I recently received a Lokatoo A1000 GPS unit which has a Windows CE 5.0 OS built in.
The basic user menu and GPS software is usable but with a large screen (relatively) and SD card expansion capability (up to 4GB), I wanted to see if I can get out of the device.
You can access the SD card either by using the USB cable (which turns the device into a SD card reader) or plug it out and mount it on USB card reader to connect to your PC.
Hijacking the Navigation button
First thing first. Without making major changes to the system, you can hijack the "Navigation" button on the user menu to start your own program. Any program that you want to run on the device must be compatible with Windows CE 5.0 based on the ARM-I CPU. The device comes with 64MB SDRAM.
If you are accessing the device using a USB cable, the SD card appears as the second drive. To access the data and programs from within the Windows CE OS, it is mounted as \SDMMC.
To hijack the "Navigation" menu button, you need to edit a file in the SD card, "GpsRunfile.txt".
Put the full path to the program that you want to run into this text file. E.g. "\SDMMC\Garmin\Garmin.exe". Once this is done, you can now activate this program by clicking the "Navigation" icon on the boot up menu screen.
Adding Another User Menu
Since the boot up user menu cannot be easily changed, I used a program called CEMENU, which can get from http://sourceforge.net/projects/cemenu/, to create a second level, user-configurable menu. Read the included documentation on how to configure the XML files used to define the menu options.
Getting to the Windows Explorer
Since this device runs on Windows CE, you can actually start the Windows Explorer in the device. The program is located at "\Windows\explorer.exe". You can either set this in the "GpsRunfile.txt" file or configured it as an option in the CEMENU program mentioned above.
Reading PDF files
One limitation of the default software is that the ebook reader does not work on PDFs. So I tried using Foxit PDF reader, http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/, or you can use PocketXpdf, http://pocketxpdf.sourceforge.net/. However, note that these programs will give an exception when you try to open the file explorer if the Windows Explorer is not running. So run these programs only from the Windows Explorer interface.
Coding in Java
You can also build new programs using Java but you will need to appropriate JDK to compile and run the Java programs. The JDK / JVM that worked for me is the phoneme version, https://phoneme.dev.java.net/. If you other successes please let me know. The phoneme JVM supports both the CDLC and Personal versions of the JavaME standard.
Coding in Embedded Visual C++
Lastly, if you want to code at a native level you can try using the Embedded Visual C++ IDE form Microsoft which is free for download. You will need 3 installations:
1. eVC4 (Embedded Visual C++ 4.0)
2. eVC4SP4 (Service Pack 4)
3. Standard_SDK for Windows CE 5.0.
You can install these into Windows XP, develop your application and compile it for ARMi. Then
copy the executable to the SD card to run.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Manually cloning Centos 4.x server to VMware ESX
To cut the number of physical PCs or Servers we need for our support and development work, we embark on testing out VMware solutions. One of the challenge is to migrate the existing physical installations (mostly Linuxes) into the VMware VMs. There are a number of options including using the VMware Converter. I chose to migrate it using HD cloning techniques.
To do this, I used g4u (a BSD based live CD) to make a clone of the physical server and store the compressed (GZIP) disk image in a FTP server.
Then I created a new VM in VMware with the same or bigger disk size as the original physical disk.
Next I again, boot the VM using the g4u ISO, and restored back the compressed disk image from the FTP server, and then reboot the VM. But the version of linux I was using, Centos 4.5, would not boot up properly. It complained that it could not find the volume group "VolGroup00". The problem was a driver issue and during the booting process it did not load the correct driver to recognize the "virtual machine" SCSI adapter.
After trying many options (changing virtual disk adapters, etc), I found an article to fixes the problem for the Centos 4.x linuxes at: http://tipstricksandmore.blogspot.com/2009/01/after-converting-physical-rhel4-system.html.
The VMware SCSI adapters uses the MPT SCSI drivers and so I needed to rebuild the initrd file to include these drivers so that the virtual disks can be seen during the boot up process.
This can be fixed by booting the VM using a rescue CD (I used SystemRescueCD), mounting the drive (don't forget to use the vgchange -ay to enable the volume groups), chroot to the disk, mount the /boot partition and then fix back the files and drivers, according to the article above.
Once done, the system booted up without problems.
Of course, if you had used the VMware Converter these problems may have been avoided but for those who wish to go via the "disk cloning" technique, remember to fix the disk drivers.
To do this, I used g4u (a BSD based live CD) to make a clone of the physical server and store the compressed (GZIP) disk image in a FTP server.
