It appears that Newisys is busy preparing a new firmware patch which should eliminate the need for a specially prepared harddisk to be used with a barebone version.

This means that you can buy a barebone (without preconfigured harddisks) NA-1400 and add your own harddisks as you see fit. The new firmware then will take care that the harddisks are properly configured. This is a major improvement over the previous solution because it can be considerably cheaper to assemble your own NA-1400 this way. It also means that you are not limited to the four standard configurations anymore (1 TB, 1.2 TB, 1.6 TB or 2 TB), a barebone combined with four 750 GB harddisk would result in 3 TB raw storage space (2.2 TB using RAID-5)!

Martin Michlmayr, a former Debian Linux Project Leader has expressed his interest in getting Debian to work on the Newisys NA-1400 among others.

The benefits of having a generic Linux distribution like Debian to work on the NA-1400 are obvious. The Debian Linux distribution consists of more then 15.000 packages which would become instantly available to the NA-1400 users for free, maximizing the usefulness of this device.

Currently Martin is in search of a Newisys NA-1400 sample which he needs for development and testing perposes. If anyone is interested in donating such a device to the Debian project please contact him directly or via this website.

Yesterday Intel announced that it has sold it’s entire XScale department to Marvell. The Intel XScale 80219 is the CPU of the Newisys NA-1400. What this means in the long term for the NA-1400 or it’s successors is currently unknown.

Today I have crosscompiled my first ‘hello world’ program for the NA-1400. This indicates that the crosscompile toolchain (scratchbox) is functioning and more serious crosscompile projects can be undertaken. First however, I need to solve an issue with glibc version differences between the crosscompiler and the target system.

The first ‘modification’ to the NA-1400 is a fact! Terminal access to the console using the onboard COM ports is succesfully accomplished.

This means there can be full control over the boot process and also root access to Linux, which makes software modifications possible. Detailed information can be found in the documentation section.

Read the ‘a users first impressions’ article to find out how my first experiences with the Newisys NA-1400 are.

New information indicates that - for consumers - the barebone version isn’t very interesting. This is because the NA-1400 needs a special image installed on one of the harddisks (the so-called master or golden harddisk). Buying a seperate master disk and installing it is expensive and also a time consuming process. Because the pre-configured versions are competatively priced, when compared to a barebone with four seperate harddisks, it is easier to buy a pre-configured version.

The 1.6TB (4x400GB) and 2TB (4x500GB) versions are scheduled to be available in Europe in about 3 weeks (mid May).

Newisys published a new administrators (users) guide and quick setup guide on it’s website:

• Users guide
• Quick start guide

This site now uses a new template and doesn’t use frames anymore. Thanks to Michael Klier from http://www.chimeric.de for creating this beautiful template.