Slashdot Mirror

The FAT32 filesystem is a major liability for embedded devices. Because of the fact that the disk head must seek back and forth from the filesystem table to the actual data, the effective data bitrate decreases with time. This means that WinCE has a maximum practical encoding time of about 1 hour; after that, the filesystem driver just can't keep up. We don't have this problem when using ext3 under Linux.

I think you've been drastically misinformed here. Head seeking between the drive's metadata and the drive data itself should be largely irrelevant when it comes to throughput, because disk cacheing will cause the metadata to be updated at infrequent intervals. If you really are having a problem, then try increasing the WinCE cache size. ext3 has exactly the same issues when it comes to updating metadata. (You may wish to try running FAT32 on Linux as a comparison.)

WinCE doesn't have a native terminal; you have to recompile and reload the whole OS and application image in order to test a change of even a single line of code. Worse, you can't interactively debug the board because you have no way to send something to standard input.

Do you feel lucky with "wince console"? And no, you don't have to recompile everything on every minor change --- just update the modified applications.

Really, it sounds like your WinCE system integrations people don't know their job. In particular, your build times look very disturbing. 20 minutes for a relink? What toolchain are you using? Admittedly, I don't know what kind of material you get from Microsoft, and so don't know what's involved when doing a relink, but something sounds very wrong.

would this work from a pda or pda phone?
with wireless built in I could see it working as a nifty little server.
What could you put in one gig?
If you could run apache on CE now that could be fun and quiet very quiet.
actually ahem
http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/software.html
looks like you can

just a thought

All I want is an iPod/iPaq/HP-48 that runs GNU Emacs!

As for playing mp3's, almost anything with a headphone jack (including iPaqs) can do that.

heh - ok, given that you have wireless, you could just ssh into a server and run vim, emacs, whatever.

OR you could just download vimce here.

Here is my list of must-haves for PocketPC/WinCE. I'm not quite what most would consider to be a "normal user," as I've got a lot of Unix leanings. However, I do not use a Zaurus because ... well, the software pretty much sucks. I really like real HWR, which doesn't exist on Linux and does on CE and the Newton. So PocketPC it is. But that doesn't mean you can't have your favorite Unix tools...

First, there are a lot of Unix ports from Rainer. I use his TeX distro for writing papers, Maxima w/ GNUplot and Tcl/tk GUI support for doing maths. I used to use Perl/tk, though Dialect (a really cool pythonish RAD language for CE and dekstop windows) has replaced it when I need to write an app that fits in as a CE app.

The app I spend the most time in is Squeak Smalltalk. It's not quite an application, but a development and application environment. Binary and source portable between oodles of platforms, including but not limited to CE/PPC, desktop windows/x86, linux of all flavors, Mac OS X/classic, Acorn RISC OS, etc etc.

One of the few regular PocketPC apps I use regularily is GowerPoint's uBook ebook reader. It's the best ebook reader I've found for the platform so far, and pretty good. The only thing it lacks that I wished it had was a text-to-speech feature for having books read aloud occasionally. It can read just about any format- txt, pdb/prc (both txt and html inside), html, rtf, and all of those formats zipped- and prolly others. it's nice to put a whole series- say, Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn series in one zip file with all of the books in the series. I typically buy a LIT and convert it when I have to, though sometimes I get books from fictionWise where you can sometimes get books in unencrypted formats.

Coding and reading... that leaves out the other big thing I do on my PDA (which is my computer): internettin'. (what a horrible word) I really reccomend the NetFront web browser- it's really nice. IE used to be really bad in PPC 2k and 2k2, though I'm told it's improved in 2k3 and 2k3SE, more like the IE that came with Handheld PC 2000 or vanilla WinCE 4.x, which is a very capable browser on the order of IE 5-5.5 or so. Handles most sites well and is pretty fast. However, it doesn't cut the mustard- no tabs, few and not configurable key commands, etc. For that, you need ftxBrowser, which I've bene using for years. Slick. It just embeds the IE control, so it's still IE (a good thing in the case of CE), but you've got a lot of features that are a must for me, a person who can't just do one browser page at a time. :)

There are a number of SSH clients around there. Some good ones that cost money, but there are some free ones. Rainer has one for free, though it takes a little work to get set up, but it's what I use.

