OK ...
i got the new idea working...
so now i present the new feature to you all!
persistent registry and persistent storage
this means, if the 900c loses power, all the settings, registry and files will remain.
additionally, there is no more Storage RAM, all that RAM will be used for program RAM.
the root of the filesystem is mounted to the 32MB flashdisk
(Internal Disk, but there will be no such folder anymore obviously, it'll become "\"
.
this will give you more space for your files because the Storage RAM is usually never allocated such a whopping amount of 32MB!
the only issues right now :
- PIM databases are only implemented for object storage
(i.e. the RAM based filesystem
)
so if you want to use/sync PIM this will be broken. you'd need to implement your own syncing solution, and i don't think coding something like that is a small task. so i will make two roms, one will have persistent storage for users who don't care about PIM, and the other will still be ram based but will have the hpc2000 PIM
(as long as i can indeed port that over
).
- i *need* to code up something that will show how much storage you have remaining
(this will be a control panel applet probably
). right now nothing shows that in cenet 4.2 with persistent storage... and if you ever manage to fill the disk up and the OS wants to write the persistent registry it won't be able to. then you have to boot to an OS with a non persistent registry to clean the disk.
- following from this... i will make a small RAM OS image that'll clean your registry and disk in such a case, but under normal circumstances you'll never need that.
unless you want to do a full hard reset which will mean cleaning the disk, but you have to leave some ROM files there, so my app will take care of that.
- the internal disk now will have \Windows under it, right now with full shadowing enabled
(i could not get it working without it YET
). this means the ROM modules cannot be seen *at all*. of course they can still be shadowed just fine
(i.e. updated by copying a new file with the same name over them
). and it also means, all the OS files from ROM
(that are not modules
) are copied here. the user is able to delete them but i don't recommend that unless you know what you're doing... so the file attributes for them will still be HIDDEN just incase
to avoid filling up too much of the 32MB with the ROM files, i'll just make all the exe's and some of the dll's into modules, so that most of that neat ROM space will be used, and the 32MB storage won't be wasted much.
edit: but maybe i can get this working without shadowing too, means there will be more space for the storage. would be even better
if anyone wants to test this to see how well it works in real life, i'll soon have a beta build... right now i was just lazy and based all of it off the ce.net beta image by NEC, because that already had persistent registry implemented so i just had to implement persistent storage
(god was it a pain due to sparse documentation! thanks TFGBD!!!
)
the beta build will take some time because i want to base it on a final cenet image and that means converting the entire registry from it to the persistent version, then of course other small adjustments will have to be made too.
so stay tuned
as a sum up main new features of v3 will be:
- persistent storage and registry as an option OR hpc2000 PIM as the other option
(i hope
)
- new skin from Geared's latest cool stuff preferably
- bugfixes, app updates, some small new features such as adding new driver app i'm coding up, readding wordpad as an extra viewer, etc etc
Edited by cmonex 2008-04-08 11:56 PM
)
