Saturday, March 24, 2007

XPe tip #3: XPProEmulation

This one is getting popular on the newsgroup. I keep often advise people who got stuck with some tough dependency problems to try to use my XP Pro Emulation project. Yes, it is huge project and still requires some work to adopt to your own hardware platform. But the benefit is nice - you will know whether your app or driver will work on XPe for sure.

here is what I say in the project description (readme.txt included within the same zip that holds the SLX):
Purpose: Emulation of XP Pro OS using XPe Repository software components (2024 components!). Note; the number of components included keeps changing release to release but always above 2000.

Method: CMI automated script was used to add all "Software" based components from XPe database to the SLX project configuration. A few "Hardware" components were also added.

Tested: "Standard PC"-based configuration as well as "ACPI Uniprocessor PC"-based configurations tested with ACPI-compliant x86 platform (AMD, 512RAM, ...).

Recommendations:
Turn OFF the "Auto-resolve Dependency" option in TD. If you have the option on, it will add/remove/modify some important and/or unnecessary components to/from/in the Configuration. this is quite old requirement and you may not need to follow it since with FP2007 version of the project the build got much cleaner.

Run TAP on your target device and include all the component dependencies from the result macro component to your image configuration. Better do the Dependency Check and then manually resolve all necessary tasks. Modify "Target Device Settings" in order to build the image for your test hardware platform configuration. You may add/remove any components to/from the build if needed.




There have been a number of threads in the newsgroup about that project. Read them if you have time.

If you plan on using the SLX project, I beg you - only use FP2007 toolkit. Otherwise I predict you will be sending me emails asking why the project is so damn slow to load and take so long to build with SP1 and SP2 tools and so often crashes there.