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Netwinder is Back
Vic writes "The Ottawa Business Journal is reporting that a new company, Netwinder Inc., is being started to resurrect the Netwinder project. In case you don't remember, this was a small linux-based server appliance started by Corel Computer, which died when Rebel.com went under. See also the National Post article."
"Calls to the new company were not returned yesterday."
Not a good start for inspiring customer confidence in a product that has already taken a company down the bankruptcy path once.
Otherwise, sounds like a really cool product.
My mother always used to tell me: If you can't find anything nice to say, say something bad about Windows.
whatever happened to the whistler product line? i believe that ibm was distributing them for a while. i have a couple of older cobalt servers, both mips based, and i really do like them. they are certainly powerful enough for moderate usage, and require little maintenance. sun has really dropped the ball--intentionally--in developing the line. the market is there, but the product hasn't arrived... yet.
But, when really geeky people look at computers, they know how much it will cost to build their own bleeding edge box, why spend over $400 on something (not including a monitor) for a StrongArm DESKTOP when a Athlon 1.8GHz can be built?
I'm not bashing it, I think it's cool hardware. I really do. But they really have to consider what other things in that price point are, and that's dominated by x86. Just look at how cheap a ThinkNIC is, and that's going to have as much geek/hacker/toy/xterminal/whatever appeal.
Yeah, I once did random network administration junk for a small company that sold Nortel stuff. Our VP was a fat moron with a respiratory problem who used to print off every spam e-mail he got and make me "look into it and see if it offers any benefits to us". I used to just throw these things in the trash but a few weeks before they actually hired me someone talked him into buying a wretched Netwinder. Not only that, but he decided to try to distribute them. Damned if he had any idea what they were or what they did but that little brochure just had so many darn Internetty words on it!
The web-based interface was nice, frankly, but the modified Redhat distro it comes loaded with is ridiculously sparse, and the omission of certain little things like, say, GCC makes adding any functionality a real pain in the ass. Unless, of course, you can find all the binaries you need for its StrongARM architecture. Not that they encourage you to expand it anyway, but as far as I'm concerned that slashes its hack value in half.
At any rate, most of the functionality it promises is obscurely implemented (if at all) and I never did get most of it working (like the much-touted "VPN capability" which the thing has literally zero pre-loaded facilities for).
Maybe I'm just biased by miserable experiences like the time the fat idiot decided his accountant's office, a tiny LAN done with coax on which three of the desktops had a modem sharing a single line so that one person could use the internet at a time, could use a Netwinder and offered a "free trial". He had me make a list of the benefits it would offer the guy, and all I could really come up with was that I could get it to gateway all of them onto the Internet at the same time. That became the "selling point" and the privilege fell to me of going to the site, completely reconfiguring the entire office to access the Internet via a gateway (which involved actually installing TCP/IP on several of the Windows 95 machines, a task which resulted in one of the machines being completely stripped of functionality when someone failed to mention that it was running a slightly different version of Windows 95 than the one on the CD I had been given to do the protocol installations) and then setting up the Netwinder's ridiculous dial-on-demand "feature". Since they used the same phone line for Internet and fax, and since the Netwinder would dial out every time any program on any computer tried to do anything with an outside address, ever, it was a nightmare. Oh, and they thought they had to turn it off every night. It doesn't have an "off" switch, so they just unplugged it.
Also, rebel.com's tech support was godawful and frequently encouraged decisions which would cripple either our internet access or the netwinder itself.
I haven't worked there for six months and I'm still getting an e-mail every time the IP changes (a script I put on to help me track the dynamic IP from home) and they STILL haven't changed any of the passwords, including root. They probably don't even remember the beastly little thing is still humming away in their MDF.
The Netwinder is an underfeatured, overreviewed device which encourages incompetent administration and ruins people's lives. Trust me.
Very high density. You could get 4 systems into 1U of a standard 19" rack. I know you can get blade servers these days with 19 servers/3U.
It'd be better if they didn't force the OS though. Just use whatever is your favourite. ARM Debian, SuSe, *BSD, whatever. Sell the platform and make it easy to add an OS.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The Netwinder has in it a great idea, which will succeed at some point.
That is, Internet access through a dedicated appliance that is cheaper, easier to use and has a smaller footprint than a conventional general purpose PC.
Linux can help with this in one respect I'm sure: Windows is an expensive part of many PCs.
But the other ingredients are no less critical: nice form factor (take a lesson from Apple), good marketing.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The first line of the article states in reference to the Netwinder appliance:
"The technology product that drove Rebel.com's business plan and also led to its demise is being resurrected to create a new Ottawa company."
