Recommended systems
From NetBSD Wiki
This wiki page lists hardware systems that are known to work well with NetBSD and that users have had good success with. At this time, there is probably no need to list every generic system that is known to work. Known working hardware is also listed in the various official Ports pages.
What Pages Should Link To This?
Please add or improve these recommendations. Be sure to link to the appropriate Ports page, documentation on installing on NetBSD and link to where the system can be purchased. Also if there are some features or hardware that doesn't work, please be sure to mention that too.
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Handheld
TODO: anyone recommend Zaurus?
Mini Notebooks
(Mini notebooks are smaller than common laptops but larger than handhelds; for example: 5-inch by 10-inch battery-powered systems.)
NEC Mobilepro 880
Notable features:
- 168 mhz mipsel processor
- 32 megs of memory
- 9.4" LCD touch screen, 800x600 resolution (screen is not the highest quality, but useable)
- Functional USB (USB 1.0)
- CF card slot
- Functional PCMCIA slot (not CardBus)
- Useable keyboard, possible to touch type with some practice
- Decent battery life, but much shorter than if using the built in WinCE operating system.
Some annoyances:
- Built in sound is mono, and buggy. Not worth the time.
- Booting NetBSD requires first booting into the built in WinCE operating system, then executing a bootloader for the NetBSD kernel.
- X sometimes will lock up, forcing a hard reset of the system or a remote login and reboot.
- Stopping X will cause keyboard input to not work or to be garbled (recommended to reboot when exiting X).
- Compiling software is rather slow.
- No fully functional web browswer works yet. Firefox will not build from pkgsrc.
My setup:
- 2 gig CF Microdrive as the root disk and bootloader
- Linksys WPC11 v3 802.11b PCMCIA adapter. v4 and higher may not work.
- Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro USB sound adapter. This can work well if madplay is used and no other major work is being done which requires I/O. I've had best results with 128k mp3 files.
- USB to serial adapter so the Mobilepro can be a serial console to my other machines.
- NetBSD/Cobalt (Qube2) to build pkgsrc stuff for the Mobilepro.
I wrote an install howto, with help from others, here:
http://acruhl.freeshell.org/mobilepro880_netbsd.txt
Low Power Systems
(This is low-form factor or miniature systems.)
TODO: Soekris?
TODO: maybe Nokia IP130?
TODO: WRAP-based?
To Do: Non classified
Cobalt mips based Qube/Raq
Kuro box: modified Sandpoint code base (powerpc)
Landisk based machines (I-O Data)
Game systems:
Dreamcast (sh3) Playstation 2 (mips)
