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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."
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.
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
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
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???
Power. The Netwinder uses a miniscule amount of power compared to the Athlon.
Foot print: The Netwinder takes up 1/4 the space of the smallest 1800 XP system
Already Built: Don't need a linux geek to set it up for you. Just use their basic web administration, and you don't even have to care that it is running linux.
I could list more, but these are the key points. I have played with one, and I wish I had one (even though it would replace my much more powerful 233MHz PII firewall, I just like the machine and how little power it drops/how small it is).
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.
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
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)