Saturday, July 29, 2006
KOHA on QNX
QNX OS is a real time operating system developed for x86 and embedded platforms. My first ecounter with this operating system was when I evaluated its floppy version where in the operating system (kernel + generic drivers), a neat graphical user interface, a web browser, a webconfig tool, and a lot of computing stuff are fitted into a 1.44mb floppy disk drive. From what i remember, it ran smoothly on my old cyrix I machine with 16mb of ram. The operating system is not opensource nor free but students and enthusiasts are free to evaluate, test and port codes on to it. The QNX company can give free lisenses to individuals and organization who can contribute to the betterment of the OS.I received a notification from QNX which enabled me to download the OS with an integrated development environment (IDE-Eclipse). A lisence key was provided and this permits me to use the IDE for 30 days. However developing software is not my concern as I really love to explore operating systems and I am interested on evaluating the speed using an integrated library system (ILS).
The setup
Obviously the ILS to be used is KOHA (v 2.2.5). I installed the OS on an AMD Athlon platform with 1000MHz of processing power, 512MB of RAM with Error Control Checking (ECC), DFI High End Motherboard and 20 Gigabytes of Harddisk space.
The installation
I had a hard time installing the modules since KOHA is natively linux, however things got easier when i found out that there is a port of PERL for QNX. Another hard thing was with the compilation of the Z3950 client, good thing i got the source code of yaz. Installation took 7 and a half hours since i was required to download and build dependencies. I had to upgrade an outdated port of Apache webserver and MySQL database engine.
The results
The performance of koha on QNX is astonishing, as compared to linux, QNX delivers rapid execution of MySQL queries and the GUI is very responsive. However i really could not bring up the Z3950 client. I do not have the figures of the benchmark though, but i really felt that this OS promises something to libraries: stableness and fastness.
Conclusion
QNX is very stable and fast operating system capable of hosting an Integrated Library System, however, the OS is not for free, therefore limiting our rights to use it. But who's to know? Maybe QNX will have an opensource version of its RTOS.
link | posted by qiqo at 7:55 PM
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