Well, I finally took delivery of my Netwinder DM644 today. I took it home
just before 6:00pm and had it up on my network within 15 minutes. I must
say that the documentation that came with the unit is sorely lacking, and at
this point, unless you are experienced with Linux (and in particular
RedHat's Distribution), you may not know to look in /etc/sysconfig/network
and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth(0|1).local to get your network
running. Since this is a "network" computer, I would have thought the
manual would have had at least some detail about getting the unit up and
running on a network. The manual (actually more of a pamphlet) does tell
what the proper posture for working in front of a computer is though. ;) Hopefully the manuals for
the more mainstream units, such as the group server and web server units
will come with more complete documentation. That being said, I had no
problems getting the box up and running and, indeed, for my situation this
was almost a "plug and play" setup. I was pleasantly surprised to find that
joe (one of my favourite editors) was already installed. On most RedHat
installs this particular editor usually has to be specifically selected.
There are a few things lacking though, most obviously, a decent web browser.
Oh sure, Lynx is there, but no Netscape (or alternative that I could find).
There is an icon on the task bar for Netscape, but no binary. I mucked
around attempting to get mozilla to run for a while, but it will take some
time. It also did not come with a really good graphic editor, but that was
easily resolved by grabbing a copy of The Gimp. So far tonight, I have
added the following tools to my NetWinder:
There are a bunch more items that I would like to add to this box, that I
will add as time allows. I really want to start playing with the IrDA port
and perhaps get this thing talking to my Palm Pilot. Ryan Shillington has done some work in this regard, that
I will check out soon. I'll update this page as time allows.
