Topic: NetWinder features?

[Bill Talcott]

Are any of you familiar with the NetWinder? http://www.netwinder.org/ is a user supported site, while http://www.netwinder.net/ is the actual corporate site. We had one until it died (right in the middle of Rebel going out of business) and we replaced it with an old PC running e-smith.

It was very similar to e-smith (with the hardware included), but had more web-based features for users. It had an "InfoPlace", which is similar to an i-bay with a fancy interface. You could upload a file, and give it a title, file type description, date, etc. which would appear in an automatically generated categorical listing. We used it for storing all our Nextel dealer bulletins (MS Office format) for corporate access.

There were more options in the administration web interface as well. Port forwarding and firewall included descriptions, as a few people have requested here. DNS stuff was web based too. I'm sure there are a few other things I'm forgetting...

You may be able to incorporate/copy some of their stuff to give the e-smith even more options, while keeping it very easy to use. I have our old StrongARM restore CD still, and they have images up on the user site.

[Robert Boerner]

I have a Rack mount Netwinder that I had in place at a school, and I found it to be very limited.

The InfoPlace program was nice (as was the discussion groups), but in order to upgrade to the latest release which includes better security controls, you have to pay a fee.

The unit (even with 128 meg of RAM) was never very fast. Because the ram is soldered on the motherboard, it just means I am stuck.

Rebel.com touted the device as a print server. What they neglect to tell you is that it will only spool jobs for printers locally connected, not ones with their own ethernet interface.

The interface for setting up shares was very minimal, in that you had to have some basic knowledge of the Linux directory structure to create new shares.

On that same note, the manual and the device seem to go back and forth from coddling the user too much, to not at all. The DNS and Firewall pages are good examples. If the user knew the implications of what changing those settings would do, they would not have bought a Netwinder anyway.

Another company is yet again trying to revive the Netwinder with a new revision of the OS and a Transmeta processor. I wonder if it will be any better