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Corel Netwinder

JonB

JonB

Veteran Member
Joined
Jan 26, 2014
Messages
1,652
Location
South Herefordshire, UK
HI

I recently came into a rather cute little Corel Netwinder and I would like to know more about it.

I found a web site - http://www.netwinder.org/about.html - but it seems all the image downloads are offline due to some Open Source restriction on distributing closed source code. Pfft.

Mine is a Rev 5 so it's the "latest" version. it is working, rather noisily, and I've taken backups of the three partitions on the hard drive. I just booted it for the third time and was rather charmed at its "Welcome to Netwinder" announcement, made in a precocious sounding girl's voice. It didn't do that the last two boots.

Does anyone have any links or info to share about it, other than what is on the netwinder.org site?

Thanks
JonB
 
StrongARM SA110, 32-64MB ram 4GB or so hard disk ethernet, and reasonable video and sound.

There were a few versions - one was supposed to be a webserver in a box, another a client/desktop/developer box (in their dreams - far too slow). The OS was a sort of mangled Red Hat with KDE and a custom web UI (webmin). It was one of the early web ui driven boxes along with the netpiilot and the like.

I'd guess the bits they can't distribute are going to be Netscape, Citrix and Word Perfect 8.

When it first came out it was novel in it's size but not much else. Same kind of era as the Cobalt Qube and other small, brightly coloured not-x86 plastic computers. Unfortunately it wasn't very fast, and got run over fairly effectively by the x86 juggernaut of the time. Some of the old Linux sites/magazines are probably the best place to look for articles from the period.

The whole thing is really a bit of a sad story as I was told it - Corel wanted to build a box for VNC (which is still around today as a protocol) and management insisted it had to be in java. Because it was in java at the time it was unusably slow. Had they written it in C rather than bandwagon jumped they'd have had a product. Netwinder was an attempt to salvage something from it.

On the bright side it gave us webmin, which is still going, although mostly superceded by more modern web UIs and of course the fact the Linux desktop system configuration is now UI based.

Alan
 
Funny thing is that the web admin feature is not installed on the developer machines (which mine is) - it was on the OfficeServer version. Comments I have read about them was they were ahead of their time, being an easy to use "web appliance". Mine is one of the latest versions (Rev 5) and has Red Hat with X and some really basic window manager. I need to upgrade the memory somehow, as it only has 64MB but should be able to handle 256 megs, given the right memory card. It needs 32 bit 144 pin SODIMM.
 
I've got one in the 1U rackmount enclosure -- it's the same funny-shaped system board, just in a 1U box with a power brick :) They will supposedly run NetBSD, there's a port for the netwinder. Mine still has the RedHat based OS image on it, I haven't done much with it yet.
 
The website news page mentions a legal problem forcing them to remove the firmware from the website, and the images that contained it.
First time I read about the Netwinder was in a french edition of the Linux Magazine, which I might still have somewhere...
I have an Office Server desktop model with a 10G hdd and 128MB of RAM, and also a DM model missing the hdd.


Found an ad in an old InfoWorld magazine, from Google collection of scanned materials:
netwinder-ad.jpg
 
Thanks, but adverts aren't going to help me much.. I need Linux distributions. :)

I've been trying to fit it with SSD via an IDE-SATA bridge and while it does boot and work (sort of), I am seeing lots of timeouts and other errors. I've discussed the problems a fair bit on the netwinder.org mailing list and it looks like this is a dead end. A shame, because the little 4GB conventional drive is noisy and probably about to peg it. I did perceive a performance boost with the SSD as one might have expected, but it is unreliable. I might blame the bridge board, but it seems to work perfectly well on a more modern kernel (as is running in my laptop), so we are left thinking there is some hardware incompatibility or unsupported mode of operation that is preventing the Netwinder from using it.

I expect it will go back into storage soon. A shame, because otherwise it is a pretty cute little machine that runs silently with SSD and the fan disconnected (add the fan and hard disk and you need earplugs). Maybe I should try with a CF adapter..
 
If the CF card doesn't work, you might try a 2.5" industrial IDE SSD. I've got a number of them from M-Systems, other manufacturers made them too. They're *very* expensive new, but do show up used now and then. They come in small sizes, too.
 
JonB said:
Yes, I considered them but so expensive (why??)..
Click to expand...

They were marketed to folks who had to replace mechanical drives in systems that were critical to their business. Plus, they likely never saw enough volume production to result in any cost decrease.
 
JonB said:
Thanks, but adverts aren't going to help me much.. I need Linux distributions. :)
Click to expand...
That is the amount of info about it not present on the netwinder.org website!
There are a couple of websites you could check on archive.org like http://linux.corel.com and http://corelcomputer.com

I made a tar.gz archive of the contents of my Office Server's hda1 which includes /usr, as it wasn't on hda3 like the FAQ says, its size is 411MB.
And an archive of the hda4 rescue partition which is way smaller.
Lists of files from the archives are at http://lorezan.free.fr/netwinder/
I can upload the tar.gz archives somewhere if you want.
 

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Yes, please!

At the moment I am trying to get the machine to work with a SATA SSD and IDE-SATA bridge but it's not going well. Keep getting timeouts. I think the problem is the kernel in use is very old (even though it is the "latest" NW9 image, and the firmware is also the latest. There are still some active users on the Netwinder mailing list but it seems they are all out of ideas.
 
I didn't see this until now, since I joined this forum four years after your last post.

I've been doing a lot of the same work you had done. I hope I can provide some useful answers.