Perhaps I am missing something, but what would make these investors believe that the final outcome of this new venture will prove to be any more profitable? If anything, I would point to the current state of the world's economy as even more reason not to resurrect a once-dead product of the infamous Dot-Com era...
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
with the upcoming Zaurus (same proc, 64MB RAM, IBM 1GB microdrive, cheap)... do we still need such boxes ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I still have an earlyish engineering sample of a Netwinder lying about. For a while it did sterling service hooked up to my ADSL line as a Web Server. But it was always somewhat idosyncratic.
For a while I've wanted a small, silent desktop that could be always on without waking the neighbours and do thin-ish client stuff. The Netwinder packed a lot into a very small case, and had a tiny but exceptionally noisy fan trying to keep it all cool. People had hacks for slowing up the fan or nifty ways of making it quieter, but it was noisier than many desktops. The range of ports for video I/O, modem etc. were never all made to work, and (I think) they dropped several of the more esoteric hardware features on the production models.
Besides the fan, it was slow and had crap graphics. OK for a server, but not as a client. With 2MB of video RAM and a poor quality output, display was limited to 1024*768, and not 24-bit colour. Performance was bad enought that even running just Citrix ICA on X was just too slow to be comfortable. So it just didn't quite cut it as a client: too noisy, too slow, poor graphics.
I guess the blade version may have been pretty useful, but the desktop version just didn't quite fit. I'd argue there's not a widespread need to make a server quite that tiny for use a gateway, SMB server (don't forget the small disk), whatever. Why not have a bigger, cheaper, quieter and faster server? Anything you could do with a Netwinder, you could do with a cheap PC with a couple of ethernet cards in it.
If they could make it quiet, stick in just a little more horsepower and decent graphics, it might make a nice client. But that's a lot of "ifs". As it was, it didn't quite cut it.
How about a sober ad in Business Week? Or Time, or WSJ or Crain's Chicago or some other mag a business manager would read? Or even the Chicago Trib. Better yet, get them to review it.
worth of NWs + services? I had no idea. Let's hope this company has some adult supervision.They sold 40 million
They had a desktop version too. Tiny computer, about the size of one of those lil' DEC Multias. Back in '98, I considered buying one over the K62-350 I was planning on getting. I'm a sucker for elegance, power efficiency and a small computer. And the StrongARM processor. Two things kept me from doing it: the price (buying a Mac was far more cost effective- did that a year later) and the fact that GCC for ARM can't do any optimizations without crashing and burning. A damn shame, 'tis.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
The first time around, while a netwinder could hypothetically save money because of its low-power consumption, in practice the premium one paid over faster, better supported hardware would have made it tough to break even over the useful life of the product.
How much did rebel.com pay for the domain name again? And for using the James Dean logo? For hot tub parties? For limos?
The variant of Linux on the Netwinder was quite old, to the point of being outdated and making it quite difficult to install other programs.
The netwinder hardware has impressed me since I first read about it. IMHO, if they would have taken the design to slightly ruggedized portables (Apple Message Book style) and PDAs and spent more money on attracting developers, they would have made a killing.
The big thing, though, is to keep from repeating the spending mistakes of the past.
Regards,
-l
I've spent a lot of time playing with thoes little netwinders. The linux distro that it comes with is second rate and the hardware is buggy. I had the opportunity to play with dozens of the things and some of them would power down if you unplug the ether net cables. The driver that monitors the internal temp of the box would often cause it to lock up. I could care less if they come back or not. They screwed up once, and they'll do it again.
The web-based interface was nice, frankly, but the modified Redhat distro it comes loaded with is ridiculously sparse, and the omission of certain little things like, say, GCC makes adding any functionality a real pain in the ass. Unless, of course, you can find all the binaries you need for its StrongARM architecture. Not that they encourage you to expand it anyway, but as far as I'm concerned that slashes its hack value in half.
You had an "office server". It shipped with a stripped-down distribution designed for end users. It wasn't *supposed* to have any hack value.
There was also a development model (same hardware, give or take some RAM and HD) that included all the necessary tools and utilities. The DM disk images were available for download from www.netwinder.org, so you could have easily upgraded your unit if you'd ever bothered to look. IIRC there was also a Debian version for the Netwinder.
When it came out, there was only the development model. Its first market was Linux hackers, and the core development team were very active (and helpful) on the newsgroups and mailing lists.
The Netwinder is an underfeatured, overreviewed device which encourages incompetent administration and ruins people's lives. Trust me.
No, the Netwinder is a very-cool-but-now-outdated Linux-friendly hardware platform that was hijacked by a group of clueless marketroids who thought that spending $BIGNUM on a cheesy domain name and a stack of glossy brochures was a better idea than actually continuing to develop the product.