What you're probably really looking for is an X Server (X clients are the applications that use X to display graphics).

A google search for "X Server PocketPC" gives me this site, which lists a WinCE port of a XFree86.

Alternatively, you could use a VNC, which would be more useful for OS X if you were wanting access to Aqua applications, too.

(No clue how well either of these work; I'm a PalmOS guy.)

As a longtime user of PDAs, Newton, WinCE and Zaurus, I feel I can safely say for most apps, MySQL is pretty sucky on the Z. It wastes precious resources on the Zaurus- especially precious considering how much the setup- Linux+Qtopia- eats up as it is. Far worse than CE.

I can't say I've used this particular MS SQL for CE product- but I have used the built-in database, which allows happy queries. As well as SQLlite on the Zaurus. Both seemed a lot faster and provided more enjoyable solutions for me, the developer, than MySQL running on a PDA did. In the case of both SQLlite and the built-in CE db I wrote some scripts to do synching over the network with the server running on my desktop, but it wasn't much work, and the drop in resources wasted between this solution and running MySQL more than made up for it.

If you want a MySQL port to CE, you could try it yourself. See Rainer's ported software, along with tips and a compat library for porting Unix/Linux apps to CE. Because of his library and what it has meant for the CE community, I use a CE palmtop instead of the C760- for me, there are a ton more useful, well-adapted Unix ports for CE than there are for the Zaurus. Granted, I'm a traditional man- I want the classics like LaTeX, emacs, and the like. I could build any artbitrary linux package for my Z pretty darn quick, but would have to put a ton of energy writing an interface that didn't blow. Which most OSS devs for the Z really don't do- they just hand you a CLI app and say "see! you can run N on the Z! oooh!"

Not sure what you mean- what version? 6.6 is the package I was using, although should be workable with the newest- PerlCE was rolled into the main distr. Anywho, you can get it here.
Worked pretty well for me- I used it on Handheld PC 2000 (WinCE 3.0-based) and on PocketPC 2000 and 2002 (both WinCE 3.0-based too).

PerlCE at Rainer's site.

Not sure what you mean- what version? 6.6 is the package I was using, although should be workable with the newest- PerlCE was rolled into the main distr. Anywho, you can get it here.
Worked pretty well for me- I used it on Handheld PC 2000 (WinCE 3.0-based) and on PocketPC 2000 and 2002 (both WinCE 3.0-based too).

PerlCE at Rainer's site.

There are certain aspects of Palm OS software that could definitely use some work... I've never seen a decent photo editor for the Palm OS...

The Palm OS is also lacking in several neat features. PocketPC *dominates* on the multimedia front... and last I checked, the only 2 (3?) Palm OS SSH clients didn't support Hi-res, so they were a bitch to read... I would love something as good as sshCE on a Palm.

And PocketPC games can't be beat ;-)

Oh! And don't forget ports of FTPD, Perl, Apache, XFree86, emacs and Vim ;) (among others)

You should learn LaTeX. It is an awesome way to write documents. I've had a number of professors compliment me on my documents. They look really professional,

Why? My reasons:
#1) If you've done any HTML coding, or are a programmer in general, it is pretty easy to pick up the basics. You don't need to learn all that much to get the core of what you need to do- lists, bold/italic/underline, centering, paragraphs, tables, and some symbols.

#2) You can use tools like LyX to do the work for you. Even if you never learn a lick of real LaTeX code, you still end up with a beautiful document, and any of the other benefits.

#3) You can use LaTeX without having a GUI. Or a newer computer. Or a "full" word processor on a "full" OS. That is, you can write, compile and print out LaTeX docs on a DOS machine, from the console on a Unix machine, a PDA, etc.

I initially decided to learn LaTeX because there was a simple TeX compiler for the NewtonOS, my PDA platform until recently. There was also NewtonWorks- a good mobile Office suite- but there was no simple way for me to output the document and print it without docking with a Mac or Windows machine. With TeX for the Newton, on the other hand, I could export the text to any machine, compile the TeX on the machine itself or on the university mainframe, and then print.

