A Windows CE Shell For Netbooks

nerdyH writes "Netbooks such as the Acer Aspire One and Lenovo Ideapad S9 usually ship with SSD storage and the Linux operating system in low-end configurations, or else with hard drives and Windows XP Home at the higher end of the market. Therefore, customers who want a "Windows experience" have no choice but to shell out for extra RAM and disk storage, potentially impacting battery life. Perhaps not for long. Quarta Mobile says its open-source (yes, open source) "MID-Shell for Windows Embedded CE 6.0" provides a Microsoft-based alternative to Linux for low-end devices with SSDs (solid state disks)."

Comments

Re:Who would want that?

[martinw89]

That's a good point. As an alternative to Linux, it's only benefit is a semi familiar interface and some windows apps. I bet a bunch of users would be confused why their favorite programs don't work on "Windows".

o_0

[David Gerard]

Why yes, I want a WINDOWS experience. It will involve bending shoes together. Or something.

What on earth? Windows CE is a fabulous example of software that sells in magazines and looks good on feature lists but basically doesn't bloody work. There's a reason the accursed iPhone is so popular, and especially so with anyone who's suffered a WinCE phone and done the wince of WinCE.

Re:o_0

[oakgrove]

As the less than thrilled owner of a Windows Mobile 5 pda phone (HTC Starcom), I couldn't agree more with your assessment. This thing is a complete piece of crap and the crappiness begins and ends with the OS.

It constantly locks up requiring a reset. And when I reset it, it's a crapshoot whether it will hang on the boot screen requiring me to remove and reinsert the battery. I constantly have to recalibrate the touch screen or my touch gets farther and farther off the mark. No command line. No USB host support though I guess that's more the fault of the device. Still sucks though. When I receive a call, it might ring, then again it might not. The UI is all-around slow. It's like you push a button and when it feels like it, it will respond, and this thing has a 400 MHz processor. I realize it's an ARM but still.

I could go on and on but suffice it to say, this thing sucks. I eschewed Windows on my desktop for Linux a long time ago and I wish so bad there were a legitimate Linux alternative for my phone. You have no idea how happy I would be to have a Linux based PDA phone. I looked at the Openmoko but, without 3G data, it doesn't make much sense. Though with USB host support, maybe I can use it with my USB720 modem. Any thoughts? One day. One more thing, the idea of WinCE on a netbook is a bad joke.

web browser

[Yold]

From my smartphone experiences, there isn't even a decent web browser for the WinCE platform. Opera sucks slightly less than IE mobile. About half the websites I tried to use functioned correctly. Fahgeddabout it

Re:Linux on the low end?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, why is it that I can't find a sub-notebook that doesn't charge MS tax for anything beyond the low end model?

Here is a 9" screen sub-notebook with a 60GB hard disk where the MS tax is an additional cost, such that the machine can be ordered with Ubuntu and without the MS tax.

http://www.pioneercomputers.com.au/products/configure.asp?c1=3&c2=12&id=2696

Re:Linux on the low end?

[glittalogik]

Amen, I want Linux on the high end too. So I went and built myself something reasonably high-end: ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe mobo, Intel Q6600, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 512MB 9800GT graphics card...so it's not the absolute shizzle but it's the best machine I've ever owned. Put it all together, and have spent the week since discovering just how shocking support is for P45 chipset motherboards still - primarily the ASUS P5xx boards apparently, but MSI and others seem to have serious issues too.

So far, the best result I've gotten is to successfully boot an Ubuntu 8.04.1 LiveCD (which will only happen with AHCI enabled, otherwise nothing) and run the installation. After that, nothing, can't even get GRUB to load. 8.10 with latest kernel apparently might do the job when it's released, but as of now (Alpha 5) it won't load at all.

So maybe I'm straying slightly offtopic but I've got karma to burn and here's as good a place as any to ask: what distro should I be trying for newish, high-endish hardware support? openSUSE? Gentoo? PC-BSD? Just wait for Intrepid's final release? I went from XP to Ubuntu about four years ago and haven't ever had occasion to try any of the others but I'm open to suggestions...

They had this already..... the HPC pro

[ogdenk]

They had this form factor of device already.... and running Windows CE. They called them Handheld PC Pros (the Handheld PC were small clamshells).

Guess what.... they sucked and they flopped. If I want an oversized PDA with an anemic buggy OS, I'll get an old NEC MobilePro 800 off of eBay for $40.

I had one for a while.... it ended up running NetBSD/hpcmips with a USB Zip drive attached with velcro. I got bored with it about 6 years ago.

CE really does suck hairy monkey nuts. I had some CE-based thin clients that worked well but that was about it. I've owned an iPaq, an HP320LX, a Sharp Mobilon, an NEC MobilePro, and an Everex Freestyle.

Each one I got frustrated and ended up either getting rid of it or it ended up running Linux or NetBSD. CE is NOT worth the effort. At all. I'll use an old Newton MP2000 before I ever buy a new WinCE device that there's no Linux port for.

The EEE PC is a HELL of a lot more functional and useful with Linux than WinCE. Why XP is even taken seriously on the EEE PC I'll never know.

Re:Good

[Z34107]

They still want an x86 computer, so that they can still sell to people who want Windows, never mind if it chugs along slowly.

Actually, that's pretty true. I got the Acer One Note thingy mentioned in the article. It came with a Linux on training wheels kinda thing ("Linpus," they called it) that vaguely resembled an XP desktop with 4 buttons. I booted it, turned it off, and installed memory (had to remove the keyboard and the motherboard to install the memory underneath the motherboard!) and put the whole thing back together again.

Installing Windows from an external CD-ROM drive took forever, and running it was horribly slow. (I put Windows Server 2003 Standard on there; "Microsoft Dreamspark" is giving away free licenses to college students.) It would hard-lock on any disk access, and the machine would be unusable until the current transaction finished and the little green light blinked off.

The problem seems to be that Windows loves to do a bunch of little writes to disk. All the time. It'll log transactions in buffers in memory, and it won't flush them until the disk is idle, or it has a lot of writes pending, or it otherwise thinks it's a good time. Works fine on hard disks, but the 8 GB SSD in the Acer OneNote (and others, I'd assume) is NOT going to be winning any performance awards anytime soon. The read/write speeds were worse than my flash drive.

So, I installed EWF drivers on the thing. (Think the file system drivers that make Linux Live CDs work, only designed for XP embedded.) The idea is to run Windows off of a read-only volume, so EWF drivers commit file system changes to memory rather than disk. (If you want, you can later write those changes to disk all at once.) All soon as disk access was effectively read only, bam!, everything was lightning fast.

SSD companies have complained that Windows drivers are full of fail, and I suspect that they're right. But, with EWF on, the thing runs World of Warcraft, Office 2007, and Firefox 3 flawlessly. (It even played back 1080p h264 files without a hitch.) You can also do nifty things like delete all the icons on your desktop, reboot and have them still be there, which is a fun trick to show people.

So, with memory and sales tax, the entire computer cost me $430. It does everything I wanted it to do (be a big PDA and take notes in class), and even plays a few games. (World of Warcraft, I haven't gotten around to installing anything else on it. I game on my desktop, and when I do, it's usually not WoW ^.^)

Point of this long, rambling post: If you're willing to tweak things a little bit (this is /., so tweaking Windows shouldn't be a problem) you can make Windows absolutely scream on these webnotes. (Bluee screen of death notes?) Windows isn't that bloated that it won't run on an Atom.