NetBSD Running On An iOpener Without IDE HD

Elwood writes "Andrew Gillham has booted NetBSD/i386 -current on his Netpliance i-opener. He did this without opening the case and without using a 2.5" IDE hard drive." Read on for details.

The steps involved (using a normal keyboard) are:

1. Get to a root shell, via 'ESC 4' and fast typing.
2. Bring up PPP to a NetBSD machine. Having a PBX helps
3. Backup the 16MB of flash, with the following:

   # cat /dev/hd0 | gzip -9 > hd0.gz
   # ftp 
   ftp> put hd0.gz 

4. Replace flash with NetBSD image, by ftping compressed file.

   # gzip -d -c file_name.gz | cat > /dev/hd0

5. Wait a few seconds, yank the power to prevent QNX updating flash.
6. Reboot under NetBSD, enjoy.

Full details are available at the main NetBSD Changes page.

Re:Hmmm

Of course, if you have 100MB ethernet, NFS root is bearable, if not fast. Then you could have a full system. :)

Re:Hmmm

they have USB... and of course NetBSD supports USB ethernet. So you could have that diskless X terminal after all.

Re:Hmmm

These things would make extremely cool and cost effective X terminals... if only they had ethernet :(

It should be a sufficiently fast X terminal over PLIP though, although it's not nearly as flexible this way. I could sure use an X terminal on the kitchen table though, I find myself eating on my desk most of the times, which kinda sucks ;)

-W

....

What can you possibly say to this? NetBSD simply runs on way to many things.

-sirket

where are they?

And now if I could only get my hands on one of those deity-confounded i-Openers.

Re:where are they?

Most of the Circuit City outlets in SE Michigan and NW Ohio seem to have some. Picked up mine yesterday and plan on trying this NetBSD install. Much more elegant than the current IDE modifications.

Hmmm

Why replace QNX with NetBSD? QNX is cool. Of course, I don't know what i-Opener has done to QNX, but I don't imagine much - it will be the standard QNX Photon + Voyager + Mail + Some other stuff + terminal(? - a QNX Web Pad I have played with had a text terminal to play with). Replace this with what? A text-mode NetBSD? Strange idea.

Re:More info & Changes

The NetBSD trick (writing a bootable image, kernel or otherwise directly to the SanDisk) also works with Linux or most any other OS. You just need an image to work from. You could take a root-on-NFS IP auto-discovery kernel and just write it directly to the SanDisk as if you were making a boot floppy and have yourself a working setup.

More info & Changes

Most of the attention out there at modifying i-openers has been towards Linux, but a lot of the information is applicable to any x86 operating system, really. *NIX systems are just easier to install and get working, since the hardware setup is weird.

i-opener-linux.net [i-opener-linux.net] and a FAQ [fastolfe.net].