I had a similar problem when I tried to use a regular 120 GB SATA SSD with a 44-pin IDE to SATA adapter. I was using the adapter most people recommend for similar conversion projects. The big deal isn't the brand; rather, it's the Marvell 88SA8052 chip for SATA-150 to IDE bridge.

The NeTTrom 2.3.3 firmware recognized the SATA drive's information:
Code: 
hda: Patriot Burst Elite 120GB, 114473MB w/0kB cache, CHS=16383/16/63, LBA

However, the boot attempt would take half a minute before giving a string of these errors. It would change sector value with each attempt: 4896, 4904, 4912, 4920:
Code: 
hda: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
ide0: reset timed-out, status=0xd0
hda: drive not ready for command
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01, sector 4896

This almost seemed like a power problem, as if the adapter still expected a 12v rail as it would for a 40-pin IDE drive. Perhaps the IDE/AHCI boundary was too transparent for firmware designed before SATA was available to the public.

My research led me elsewhere, as someone had this problem 17 years ago in CentOS. That person wound up adding "ide0=noprobe" to the GRuB instructions. NW9 doesn't have a Grub package, so this would have to wait for an installation of a newer distro that provides Grub.

I wound up using KingSpec/Yansen IDE SSD drives. They have occasional sales on the 128 GB model, which works slightly faster because it has more NAND chips to throughput.

The pimptastic ActionRetro did a performance test of the 64 GB Yansen against DosDude1's DIY kit and other options. Dosdude's is faster: even though it uses the exact same controller chip, it has less mishegoss in the board design.

Unfortunately, right now you would need to order a PCB and SMD the chips yourself. The video demo is thorough, yet I don't have the experience with SMD compared to PTH soldering. I'm also terrified of wasting NAND in a first through fifth attempt at my maker space. If I meet Dosdude at an event, I'll give cash and food.

I went through a lot of tangents there, but I hope it can help someone. I'll be demonstrating this at VCF Midwest in a few weeks, so I can answer all sorts of questions then.
 
Last edited:
EtchedPixels said:
StrongARM SA110, 32-64MB ram 4GB or so hard disk ethernet, and reasonable video and sound.

There were a few versions - one was supposed to be a webserver in a box, another a client/desktop/developer box (in their dreams - far too slow). The OS was a sort of mangled Red Hat with KDE and a custom web UI (webmin). It was one of the early web ui driven boxes along with the netpiilot and the like.

I'd guess the bits they can't distribute are going to be Netscape, Citrix and Word Perfect 8.

When it first came out it was novel in it's size but not much else. Same kind of era as the Cobalt Qube and other small, brightly coloured not-x86 plastic computers. Unfortunately it wasn't very fast, and got run over fairly effectively by the x86 juggernaut of the time. Some of the old Linux sites/magazines are probably the best place to look for articles from the period.

The whole thing is really a bit of a sad story as I was told it - Corel wanted to build a box for VNC (which is still around today as a protocol) and management insisted it had to be in java. Because it was in java at the time it was unusably slow. Had they written it in C rather than bandwagon jumped they'd have had a product. Netwinder was an attempt to salvage something from it.

On the bright side it gave us webmin, which is still going, although mostly superceded by more modern web UIs and of course the fact the Linux desktop system configuration is now UI based.

Alan
Click to expand...

Hello,

First post on the forum, I'm joining a bit late as I found the thread only today.

The story isn't totally accurate there. At the time there was a big hype around the thin clients/network computers, that Java and Linux would be so disruptive for the desktop market. Around the same time, Corel (well, it was the CEO's vision at least) was attempting to create a desktop Linux market in order to extend the adoption of its product suites beyond Windows... So they had this idea of creating a Linux desktop computer to which they would add VideoConferencing support (VideoConferencing Network Computer) - that's the rationale behind the mystery video input!

- the operating system had to be ported to the StrongARM, which required a ridiculously small amount of power compared to a standard PC,
- .... surprise - it didn't have a math floating point processor unit, hence the Corel kernel team had to write a software one from scratch!
- the desktop had to be Java so that it could also be used on other (read Intel) platforms and be compatible with that new Java world in its infancy
- Sun didn't have a port of the JVM for StrongARM so Corel had to do it
- the jBridge technology would be used to "remote Windows" the Windows apps, à-la-Citrix to the Java desktop for legacy apps support
- .... the tech became GraphOn Go-Global which is still around

The desktop team had developers who had originally worked on the Corel Office for Java, so they were amongst the most advanced Java developers outside of Sun at the time. I was lucky enough to be an intern there at that very moment. Only toward the end of my internship someone on the QA team discovered that there was a new remoting app from Oracle Research Lab called VNC that, to our amazement, did provide pretty good remote desktop capability. Around the same time, the JVM port still wasn't completed and, once it did, it didn't perform well on the StrongARM. More development was required to profile/optimize/tune the interpreter for the new platform... yet the hardware was ready, R&D money was being burned and they _had_ to ship something. The Java desktop project was shelved as Corel killed its Java strategy, and KDE replaced it.

I had an original Corel Computer NetWinder as a small Linux server at home for many years until the unit died overnight. That was a sad day.

Fun read from the archives:
- https://www.itworldcanada.com/a-brief-history-of-corel
- https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/corel-maps-out-nc-plans/
- https://techmonitor.ai/technology/corel_tries_a_different_tack_with_office_java_applications

Fun times.
 
Hi all,

I have this Corel Netwinder 275. It should be in a good condition but I lost the power adaptor.

Does anyone know the V and A specs?

Thanks,

Markus
 

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