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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."
Because all operating systems are written by programmers, I assume that any operating system is much smarter than me. Thus, any good operating system should try to outsmart me by restricting my options at every turn. Linux, like all versions of Unix, is lousy at restricting my options because at the command line virtually any operation can be performed with ease. (For example, 'rm -rf /win' could 'delete an entire mounted directory, with no popup window warnings whatsoever.)
I'm proud to say that there is no such danger in 95/NT. Windows pop up when I want to make a change, and then more pop up to ask if I'm sure I want the change. Thankfully, Windows 95/NT operating systems look after my computer's well-being by occasionally switching configuration settings from the way I want them to what the OS programmers think they might probably ought to be. Boy, I'm just impressed with how smart they are. Once I learned to live with whatever the default settings are on any new hardware I install, I can't say the number of hours I have saved.
I use that spare time to reboot my Windows machine multiple times a day. Technical support personnel recommend that I do it regularly-- kind of like brushing my teeth. To help remind me of this necessity, windows pop up to tell me to reboot whenever I make a configuration change. By now my machine is minty fresh, I figure.
There is no such useful rebooting in a Linux system. It is as reliable as the sunrise, with uptimes in weeks and months. Virtually no configuration change requires a reboot, to boot. Imagine all that plaque in the computer. Gross!
In 95/NT I am prevented from making dangerous fundamental configuration changes unless I use a special "registry editor". I have found it so useful to have this separate editor that I hope in future versions they go all the way and supply a separate editor for each file on the disk-- in that way windows could pop up at every keystroke to warn me that changing any line in the file I am editing could cause the system to not run properly. If this were only the case, people would finally learn that it is best to just stick with the mouse and they would be freed of the need to constantly move their hands back to the keyboard. (If one stops to think about it, the mouse is a much better device to use than the keyboard. Ever hear of someone getting carpal tunnel syndrome from a mouse? No. It's comfortable and ergonomic. Like Morse code devices. That's how long distance communication started, after all.)
Linux, by contrast, requires no special editor to change configuration files. The fact that there is no "registry" in Linux allows the abomination of using any text editor whatsoever to do the configuration. Can you believe that configuration files are usually stored clear text? Talk about dangerous!
I am also happy to report that I have experienced no truth to the rumor that Windows disks become corrupt after improper shutdowns. Indeed, I have been forced to improperly shutdown the machine innumerable times after it locks up, and I have no apparent problems to report regarding the disk. No such claim can be made for Linux. They say something about lack of data points. Excuses are all I ever seem to hear from the Linux crowd.
By sheer size alone, Windows 95/NT beats Linux hands down. It is so much bigger, it is _obvious_ that it is better. Why would you want a small OS with the large disks and RAM sizes we have these days? For this reason alone, I heartily recommend Windows as a way to maximize resource utilization. Your CPU and disk will constantly be pegged to the limit, the way god intended. The Linux kernel and drivers accounts for only about 750KB. Why, even the Microsoft Win16 subsystem uses more space than that.
It is no surprise that Windows costs $270 on the retail market and Linux doesn't cost anything. People know what they want, and they want Windows. Because Linux is free, that means it's basically worthless. The same goes for all the development tools, remotable GUIs, and applications, which all cost money for windows (i.e., are worth something) and free for Linux (worthless!).
Installing software is very easy in Windows. I usually slip in CDs without even reading instructions or warnings, and just double click on whatever window pops up. There is no need to read anything or touch the keyboard. (Did I mention that I hate that thing?) Well, OK, I have learned the hard way the machine locks up if I don't take the time to close all other applications.
Linux, by contrast, requires typing on the keyboard to get anything to install at all. And you always have to know the NAME of program you want to install. For example, in Redhat, you have to type ``rpm -ivh ''to install the program and documentation. Linux needs to get with the '90s!
Windows follows the DOS convention of putting \r\n at the end of every line of a text file. While this is only a mild concern because of the relative rarity of text files on Windows machines these days-- thank god--it helps to differentiate between the text files and the other files. Sadly, Linux makes no distinction between text and other files.
If I legitimately purchase Windows 95/NT, I can call Microsoft customer support to get help with my problems. After a short hold time of an hour or so, they always help me. Ever since I told them that I was dual booting to Linux, they were able to flag my account and now each time I call even the entry level support personnel I am connected to say that Linux is the source of my problems. Everyone seems to agree that Linux is no good. The more I listen, the more I'm impressed with the knowledge of the support staff there.
By contrast, in Linux, all I have is stockpiles of resources and documentation that I would actually have to read in order to understand. Sure, I could obtain Linux support from a commercial organization, but they would probably just tell me I have to use a text editor to fix up my system.
