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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."
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.
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.
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
I haven't seen any signs of Sun dropping the ball here in Finland. At least we're getting all the support we need for implementing Qubes as project servers for the construction industry.
The Qubes are really cool and capable little servers for runnign web-based project banks, especially with the RAID-enabled Qube Pro line.
Midgard Project - Open Source CMS
I've been working on a system that does alot of what the netwinder was supposed to do.
MY system however is much better! (shameless plug)
It's runs debian for a start, so expanding it's capabilities is as easy as "apt-get install". It runs on x86 hardware because x86 is soooo damn cheap and powerfull. so you can always build your own or upgrade or whatever. We plan on making a low-power version at some point (strongARM or whatever) to take advantage of that niche.
My VPN system works. It's using FreeS/WAN and RSA keys, no certificates at the moment, but hey! it's more secure this way anyway.(transfer your public keys OutOfBand on a floppy disk)
It also has cool features like the ability to have multiple Internet connections that will 'fail-over', and multiple LAN segments that can be firewalled off from each other, they can be given different net connections to use, and you can customize the level of access for each LAN. So you can put your important internal servers on a seperate segment from your general purpose email/browsing PCs, and limit/eliminate their net access.
It also comes with built-in email virus filtering (you have to pay for virus scanner license). oh, and it runs Apache with mod_ssl so you can deploy web-based apps on it and use cool x509 certificates for access control...
I could go on and on... it's made for people who don't necessarily know how to use linux, but if you do then there's all kinds of cool stuff you can add.
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.
I'm not sure what you mean by "force the OS". The bootloader is designed to load a Linux kernel, but apart from that there's nothing restricting your choice of distribution.
Changing the OS does require a bit of effort because the Netwinder doesn't have any removable media drives, but once you've set it up to net-boot from another machine it's easy to wipe the drives and put on whatever you want.
However not all software will compile/run on the StrongARM platform; many packages have hidden bugs or x86-only assumptions that are exposed by the new architecture (e.g. structure padding, endian-ness, word alignment). You can't just take the stack of SuSE source RPMs and expect to build a fully-functional port. However this is more the fault of the software than of the hardware.
Details about the Debian Netwinder version are here.
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.