That became the "selling point" and the privilege fell to me of going to the site, completely reconfiguring the entire office to access the Internet via a gateway (which involved actually installing TCP/IP on several of the Windows 95 machines,[...]
So you're blaming the Netwinder for the trouble you had re-configuring an office full of mongrel Windows 95 boxes???
... in POG form!
Sorry, one of my favorite lines.
. .
Unfortunately both parts of the Ottawa Citizen article are now invisible except to paid subscribers to the Citizen. Their no-cost archive only goes back 14 days.
Regards,
-l
And really enjoy it. I've had it since back in '98 when they first came out and the software on it has improved enormously. Netwinder.org is still up after all this time and people are still creating new disk images for it and updating it. Even though the processor (275 MHz) is not anything to brag about, it works wonderfully for a firewall/FTP server/etc, which is what I use it for. It's a heck of a lot more versatile than a dedicated box and doesn't make much noise or heat. It's great to be able to fire up a copy of Ethereal to sniff packets right off my cable modem. A great little box for what it does, but unfortunately I think they priced themselves out of their primary market-- dedicated firewalls and print/file servers.
I hope they succeed just in that I used to know a couple of folks at the old rebel who worked too hard and had stupid management kill the company.
I mean, all that money for rebel.com and James Dean, yet it was my impression that they spent very little budget building channel and getting distributors (I'm not sure they ever got Techdata, Ingram or Merisel).
As previous posts alluded to, VPN thing was a mess. There were deals in place with vendors to try to get real (not PPTP) client server VPNs on the box. Rebel engineering understood and looked out for end user security. At the time the use of Strong Arm and the lack of mature VPN technology really hurt their efforts, though (and the deals they were asking the VPN vendors for). Later, it's my understanding that they actually made nifty Free S/WAN boxes.
It'll be interesting to see if this company can revive the "cute little office server" market. Cobalt Product Management and the Sun purchase has essentially run the Qube product into the ground. It was interesting to see Sun's public "commitment" to "Linux" when the Cobalt BU has been so ignored (let's just say that integration into the sales mix didn't go to well, and casulties in the first Sun layoffs included most of Cobalt Sales and Marketing).
Combine the loss of sales interest from Sun with a total lack of new product releases and feature sets from the Cobalt line, and you have to hurt for those who really believe in the Cobalt products. Because while it's nice to have an "appliance" product, I'm not sure I want to spend Cobalt pricing for an AMD 450 with a tiny hard drive or two when I can build a pretty nice server myself for the money.
I also liked the Rebel.Net idea. Ok, maybe not the name, but bundling a Netwinder as a SOHO/SMB server with DSL service seemed like a real value and a way help those businesses not have to spend extra $$ on Win2k and Compaq hardware.
I hope that the new company will continue to use an x86 architecture, and that they'll find a better quality hardware source. With the excuse that most of my experience with the Netwinders were pre-release units, they did tend to rattle and hum at times (maybe it wasn't the hardware but the shipping box?!).
I really had respect for the software engineering side that Rebel had.
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
The new NetWinder Inc. will likely be selling off their stock of StrongARM first, before they start to ship the Transmeta Crusoe versions.
The Crusoe version is x86 compatible, much faster, has floating point, comes with USB, has PCMCIA as an option, all in a box the same size as the StrongARM (same box actually). And it is quieter. Not bad for 14 Watts peak.
Yes, price is going to be the monkey on their backs. It's hard when using laptop components which are premium priced to begin with.
I wish them success though.
-- an ex Corel Computer Corp (CCC)/Corel/Hardware Canada Computing (HCC)/Rebel.com employee
For my purposes it's great... It's a fire wall. It's powerful enough for that sort of thing and uses much less electricity than PCs, but is a full linux machine. It also is small which is really nice. Small so you can put it anywhere. It has some space on it so I can store files on it. Of course I blew away the red hat and put on debian first chance I got, but other than some problems with the kernel config scripts it has worked just fine. I've also had apache, cvs, mysql based of of it at one time or another and no problems, well after I switched away from the red hat based distro..
The NetWinder was originally going to be a Java-based office desktop, running Corel's Java port of WordPerfect andother office-type apps. The Java ports were horribly slow and buggy as I recall, so it was re-cast as an web/file/internet-gateway server. The later rebel.com versions were based on the TransMeta chip, not the StrongARM.
Cool points:
1. The 275MHz StrongARM chip was fast (in 1998) and low power - the power supply for the unit is a little plug-in "wall wart".
2. Dual built-in ethernet, perfect for NAT setup.
3. Composite video in/out.
4. ARM binaries of sendmail/etc. immune to x86 script-kiddie stack-smashing attacks (might crash, but unlikely to get rooted).
