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."

I've worked with these...

[Mister Snee]

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.

Looking for a niche

[1984]

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.

Re:I've worked with these...

[AT]

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.

Actually, they sold these with two software configurations, a dev box and an office server box. The office system had only enough to run all the Netwinder services plus the web administration app. The dev system had all that, plus all the development packages you'd get with Redhat -- it was basically a StrongARM port of Redhat 6.2 plus web based administration.

You could download the dev rpms from netwinder.org and upgrade the office server into a dev box. Additionally, they provided complete install images for reinstalling from scratch, and you could change the office server into a dev box by downloading the dev image and reinstalling.

Re:Problem with the Netwinder

[darkwiz]

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).

This is what needs to change . . .

[brokeninside]

/. linked to coverage of the autopsy [slashdot.org] of rebel.com last September. Rebel's problems were mostly financial in nature. The Ottowa Citizen article in the original /. link lists some of the symptoms . . .

By the late 1990s, [Mac] Brown was on top of the world. Revenues at Hardware Canada Computing were approaching $40 million annually and the company was solidly profitable, boasting net margins of 8 to 12 per cent of sales, according to Brown.

Already though, there were warning signs. Most serious entrepreneurs plow their company's earnings back into the business to help finance new projects, research and growth. Brown was already diverting a significant portion of his profits into supporting an extravagant lifestyle. Generous with his money when it came to family and friends, he had moved many of his New Brunswick relatives -- including his parents and two brothers -- into well-appointed homes in the Ottawa area. Brown built himself a 12,000 square foot home and marina on the river near Manotick.

. . .

The company had already distinguished itself by spending more on its Corel Centre entertainment suite than most of the other, much larger corporations with a presence at the arena: Aside from the $120,000 annual rental, Rebel was shelling out more than $1,000 per night for food and drinks.

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

Re:cobalt and whistler

[rootlocus]

sun has really dropped the ball--intentionally--in developing the line. the market is there, but the product hasn't arrived

What are you talking about?.. Sun/Cobalt is still releasing new products, and supporting the existing Cobalt products pretty well.. I get notices that new security patches are available every month or so.. And recently Sun hired more people to answer questions on the online cobalt support forums..

I have nothing but good things to say about Cobalt machines.. For hosting a few low traffic sites, they are perfect, and one can pick up a Cobalt raq or qube used on eBay for only a few hundred bucks.. i have better things to do with my time than spend days configuring bind, sendmail, apache, kernel patches, php, mysql, etc etc..

Netwinders, Cobalt, and the glorious past

[Alexander]

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.

Forgot about Crusoe!

[andrewm]

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

NetWinder past, present, future?

[eimaj]

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.

Re:Problem with the Netwinder

[BadlandZ]

The mistake is that it's not a desktop

There were 2. Desktop, and server versions.

And, x86 would be soo much cheaper, with better preformace, for both. Same points apply to the server versions.

If you want a gateway/firewall, you could use something like the ThinkNIC and it would actually be safer (boot only off CD) and log to any other system (for security).

I don't know about you, but the hundreds of dollars in price diffrence does not justify the only 2 advantages I know of the NetWinder (low power requirement, less space). It would take a long time to make up the diffrence in power (per unit, remember, having 100's of them saves 100x more power, but cost 100x more also!). And, if I recall correctly, they were 2 per 1U rack, _NOT_ 4 as I saw someone earlier post.