Well, so here I am, trying to install PHP and MySQL so it works on IIS.

Except, of course, it doesn’t.  At all.  Or at least, not that I can work out.

And the solution?  A Linux installation under Virtual PC, of course, what else?

So, which distribution?

Well, I started on Slackware.  So off to the website and then – can’t get onto any of the mirrors.  BitTorrent time.  GetRight doesn’t like it, so µTorrent‘s back.

I’d forgotten how well it works.  215K.  So many Windows applications like this would be about 10MB, take four or five minutes to load up and use twice the resources just to display the main page.

And here we have QNX 6 running on MS Virtual PC 2007…

As you can see (if you click on the image, have a magnifying glass handy, are just generally psychic or have just read the last paragraph), this is a shot of QNX 6.3.2 running on…  well, anyway it works fine with or without hardware acceleration on an AMD Turion, needs the Vesa rather than S3 driver (otherwise you just get 3 dots on screen, or at least I did.  But then VPC’s video is a bit… erm… “challenged” on my machine.)

The version I downloaded has the Eclipse-based Momentics IDE added in, as well as the entire QNX operating system.  This wasn’t what I downloaded at first of course.  Oh, no.  I had to go – stupidly – for the “Windows host” version.  OK.  A version I have to install in Windows when I want to install it on a naked virtual machine.  And it’s twice the size of the version I really need.  Classy.  That’s 1.75% of my entire monthly download quota blown right away.

But so far I’m liking QNX.  The sidebar reminds me of what I used to do with the Internet Explorer 4 launch bar when I first saw it, only better.  And the browser appears pretty competent: it handles Google Mail, which isn’t too bad.

More as I explore it, but QNX isn’t just – as traditionally thought – a highly reliable server OS (which it is), but also quite possibly a desktop operating system in its own right.

I recently got my registration code back for ElcomSoft‘s excellent Advanced Disk Catalog (I’ve been using it since Vladimir Katalov himself was in charge of it) and decided to rebuild my catalogues, which I haven’t had around since a hard disk corruption two or three years ago. While doing so, I came across an old PC Plus coverdisk from February 2001, containing Serif Page Plus 4 and QNX.

Well, well, I thought – an entire operating system to play with…

It was obvious from the file structure that they’d just copied it across to a subdirectory on the CD, as the readme referred to the “qnxrtp” directory being a subdirectory directly off the CD. So, a little fiddle with Nero, make the bookdisk image the boot off the CD, use the Image Recorder, and five minutes later I have a bootable ISO image of QNX.

The next question was how much space to use for QNX? Well, all 1GB that I’ve assigned to the virtual disk (the readme said 300MB should be sufficient, so that should be okay) and suddenly… it all stopped. Says it can’t find “/boot/fs”, even though it’s there. But in upper case.

Hmm… bring out Azri Rosborg‘s “Up or Low”, set all to lower case and play with Nero again…

This time it copied five files and told me to remove floppies and CDs and reset. Looking good… until it told me it couldn’t find qnxbase. Hmm. OK, try again, this time in verbose mode. Nothing unexpected except it says if it doesn’t work, press ESC to skip DMA. So let’s try that.

Same messages – “Unable to mount a QNX filesystem… Unable to access packages”. Hmm.  Okay – try it in Virtual Box.

Nope.  Fails even worse.  Won’t even boot off CD.

Oh well. Perhaps I’ll go download the full QNX and ask for a non-commercial licence instead.  In the meantime – FAIL