Is there any two-pane commander-like file manager for QNX Neutrino 6.5.0 (no matter if only Shell “pseudographic” or Photon graphic version)?
Has Midnight Commander (‘mc’ from the shell) been removed from QNX 6.5? It was still available as of 6.32 and I can’t imagine what would be different given the file system is the same.
I can zip up and put it on here if it wasn’t installed on 6.5 and you can try it.
Tim
Thanks Tim, but cannot find mc in QNX 6.5.0.
What is the “method” of installing some open source apps into QNX 6.5.0 + Photon PC from the web?
I am studying everything on the web (running 30-day Evaluation so time is important) but don’t quite understand things like:
- pkgsrc
- bootstrap etc.
Could you please explain where to find (download) some open source apps (build from source or already built binaries) for QNX 6.5.0 + Photon?
And how to install them?
I have downloaded 6.5.0_bootstrap.tar.gz. Is this a graphic “Photon installer” or a kind of “Terminal/console installer”?
- where to place it?
- then unzip and untar (tar -xf) - to what directory(ies)?
- and then?
Pilotek,
We are still running 6.3.2 here at my company. That version of QNX had and still uses a graphical installation tool under Photon to install pre-built utilities like Midnight Commander. So I am 100% not an authority on 6.5 and everything I know has been gleaned from reading posts from Mario and others who are using 6.5.
Pkgsrc
This is simply a repository for all the open source code for 3rd party software/utilities for QNX plus some internally developed software QNX has chosen to make available. It’s using SVN revision control system.
community.qnx.com/sf/projects/pkgsrc/
It was made available like this so users could get the source code for their favorite apps and modify them if needed (ie for specific hardware or different processors etc) and then compile them rather than simply provide binaries which may not work on all hardware.
Pkgsrc Bootstrap tar file
This is simply the source code compiled already into binaries. For most people this is all they need because they don’t want to actually compile the code they just want to run it and if it works they are happy.
You mentioned you already downloaded this file.
Its not an actual installer at all. It’s simply a zip file (tar file) containing tons of programs. You can pick and chose what you want from it. One way is to simply list the contents in the console window with the ‘tar -t’ command. Then use ‘tar -xf’ to grab what you want as you noted. The other way is to use winrar under Windows which can read tar archives and you can then graphically drag/drop what you want on a usb thumb drive and then put that usb drive in your QNX machine. At the very least I’d suggest you use winrar (or 7Zip) to view the archive under windows rather than in the console.
As to where it installs. I haven’t looked in the actual archive. But normally the paths are stored with the file. mc on my system is in opt/bin. So in the tar file you’d see /opt/bin/mc and if you untar in QNX it will already place the file in the opt/bin directory for you (you may have to manually add /opt/bin to your SHELL path so that you can type mc from the command line and I assume you know how to do that). If you go the winrar route you’ll have to copy the file to the correct location potentially creating directories and definitely setting the execute bit (chmod a+x).
One caveat that maybe Mario or someone can chime in on: Many 3rd party stuff under 6.3.2 required certain libraries to be installed. The 6.3.2 installer auto-magically got those dependencies installed for you when you used it. I have no idea how that’s resolved with the tar archive. My guess is that you simply have to wait for the error message at run time to figure out what else you need then install that and try again until it runs.
Tim
Tim, thank you very much.
Our enthusiasm of these several days when exploring QNX 6.5.0 30-Day Evaluation (and succeeding in making to run e.g. Ethernet NIC (by adding it’s PID into particular enumerator), then TCP/IP, connect to internet, QNX6’s using all 4 cores of the PC, making running Phindows etc.) was now “knocked on knees” by information on deprecation of Photon (and consequent no Photon graphic “drivers” next support and deprecation of self-hosted development) in next release of QNX6.
We are very sad about it… how can QSS “scrap” all the desktop “graphic” users that have used all versions of QNX for years and invested a lot of development effort to their QNX2/4/6 systems.
I am sad, too. But to be honest, I wondered… “all” the desktop users? How many companies are there that still use QNX the “non-embedded way” today? 5? 10? And how many runtime licenses do they buy each? 10? 100? Compare this to the big Automotive customers that buy 100,000 or even 1,000,000 licenses. Even if they get a much better price, it’s still much more money for QNX.
Greediness? Surely not. It’s a matter of a fact that maintaining an OS nowadays takes much more resources than it took 20 years ago.
And there is a very good alternative to Photon - Qt. Which is much more powerful, actively maintained, spans multiple OSs, etc.