Then I created a new VM in VMware with the same or bigger disk size as the original physical disk.
Next I again, boot the VM using the g4u ISO, and restored back the compressed disk image from the FTP server, and then reboot the VM. But the version of linux I was using, Centos 4.5, would not boot up properly. It complained that it could not find the volume group "VolGroup00". The problem was a driver issue and during the booting process it did not load the correct driver to recognize the "virtual machine" SCSI adapter.
After trying many options (changing virtual disk adapters, etc), I found an article to fixes the problem for the Centos 4.x linuxes at: http://tipstricksandmore.blogspot.com/2009/01/after-converting-physical-rhel4-system.html.
The VMware SCSI adapters uses the MPT SCSI drivers and so I needed to rebuild the initrd file to include these drivers so that the virtual disks can be seen during the boot up process.
This can be fixed by booting the VM using a rescue CD (I used SystemRescueCD), mounting the drive (don't forget to use the vgchange -ay to enable the volume groups), chroot to the disk, mount the /boot partition and then fix back the files and drivers, according to the article above.
Once done, the system booted up without problems.
Of course, if you had used the VMware Converter these problems may have been avoided but for those who wish to go via the "disk cloning" technique, remember to fix the disk drivers.
Booting from USB disk
On the older PCs there is no option to boot from the USB port. That is a predicament that I faced. The CD-ROM drive has failed and there is no built in network port.
With only a working floppy drive and USB ports, I used the PLop Bootmanager to install a boot manager which gives me options to boot from various devices (CD-ROM, HD, USB) even if the BIOS doesn't support.
Check it out at: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html
With only a working floppy drive and USB ports, I used the PLop Bootmanager to install a boot manager which gives me options to boot from various devices (CD-ROM, HD, USB) even if the BIOS doesn't support.
Check it out at: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html
Thursday, May 7, 2009
How to install Windows 2000 using a Floppy and a Thumb drive
Recently an old Compaq Evo N160 laptop had a hard disk crashed. Worse still, the CDROM drive was not working. So how do you install back the Windows 2000 Pro on this laptop. I only had a working floppy drive and working USB ports but the laptop does not boot from the USB drive.
To install it, I first used another PC to copy the Windows 2000 Pro CD contents into a thumb drive.
Then I created a bootable MS-DOS 6.22 floppy disk. I copied over the following files to enable the laptop to access the thumb drive from DOS:
himem.sys - you can get these from the Windows 98se PC
format.com
fdisk.com
smartdrv.exe
usbaspi.sys - search the Internet
di1000dd.sys - search the Internet
Create a config.sys file on the floppy with the following contents:
device=himem.sys /testmem:off
devicehigh=usbaspi.sys
devicehigh=di1000dd.sys
LASTDRIVE = Z
Plug in the thumb drive and boot off the floppy from the N160.
Then, you will need to partition and format the hard disk (on FAT you can only get upto 2GB in the partition) using fdisk and format.
You will need to reboot the PC again.
Run the smartdrv program.
A:> smartdrv
Next, go into the thumb drive (which should be drive D:).
A:> D:
D:> cd i386
Then run:
D:> winnt
The Windows 2000 Pro installation should start. During the Windows installation, you will need to convert the existing 2GB partition to NTFS or alternatively, create a new NTFS Partitition to install the Windows 2000 OS.
Then you are done.
To install it, I first used another PC to copy the Windows 2000 Pro CD contents into a thumb drive.
Then I created a bootable MS-DOS 6.22 floppy disk. I copied over the following files to enable the laptop to access the thumb drive from DOS:
himem.sys - you can get these from the Windows 98se PC
format.com
fdisk.com
smartdrv.exe
usbaspi.sys - search the Internet
di1000dd.sys - search the Internet
Create a config.sys file on the floppy with the following contents:
device=himem.sys /testmem:off
devicehigh=usbaspi.sys
devicehigh=di1000dd.sys
LASTDRIVE = Z
Plug in the thumb drive and boot off the floppy from the N160.
Then, you will need to partition and format the hard disk (on FAT you can only get upto 2GB in the partition) using fdisk and format.
You will need to reboot the PC again.
Run the smartdrv program.
A:> smartdrv
Next, go into the thumb drive (which should be drive D:).
A:> D:
D:> cd i386
Then run:
D:> winnt
The Windows 2000 Pro installation should start. During the Windows installation, you will need to convert the existing 2GB partition to NTFS or alternatively, create a new NTFS Partitition to install the Windows 2000 OS.
Then you are done.
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