I ordered an Amiga developer box as soon as I returned from holiday, but it appears the demand for the new Amiga SDK has been so huge that I ended up having to wait a while for my machine to be shipped. Only trouble is, I've had more than a few problems getting enough of Linux installed to actually run the SDK - the supplied SuSE Linux distro fails dramatically during installation (I was never a fan of SuSE so maybe it's seeking revenge) and my own copies of Linux Mandrake and Red Hat gripe about installing X. Since my existing Linux box died a few weeks back, I've had no joy in getting the SDK running on anything yet - but then, time hasn't allowed me to spend a serious amount of time trying to get this fixed. Maybe this weekend...
In the meantime, I started to peruse the developer manual. This is pretty good stuff - produced on an Amiga and crammed with a clear, concise guide to Ami and how to develop for the new system. There's a distinct bias towards VPcode, which I guess is fair enough, but good coverage of C/C++ and Java has also been provided. More importantly, the guide has helped crystallise the new OS in my mind and I'm absolutely itching to roll up the sleeves and start coding... just as soon as it's installed. This is very cool stuff, like you need to be told that by now, but I'm more certain of that now I've got my hands on something tangible.
Of course, as is traditional with most things, if you're waiting for two things a long time they'll both end up arriving simultaneously. Thus, a week later my prerelease CD copy of QNX Realtime Platform, based upon the new QNX Neutrino kernel, arrived airmail from Canada. No printed manual unfortunately, just a CD in a hard case, but this is a prerelease and it's free so I shouldn't complain.
Wondering what to do with an OS-less developer machine, I thought I'd give the QNX RTP installation a go and see how far it got before failing. Since the developer box doesn't want to boot from CD-ROM,
