CE Emulator & Protable Firefox on CF Card?

The new issue (September 6, '05) of PC Magazine has a "Solutions" article by Edward Mendelson that is fascinating. I wonder whether we can do something like what he describes with a CF card?

He describes making a portable bootable system on a USB thumb drive. He uses and mentions some interesting versions of major programs: 1) a free MS download of a CE emulator (why can't we update our OS using this?) 2) John Haller has developed portable versions of Firefox, Thunderbird & Sunbird Calender downloaded from johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla
3) A portable stand alone PDF reader foxit PDF Reader 1.3 at foxitsoftware.com and much more.

He isn't clear on this but I believe he claims they put together a functioning portable office on a 32MB thumbdrive. You do not have to install the system. Just plug in the drive on a PC USB and it even starts itself. Programs include one that leaves no tracks or info on the PC.

Any reason why a CF card can't be set up to do something like this on a Handheld?
Of course, we do not need an office to go but running a newer version of CE and the portable versions of firefox, thunderbird and running a stripped down version of a newer IE may be possible, adapting the approach described by Mendelson? Pages 84 to 88

---Bruised

well, it could be possible but then you need to license that newer version of CE and write a bootloader, drivers and SH3 support, etc etc..

Currently Linux is the only way that we can do something similar to that. Why? Because it doesn't cause thousands of dollars to make a build of it, like CE. I really am wondering if there is another OS that we can get on CE devices other than Linux. I think some variety would be nice.

Today's motherboards (and BIOS) have the option to boot off a USB disk. The same way you can boot PCs with floppies, harddrives, and CDs.

Handhelds do not boot off anything other than its own ROM.

If that is the case how can you boot Linux on the J720?

HPCs like the Jornada *can* boot off using a bootloader. So yes, it can boot off other OS, provided a bootloader is written, as is the case for the various *nix distros for HPCs.

From what I know, bootloader basically do what the bootloaders in the ROM in HPCs does, ie, read an image to memory, reset the Program Counter (PC) and let the processor execute whatever statement is there.

In the strictest sense, HPCs like the 720 cannot "boot off anything other than its own ROM", ie it cannot boot off anything using its built-in bootloader. But with an external bootloader, it can!

A typical ROM config for HPCs ...

============
BootLoader
---------------------
OS Image


============

For those with flash rom, the bootloader would also have some other functionality like

- Flashing in from Serial port
- Flashing in from CF/PCMCIA
- Flashing in from JTAG
etc

I think portable Firefox and Thunderbird and all the other apps would be great for the HPC accept the fact that if you ever check how much ram your 'firefox.exe' is taking there is no way an HPC could take that very well.

But for PCs using portable firefox on a USB drive is great, keeps me Firefox handy, just be weary of trojans on these unprotected IE systems loading something on your USB drive and bringing to your system.

Mendelson discusses the bootloader for the thumbdrive. He also reports that it does not cost anything to set up a thumbdrive the way the PC Magazine team did. Please read the article I mention in my original post and then see what you think.

I am not a programmer, beyond scripting or old MS DOS Batch files. As for a different O/S than CE or Linux, what about DOS? I don't mean proprietary MS-DOS but the much better Open Source DOS variants. There are many hard core DOS users around still. They keep Free versions of DOS alive and evolving. I held out against Windows as long as I could, prefering much smaller and more stable Geosworks, Amiga, and command line Dr. DOS & Free DOS. I did not give in until Windows '98, when I thought I was sort of forced to go windows. Based on what I know now, I think I should have stuck with DOS. I figured it would crash along with the global BBS network, after AOL opened up Internet to the public and together with Microsoft taught a generation of computer users they can demand to be computer illiterate, 'that it is really the way to go. Just let Microsoft do the navigating and driving.'

Well, turn off the TV and radio (so the propaganda cannot reach you) and wait and see what a joke Windows Vista and the new MS policy of making users pay for update "service." 'We will discuss what the unacceptable huge & slow Vista can do as if you get that in the stripped down version we ship out and we will charge a monthly fee for you to download the weekly bug and security fixes we auto download to to you. '

I could just see the public reaction to Ford or GM delivering a stripped down, buggy version of a new car to you and having you bring it in every week so dealers can finish the job a little at a time for a "upgrade" monthly fee! Then, send out a strongly recommended yearly major Service Package that leaves many cars inoperable. For a by the minute fee a factory rep., who may or may not know English or may not know anymore than the corporate secretary, will help YOU get the car running again! If the unstable, bloated battery crashes, you have to prove the car belongs to you personally within 24 hours or your new battery is fried. Even if you buy a new model, you cannot sell your used car. How would that go over?