In the end, I have no need for that old computer donkey Unix. I don't need to run big Unix tasks, after all. I refuse to become one of those a bug-eyed computer users, that's for sure. As soon as I can keep Windows from crashing for long enough, I'm going to delete my Linux partition, i.e., the equivalent of moving it to the recycle bin, saying that I'm sure, emptying the recycle bin, and again saying that I'm sure.
This has been a presentation of the good people of the
~CDPB~.
<O
( \
X
8===D
Had this been an actual first post, you'd be dead now!
Good day!
In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women!-H.Simpson
Fuck You!!! Yeah, you. Thanks.
Visit the new Troll site!
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I am insigtfully yelling fp!
Good day to you, Sir.
Visit the new Troll site!
"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.
are very nice. Nothing beats a good burrito in the morning.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Gave a girl a ride in my wagon
She crawled in and took control
She was tired as her mind was a draggin'
I said "Get some sleep and dream of rock and roll"
Cause like a picture she was layin there
Moonlight dancin off her hair
She woke up and took me by the hand
We made love in my Chevy Van and that's all right with me
Her young face was like that of an angel
Her long legs
Were tan and brown
Better keep
Your eyes on the road son
Better slow this vehicle down
Cause like a picture she was layin there
Moonlight dancin off her hair
She woke up and took me by the hand
We made love in my Chevy Van and that's all right with me
I put her out
In a town that was so small
You could throw
A rock from end to end
Dirt road main street, she walked off in bare feet
It's a shame I won't be passing through again
Cause like a picture she was layin there
Moonlight dancin off her hair
She woke up and took me by the hand
She's gonna love me in my Chevy Van and that's all right with me
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
Drain your swampy armpits, wash off your rancid body odor and fix the bug dammit!! But please - for Gods sake, TAKE A SHOWER!
From the annals of the Troll Library .
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.
Can't anyone post anything usefull to discuss other than first post or some bullshit ascii art?
If it won't boot, Fsck it!
Ah yes...the Netwinder Project - which much like Slashdot and Linux, is gayer than dude porn.
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.
Where is The Giver? Yes, the receiver is fine, but we want The Giver.
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."
.how .do .you .like .your .page .widdening .posts .do .you .prefer .rational .statements .or .just .random .crapfloods .that .is .my .question .to .you .how .do .you .like .your .page .widdening .posts .do .you .prefer .rational .statements .or .just .random .crapfloods .that .is .my .question .to .you .how .do .you .like .your .page .widdening .posts .do .you .prefer .rational .statements .or .just .random .crapfloods .that .is .my .question .to .you .how .do .you .like .your .page .widdening .posts .do .you .prefer .rational .statements .or .just .random .crapfloods .that .is .my .question .to .you .how .do .you .like .your .page .widdening .posts .do .you .prefer .rational .statements .or .just .random .crapfloods .that .is .my .question .to .you .how .do .you .like .your .page .widdening .posts .do .you .prefer .rational .statements .or .just .random .crapfloods .that .is .my .question .to .you .how .do .you .like .your .page .widdening .posts .do .you .prefer .rational .statements .or .just .random .crapfloods .that .is .my .question .to .you .how .do .you .like .your .page .widdening .posts .do .you .prefer .rational .statements .or .just .random .crapfloods .that .is .my .question .to .you .how .do .you .like .your .page .widdening .posts .do .you .prefer .rational .statements .or .just .random .crapfloods .that .is .my .question .to .you .how .do .you .like .your .page .widdening .posts .do .you .prefer .rational .statements .or .just .random .crapfloods .that .is .my .question .to .you .how .do .you .like .your .page .widdening .posts .do .you .prefer .rational .statements .or .just .random .crapfloods .that .is .my .question .to .you
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD s dead
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
He will be missed
Show me That Smile (The Growing Pains Theme Song):
Show me that smile again.
Ooh show me that smile.
Don't waste another minute on your crying.
We're nowhere near the end.
We're nowhere near.
The best is ready to begin.
As long as we got each other
We got the world
Sitting right in our hands.
Baby rain or shine;
All the time.
We got each other
Sharing the laughter and love.
Alan Thicke's Journal
My Slashdot ads say "
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.
i. am. posting. this. to. see. if. or. how. it. makes. the. page. wider. i. don't. know. if. it. will. work.
now i also want to post something related to the topic but while i am writing this i forgot what it is.
now i will write about how i want sarah michelle gellar to strip of and let me stick my 9" into here, while she screams in pane, i then want to get natalie portman in here and let me fuckher from behind while sarah licks my arsehole and JLO gives me the bloejob that she has been perfecting.
i wonder how many replies i will get?
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
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.
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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
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...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.