Hello. I recently acquired a NetWinder...

[Ralph Siemsen]

Hello Daniel,

Daniel Gimpelevich wrote:

> http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2006-February/001829.html

New one to me!  Cabal linux users group, hmm, sounds like fun!  Except, 
I thought there was no cabal! :)

> It appears the netwinder.net site went offline toward the end of 2004.  
> Any idea who inherited the copyrights and licenses for stuff you  
> couldn't put on netwinder.org before after that? 

The www.netwinder.net site is still active as far as I can tell (there 
is still a website there I mean).  It hasn't been updated in a long 
time, and I do not know who is really maintaining it.  Last we heard 
from them, they had packed up shop and moved out to the east cost, and 
were never really heard from again.

 > I assume the
> distributability of the NeTTrom has been resolved, since I was able to  
> download and use the last official version. Any progress on opening up  
> the source to it? 

There is no change here; all binaries were removed from the primary 
site.  Mirrors should not be carrying copies.  I have done some work at 
a replacement firmware (fully GPL'ed of course) but nothing really 
usable at this point.  As there have been several requests in the last 
little while, I may revive this project.

> There was mention on this list of Fedora-based  
> development going on on the hardware recovered from the old colo, but  
> not posted anywhere due to a lack of internet access there and a lack  
> of disk space at the current netwinder.org; any chance that stuff could  
> all be put on netwinder.osuosl.org along with all the stuff currently  
> missing from the netwinder.org website? 

The latest image was nw-9, roughly redhat-9 based.  Some work was done 
on fedora core; but not completed.  There really did not seem to be much 
requests for it, and other options (Debian, Gentoo) seemed to draw many 
of the potential users.

> The standard daughterboard has  
> placeholders for missing (telecom?) chips, but the unused RJ-11  
> connectors are included anyway. Is there a schematic for this board  
> anywhere, so that I can look into possibly using those connectors for  
> other purposes? 

Not that I know of.  You can probably trace the signals from the 
connector to pads where the telco magnetics would have gone.  The cost 
to license 56k modem technology was higher than buying an external 
modem, hence this card was never fully developed.

> Where is nwlilo? 

It is in the nwutils package.  The latest directly available version is:
http://netwinder.osuosl.org/users/s/stewart/redhat/RPMS/versioned/nwutil-1.6-1.armv4l.rpm

There has been some development on this package recently, version 1.8 is 
released, but I have not managed to upload it yet.  Nwlilo didn't see 
any changes, but the package did see several cleanups and additions.  It 
will appear in my directory (/users/r/ralphs/) in the near future.  In 
the meantime it should be available somewhere on debian.org, as the 
Debian folks were the ones who requested all the changes.

> What is the difference between the  
> nwfpe and fastfpe modules? 

Compliance versus speed.  NWFPE offers double and extended precision 
modes and passes all the IEEE tests, as far as I know.  Fastfpe is 
faster in benchmarks, not sure how compliant it is.

Both are irrelevant now that software floating point is readily 
available in the toolchain.  Expect NWFPE to remain only for 
backwards-compatibility with old binaries.

> What is the status of porting the WaveArtist  
> driver to ALSA? 

Not to my knowledge within the netwinder community.  I don't know which 
other devices contain the waveartist though, perhaps there is work 
elsewhere.

> Current Debian kernel packages don't appear to include  
> any CyberPro drivers. What is the significance of this?

Not sure, you would have to check on the debian-arm list.  I know that 
the cyberpro framebuffer in 2.6 works.  It is probably compiled-in, as 
the VGA mode stopped working early in the 2.4 series, and nobody ever 
fixed it to my knowledge.

> Has there ever  
> been any kind of Linux support anywhere for the WinBond 9660? I can't  
> even find a mention of such a chip anywhere. Perhaps it was originally  
> a typo that should have said 9960, and everybody's been repeating it  
> ever since? I should take a look at the chip itself to be sure, but  
> until then, I'll assume it's this one:
> 
> http://web.archive.org/web/20010619032254/www.winbond.com.tw/PDF/sheet/ 
> W9960cf.pdf

The DM disk images include a few demo applications for doing video 
capture.  There are both console (fbvideo) and X applications for 
capturing video.  Performance is poor and limited by flaky DMA.

These apps were not ported to the NW9 image, though it should be 
possible to do so.

> Is the secondary IDE channel accessible in any way?

Not to my knowledge.  You can however put two drives on the primary IDE 
(master and slave), as long as you have a good power supply.

> Has anyone looked  
> into the possibility of a banana-board for the RAM socket? I'll  
> probably think of more questions, but these are probably enough for  
> starters.

As 256MB is the limit from the footbridge, there doesn't seem much point.

Cheers
-Ralph