime version of QNX meant to run already compiled programs. If you run ‘qcc’ from the command prompt what do you see? If qcc isn’t there it means you don’t have the development environment.

Tim

3

QNX 6.4 is outdated and will not run on modern hardware. Current QNX version is 7.1.

There is no central repository for QNX applications.

Go to QNX website to get learning resources.

A BSP (Board support Package), like in any system, is a software layer that make the QNX OS work on a hardware.

To be able to compile for QNX, you pay to get a license and access to dev tools. Looks like there are exceptions (academic and open source ?).

4

Forgot to say, you can get a one month free dev license from QNX WEB site.

5

EOL does not mean free. It means End of Life. If you are developing on the system, you can expect no support even if you are willing to pay. If you distribute it you might get a cease and desist letter or you might be sued or most likely they won’t notice at all and will leave you alone.

The development system comes with a help program that has complete manuals. This is not the best way to learn QNX. There are a couple books by Rob Krten. This one is a place to start.

If you have the development system you can use the compiler and make.

You can run QNX 6.4 on a 64 bit cpu that supports 32 bit. You can’t run it in 64 bit mode. For that you have to purchse a license for QNX 7.0+.