Cobalt

Cobalt Networks were The geniuses behind the Qube and the RAQ family of server appliances. Great hardware design, great solutions, bad pricing strategy. No wonder they were bought up by Sun.

Now Cobalt is the brand name for Palm OS 6, so this node will likely cause a lot of confusion for a while.

Resources

• CentOS Installation Guide – requires a PC to format the hard disk.
• dePoPo – updated packages for the standard Cobalt distro.
• Open Cobalt Qube – ports of the web front-end
• Cobalt ROMs
• http://cobalt.iceblink.org – Kernel configs and packages for Debian and RedHat
• NetSolid – a commercial venture for continued Cobalt support, but without any visible output so far.

NetBSD on Intel

Although NetBSD only ran on the MIPS models until a little while ago, there was some work in progress on an Intel installer.

CentOS on Cobalt

Thanks to brian99 on IRC (Gentoo-Cobalt-Dev, freenode), I found these:

• A HOWTO for net installation.
• A Strongbolt

Gentoo on Cobalt

It can be done – the question is how, and without opening the box.

Likely approach:

• Unmount all but the / partition, copy needed files from /usr to /
• Unpack the gentoo tarball there, chroot in, install like normal
• Set the boot partition with the ROM tool (which apparently misbehaves in the 2.10 ROM)

Useful links

• Alternative Architectures Forum
• Gentoo on a Qube 3
• 2.4 kernel
• 2.6 kernel