I had to move on around a year ago from the NewtonOS, at least as my primary platform. On the Jornada 720, a Windows CE micro-laptop Handheld PC 2000 device, I started writing my papers using a real version of LaTeX- the same thing as I was using on my OS X machine. Editing the LaTeX code in emacs no less- all on a PDA! The whole cycle- editing, compiling, viewing (with WinDVI) and printing can all be done on a PDA. There are easy to install WinCE packages. I also had a PocketPC for a while, and the packages all worked very well there as well, but editing wasn't as nice as it was on the J720- it has a real keyboard. I've recently switched to the Zaurus SL-C760, and am a bit disapointed in that there aren't any easy to install ipkgs, along with a decent Qtopia LaTeX editor. Alas, I'll work on it soon enough- I'll need to be able to write up LaTeX docs and compile to PS before school starts. :)

#4) I had another reason, if I remember, I'll put it here!

#5) It's entirely free. Yeah, you could get OpenOffice. Or you could pirate/buy/get bundled MS Office. OO has generally just been a huge hassle for me; MS Office (I'm on OS X) is generally faster, more stable and less of a hassle than OpenOffice, but introduces its own set of problems.

There are already several remote access solutions for PDA users. Best of all they're freeware and cross platform.

Using the VNC graphical protocol (servers for Linux, Solaris, Windows, Mac, Dec Alpha):

• PalmVNC for Palm OS.
• VNC Viewer for PocketPC (a version for Windows CE is also available on the official site.

Text remote access using SSH (which may be all you need if you want access to the command line and to, for example, send/read email with something like PINE):

• Top Gun SSH for Palm OS.
• SSH (port of BSD SSH) for the PocketPC (aka: Windows CE).

You should know this before buying an expensive commercial solution that may not be what you really want. The only advantage the article's commercial solution is that I think VNC doesn't include encryption by default (although I bet it wouldn't be difficult to add).

When discussing the Zaurus in relation to WinCE, a lot of people go on about features they see as novel to a Linux PDA.

I'm a big PDA nerd. I'm working on my own PDA OS/computing environment. And I've done a lot of comparisons between WinCE, Palm OS, Newton OS, and Linux.

Linux on the PDA can do a lot of slick things- run Apache, Emacs, Vi, Perl, Python, SSH, VNC and X11. WinCE can do that as well. There is an XFree port, multiple SSH clients (Free, free and commercial), etc. You can tunnel X11 over SSH on a WinCE machine. You can use a serial cable to adminster router with a terminal emulator. Some of these things are of questionable usefulness for some people, but it is possible all the same.

I've heard way too many people go on and on about how their Linux PDAs can do these things as an advantage over WinCE PDAs. Linux PDAs may have their advantages (moral advantage?), but running a handful of useful Unix-ey tools isn't one of them.

Check out Rainer's page for a lot of useful WinCE ports.

I cannot say the same for Palm OS, however. PalmOS is relatively primitive (internally) compared to WinCE and Linux/PDA, which are both full-blown, relatively modern operating systems that run on PDAs. Some of these things work on Palm OS devices, SSH for instance, but X11, Emacs most likely do not.

I'm *really* tempted to buy this Zaurus- seems like a good deal. But the same thing as ever is holding me back- Linux PDAs have no real handwriting recognition system, like the HWR on the Newton OS or CalliGrapher for Windows CE. I use it quite a bit for taking notes- taking bitmap notes doesn't compare in their usefulness to real text notes. The thumboard wouldn't cut it for taking college lecture notes for me, and the character recognition wouldn't either.

Other than HWR, I have still stuck to using WinCE and the Newton OS as my PDA platforms. The available software for WinCE is generally of a higher quality than you can get for Linux PDAs. Like on desktop Windows, there is a lot of trashy software, however, but the good stuff is pretty good, better than most of what you can get for Linux PDAs, commercial or not.

That isn't to say that all Linux PDA software sucks, or that you can't get a decent package here or there- on the contrary. The Hancom Office apps are pretty nice. However, Linux PDA apps are all too often like their desktop Linux apps- messy UI wise. Especially the Free and free apps. The commercial QTopia shops put a bit more thought into their apps, which is good.