Downsides:
1. Incredibly noisy fan, I mean it sounded like a hair dryer. I used to keep it hidden under my desk to mask the noise, and a few months ago I finally just took off the top half of the case and disabled the fan. An office full of these things? Forget it.
2. Too many apps had problems because they relied on x86 (lack-of) alignment. This could usually be worked around with -mshort-load-bytes and other GCC options, but after about 6 months of honestly trying to use the NetWinder as my main desktop, I gave up and went back to x86.
...
I saw the NetWinder at Linux Expo 1998, and I just had to have one. I still have it doing NAT/gateway for my cable internet hookup, running kernel 2.4.5 with an iptables script. The netwinder.org folks are still keeping the mailing lists alive and even working on a RH7.2 port.
It would be neat to see them base a new version on say a 1GHz XScale (I understand gcc ARM support has improved a lot since 1998), get the fan thing and other engineering nits right this time, and yes, don't over price it.
Scenario:
I'm not saying this is what happened here, but when I read the story it gave me the idea. The shareholders in the old company would probably attempt to go after the new company and/or declare the Open Sourcing illegal, after the cat's out of the bag.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I wish that hadn't used those damn external power bricks. It did make the unit smaller, but I kept on loosing the power supply. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world to find a suitable PS for that box. I think that most of the downtime on the netwinder I had was due to lost power supplies.
Sure, you could fit 4 206-mhz strongarms in a small space, but it's likely to be much cheaper and easier to use one 800-MHZ box, or one 1600-MHz box. The new Crusoe platform may be more interesting, if it actually gets built.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Obviously the intel kit's cheaper but if you need a large number of servers in a small space, or were paying by rackspace they were pretty nifty.
Now, if someone were to create a small 1U case for say, the recent FlexATX motherboards or similar, which held multiple AMD based servers per 1U case, I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one interested.
Deleted
Cheaper to build an ix86 based system these days and with flexatx motherboards and cases you can get fairly small. Example:
http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/product.php?subcat=4
Deleted
...when it first came out, but here is something I think is just about right. Portable, does networking, configure it the way you need it, connect to monitor or TV, ad nauseaum. Hmmmm....
Just so y'all know the "device" that netwinder inc will actually be selling is probably not the old strongarm version (2100) but probably the (3100) which included : 10+GB hdds, 128+ MB of ram and a 533MHZ Crusoe Processor. 2 Serial Ports (One for console) 3 Realtek Nics, 2 USB ports (USB Modems and some Nic's). No Video, No Keyboard, No mouse, only a serial console. These run much nicer 4-5 times the hard drive throughput... FYI
"Be glad you sailed for a better day, But dont forget there will be hell to pay" - Dave King/Flogging Molly
i wouldn't call this up to date really. i understand sensitive economics and such, but who is going to ditch a windows nt server for a qube? how about a really powerful qube--athlon? also, i would very much like to see active development of workgroup software, and other applications. the admin interfaces are very nice, but they need to go further to be competitive, and i do not feel that they have. 2c.
are there any sites that i could check out which use this application platform? thanks.
Did they buy any stock of Netwinders, or did they just buy the design? Sounds like the latter.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
They have the design (IP) and what stock remained after KPMG (the appointed bankruptcy receiver) sold what it could.
this is cool.
just peeked at the ftp site and saw an 'unsupported' directory and am dowloading the dm image from that. it's from last year, but hey my winder has been sitting in a milkcrate for three.
maybe i'll replace the 120 db fan if it runs well, and actually use it.
hope these people don't fuck this up like rebel.com did. please excuse my flatulence, as i have been drinking quite heavily.
I tried to buy one of these things when the company was doing well. They hit my credit card and after a few weeks of waiting I called to see where my product was. Backordered. TWO MONTHS LATER still no NetWinder. Every call answered with "next week". I eventually took it to my credit card company to fight to get my money back. I will NEVER, EVER buy this product no matter how promising it is. There is no excuse for scummy sales practices.
You have always been able to download the NeTTrom (StrongARM) firmware source code.
I mean come on.. The documentation for the free operation systems is so much better than it was when these types of appliances started catching the eyes of the technically illiterate business journals, and tech-reports.
Free software also.. It seems that even the most obscure and geekiest free program comes packaged with thoughtful docs.. Seems like even man pages are getting better..
My point..?
Even a paper MCSE with zero *nix/*bsd background could probably put together the equivalent of one of these appliances with surplus hardware in a reasonable amount of time.
Anyone with any *nix/*bsd experience would have little trouble whipping one up before lunch-- before first coffee break even.
The only real market I see for these things is the career civil service IT employee (or the private sector equivalent), who is essentially a liaison to Compaq, IBM, Sun, etc., and have the tech-support phone number memorized, and who really has no interest in technology.