QNX and EeePC

QNX USERS QNX6 - OS
1

Hello,
After a long time not using QNX, I’m interested in returning to the fold, and also considering the purchase of an EeePC. Basically, what are my chances of getting QNX to run on this thing? Bearing in mind there is no optical drive.

The only hardware support I would want is the screen and Wifi, not fussy about sound or the SD card slow, or indeed the webcam, but maybe I could investigate those after I got the basics working.

Any ideas about how to even get QNX onto it? Anyone tried it?

Cheers

Garry

2

What are the specs? I can analyze them line by line but I think wifi is not happening.
And welcome back, thegman

3

Hello, thanks for the welcome… :slight_smile:

I can’t find a huge amount of info on the tech specs, except the Wifi chipset is Atheros, a quick Google leads me to believe that this might be another name for the Prism chipset, which means that it may just work under QNX.

I’m willing to buy an EeePC to try this out, but any ideas how to even load QNX onto it? Basically it’s got Ethernet, Wifi and SD slot as inputs, none of those seem particularly useful for installing QNX.

As an aside, as there are Linux drivers for this Wifi card, and indeed all the other devices, how much does that help in creating drivers for QNX? I speak as someone who has never written a driver in his life, but written a lot of C for other stuff.

4

Does the device has USB, if so then you might be able to boot from it, or maybe if you can pool the SSD from it you might be able to install on it via another PC.

The fact that you’ve not written drivers is not a big deal, but the fact that you may not have deal with a hardware devices can slow you down. Also have the source to Linux in my experience doesn’t help that much because most of the time this stuff is VERY hard to comprehend mainly if you don’t have the specification of the device.

5

Hmmm, yes it has USB, but whether then internal flash disk is available from USB externally, I think that’s unlikely. I’d guess from a convenience point of view, Asus have likely made the internal flash disk appear to be a normal hard disk.

I think one can plug in a USB CD-ROM to restore the default Linux installation, but not sure if QNX would be OK with that.

6

I have done QNX install on none-usb/none-cdrom windows machines. :slight_smile:

  1. Use some patition tool to get some space on harddisk for your QNX.
  2. Download the QNX ISO (The Neutrino one, not windows one).
  3. Install VMWare, and build a VM machine, which will boot from CDROM. (and the virtual
    CDROM is using the QNX ISO).
  4. Make sure in this virtual machine, you “add a harddisk”, but choose “Use Physical Drive”.
  5. Boot the virtual machine, it will start the ISO (and allow you to install), and it also have
    access to your local harddisk.
7

According to this:

qnx.com/developers/hardware_ … wireless=1

I fairly wide variety of chipsets are supported, which surprises me. When I get a chance, I’ll run the live cd on my wireless laptop and see.

8

You may also want to look at the newly posted core_network source and “milestone build” binaries.

9

Unhelpfully, my laptop has a Dell TrueMobile thing which QNX failed to detect.

10

There is a difference between detected and supported. The new stack (io-pkt) isn’t actually available in binary form yet (only source form from Foundry27). I would bet that your chip is supported if you use io-pkt…