If you like what is available enough, and think the moral advantage of Linux instead of WinCE

I've wanted a Linux PDA for quite some time. I did something similar to you, I bought a Helio for running Linux. Similar specs as an Agenda (75 MHz MIPS, 2 MB Flash ROM, 8 MB RAM, serial, 160x160 B&W screen). Linux was ported, so was PicoGUI, but in the end, it does just about as much as an Agenda does. Maybe a little more- the open-source default VT-OS is still pretty useful. After that, I got an iPAQ 3100 for developing Dynapad, and tried running Familiar and then QTopia on it during a couple months in the summer. Went back to WinCE after that,

I also run Squeak on it, and can use it for programming. But generally, it's a toy compared to my Newton 2100 or my Jornada 720.

That said, use whatever you like. I'm not a "WinCE evangelist," but thus far, I've preferred using it over Linux on a PDA. I don't even use Windows on the desktop (or server), but I'm a big proponent of using the best tool for the job.

Web server on handhelds is nothing new...
http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/wince/apache-ce.html
Only this runs on Windows CE, no Linux...

I mean, c'mon ... there is at least one person who ported Apache to Windows CE (ApacheCE), so it's not like this particular example is unique in terms of serving networked content. One wouldn't even have to go through the pain of configuring Familiar Linux, as was the case here. Slow news day already?

I mean, c'mon ... there is at least one person who ported Apache to Windows CE (ApacheCE), so it's not like this particular example is unique in terms of serving networked content. One wouldn't even have to go through the pain of configuring Familiar Linux, as was the case here. Slow news day already?

Oh Ok, how about I make it easy and just ask for the Apache port? That will never happen either because: [sniped random idiocy]

you mean like this?

It took me a whole 2 seconds of searching on google to find that. If you knew anything about computers you would know the following:

1) WinCE is as much a 'real' OS as Linux and Windows (premtive multithreading, protected memory, sockets, etc)

2) You don't need a 'real OS' to run a webserver and you never did. You can run a web server on an Atari 800.

3) The quality of the OS has nothing to do with the quality of the Excel port.

I don't know about Linux, but there is active development of NetBSD (NetBSD/hpcarm) that runs on Jornada 525. I have not tried it, though, so I'm not sure of the current status. Here is the web page: www.netbsd.org/Ports/hpcarm . There is also a guy (in Germany I think) named Keuchel Rainer that has ported lots of UNIX-type tools to Windows CE (focusing on Jornada 720). This includes many command line tools such as tar, telnet, gzip, rsh, etc.. plus Perl (!) and an X Server (!!). Perl seems to work well, but aparently thare are a few limitations due to the WinCE operating system, but I have not had any problems yet, probably because I still a newbie when it comes to Perl :-) The X server also works well (although a little slow) and includes some ported X apps, such as twm, xeyes, xedit, xcalc, and xpdf. I have not yet tried it with remote X apps, but i'm sure it works. He has also ported emacs to CE! Check it out: www.rainer-keuchel.de(click on Software at the bottom).
There is also a Yahoo! winCE dev group (started by Mr. Rainer: groups.yahoo.com/group/wince-devel If you find out about a Linux port, post it! :-)

Emu48CE, an HP48 emulator.

RPN Calc. Very nice and supports RPN like all good calculators should. No graphing capability.

Maxima. Looks interesting, port of a GPL symbolic manipulation program. (This guy has emacs, gluplot, and other stuff running under CE as well.)

There's a lot more stuff out there if you search, but no real killer calculator yet that I can see.

I don't know about Linux, but there is active development of NetBSD (NetBSD/hpcarm) that runs on Jornada 720. I have not tried it, though, so I'm not sure of the current status. Here is the web page: www.netbsd.org/Ports/hpcarm

There is also a guy (in Germany I think) named Keuchel Rainer that has ported lots of UNIX-type tools to Windows CE (focusing on Jornada 720). This includes many command line tools such as tar, telnet, gzip, rsh, etc.. plus Perl (!) and an X Server (!!). Perl seems to work well, but aparently thare are a few limitations due to the WinCE operating system, but I have not had any problems yet, probably because I still a newbie when it comes to Perl :-) The X server also works well (although a little slow) and includes some ported X apps, such as twm, xeyes, xedit, xcalc, and xpdf. I have not yet tried it with remote X apps, but i'm sure it works. He has also ported emacs to CE! Check it out: www.rainer-keuchel.de Click on Software at the bottom.

There is also a Yahoo! winCE dev group (started by Mr. Rainer: groups.yahoo.com/group/wince-devel

If you find out about a Linux port, post it! :-)

Haven't tried it yet. May get around to it tonight.