---"It just gets curiouser and curiouser, said Alice"

---Brui

How?
(btw it's probably not my place to answer that question)

Ok, here's the deal.

The thumbdrive described in the article contains mostly Windows applications that can be run without installation; directly from the drive. That includes the CE emulator; it is just another application that can run under PC Windows, and has some practical use (IE6, WinMsg etc).

It also describes how to make certain apps autorun when the USB drive is connected.

And finally it describes how the drive can be made bootable, so you can boot your own OS from the drive. The OS's mentioned in the article are certain versions of DOS and Linux. They DO NOT run any of the Windows applications described previously in the article. If you boot from the drive, you cannot run Firefox, OpenOffice, or CE emulator. Unless of course you install other (often lesser) versions of such programs that can run under the smaller OS. Chances are networking isn't available in such OS (unless you happen to have the required network adapter drivers), so everything is offline.

I think the CE emulator that runs under PC Windows is about the only thing I would find useful, because it is a complete system that can do anything practical, like keep my cookies and stuff (unlike the other small OS's). The other Windows apps don't really appeal to me, since there's no telling how protected your data will be. If you don't leave data in such apps, there's almost no point in using the thumbdrive anyway.

As for using the idea for HPC... it is mostly equivalent to having apps on your CF card. You can run the same app directly from your CF card on different Handhelds as long as the apps are compatible with the CE version and CPU type, and do not require installation.

The CE emulator, as mentioned above, is strictly a PC Windows app; cannot run it on CE itself.

Lastly, about running DOS (instead of emulating x86) on HPC: you can as long as you recompile everything (OS, drivers, apps) for the CPU type of your handheld. Basically same idea as the Linux stuff. And yes, if you happen to have an x86 CE machine and found a bootloader for it, you don't need to recompile everything, just the DOS to support your hardware.

Yeah...there are a ton of little apps that will work on thumbdrives other than just Firefox...
http://www.portablefreeware.com/
All free and all run off a thumbdrive..I just use a launcher app that has a little autorun.inf and it allows me to start all my apps.

Amen to bruisedquasar...I've been a Windows user forever, and it's okay, but the day my old laptop became the "old" laptop I decieded to just have some fun and install DOS on it. Not that bad of an idea cause I found DOS drivers for my ORiNOCO wireless card and got me a copy of Arachne and now it's my super low powered internet machine.

But about DOS being on the HPCs..I did remeber seeing a good DOS emulator that I was pretty close to getting, but it wasn't free and I didn't feel that bothering with all the registration for the trial version was worth it.

I dunno if you've got a J720 but JLime should have a functional kernel out soon for it...won't have all the apps, but should be ready.

I know the thumb drive set up the PC Magazine techs put together and maybe few of the programs will work with a CE device. What interests me is the concept and possibility of doing something similar. For instance, the nanite revolution was sparked by the personal computer revolution where photo-film like techniques are used to design and build a master transitor system large and then repeated shrink copies until it it miniturized.

A cross section of engineers and scientists wondered if something similar, if the concept could be applied to making microscopic machines. Several years ago these American innovators managed to build microscopic rotary pumps, engines and etc and IBM labs managed last year to add an electron computer to a nanite engine and polymer coating scientists managed to construct, using polymer and nanite technology, a super string that is strong enough to hold a people capsule several miles away, connect it to a stallite or the space station and use such an anchor to make a whip elevator from earth into space.

I also wonder if the engineers and computer programmers among us have looked into what Casio BE-300 enthusiasts did to greatly extend the capabilities of the BE-300. They built something they call O/E (operating environments) that extend the MIPPS processor, embedded CE 2.11 Casio so it can run most pocket pc software. Could similar 0/Es be compiled for Handhelds so we can side step the engineered CE version limitations?

1) NONE of the apps in the article can be used on CE. They are for PC Windows. And like I said before, you can do something similar by running your favourite CE apps from the CF card. The whole idea of the thumbdrive is to have the apps with you instead of with the computer. However when applied to HPCs, having the apps with you is worse than having them with the computer
2) Some DLLs written for the BE-300 are already being used by some people to run PPC apps on the HPC, especially the ones that are compiled for more than just MIPS. However only one or two of those files actually do any help for us, and even those I believe are later replaced by better alternatives.

the BE-300 doesn't run ce 2.11.... it runs CE 3.0, but not ppc2000. that's why enthusiasts needed to hack ppc programs on it. it's similar to the hpc2000 vs ppc2000/2002 difference.

uh? what files don't help?