The Netwinder (http://www.netwinder.org/) is a thin client which used to be
produced by Corel and later Rebel.  It's based on the StronARM chip and
around the so-called Footbridge companion chip.  Most Footbridge based
machines (most importantly, Netwinder and CATS) share similar or the same
code in debian-installer (it's called arm/netwinder rather than
arm/footbridge for historical reasons).

The Netwinder supports installations both via serial console and via
framebuffer (standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard).  All Netwinder machines
have a built-in 2.5" IDE drive.  The firmware is called Nettrom and
even though it's based on an old version of Linux there are no sources
available.  Nettrom has a number of restrictions which we have to live
with, e.g. the inability to load TFTP images larger than 4 MB.

The Netwinder has 2 Ethernet devices:
 - a Winbond W89C940F 10 MBit that is _everywhere_ referred to as eth0 [ne2k module]
 - a Digital DS21143 Tulip 10/100 MBit chip [tulip module]

Unfortunately, Linux decides to load these modules in reverse order, so the
well known "eth0" from which you load the d-i image via TFTP suddenly
becomes "eth1".  This was a problem with sarge and etch but has been fixed
in lenny with the help of a udev rules file.

Another really funky thing about Netwinder (Nettrom, really) is that it can
only boot certain TFTP images... in many cases, it will find a gzip marker
*somewhere* in the kernel image and think it's an initrd... oops.  After
talking to Ralph Siemsen for quite a while, he figured out a solution: you
can put a kernel and an initrd together into a "Netwinder image" and
specify the size and offset at the beginning.  This allows us to create
images that 2.6 can actually boot.  See the mknettrom script in the
nwutils package.

One final thing: Nettrom can only boot from a partition that is ext2
revision 0 (i.e. the old ext2 type).  partman has code for this already.

Regarding flash and configuration variables: there is no library to change
variables from within Linux.  In theory, it would be possible to read the
last 64 KB from /dev/mtd0, change it and write it back, but Ralph Siemsen
strongly advised against doing so.  debian-installer will therefore simply
print a list of commands users have to type once in order to boot Debian.

Upstream contacts (both very helpful):
  Ralph Siemsen <ralphs@netwinder.org>
  Woody Suwalski <woody@suwalski.net>

