New to XPe

[Zapp Brannigan]

Just got given a task from my boss, to sort out a XPe image for our
range of machinery, basic Advantech PC based hardware. I have it mostly
working, but am falling over on some points, so I am wondering if anyone
can help..

1/ We have some engineering machines used to develop the software that
lives ontop of XPe, and on these we need to install MS Visual Studio 6,
as the moment we cannot, as the setup program craps out on when "next"
is selected. Have seen MANY posts about this, but I cannot find a
working solution (even using hte keyboard was suggest, but that does not
help). Anything else I can try? We did have a "Null Device" missing
problem (but I sorted that by lowering the threshold and adding it).

2/ The other problem, is the Plug n Play / Add New Hardware. We don't
want this, we want it to work the "old NT4 way", in that we can install
drivers by sticking the device drivers in the correct location, and
adding the relevent info into the registry, and then rebooting Can XPe
be made to work in this manner? where the basic setup is embedded in the
ghost image, but additional 3rd party drivers can be installed silently
later on. by our Installshield script. At the moment, I have tried to
remove PnP (User Mode), after a MS tech suggested it, but that
bluescreened it during the resealing phase, as did removing the Add New
Hardware component...

We used to use NT4 Embedded, and did not have any of this hassle!!!

Thanks...

 

[KM]

Zapp,

Not speaking about your issues, could you tell me why you need to install
VS6 on the XPE devices?
Is there a particular need? E.g., you can always use VC 6.0 Remote Debugging
or even Kernel Debugger to debug remotely connecting to the target device
through serial.

I don't know any way to turn off PnP in XP/XPe completely. If you remove any
PnP component or some Class Installers you may end up having problems
installing your own driver or even FBA may not finish the runtime
preparations and crash at some points.

 

[Zapp Brannigan]

Zapp,

Not speaking about your issues, could you tell me why you need to install
VS6 on the XPE devices?
Is there a particular need? E.g., you can always use VC 6.0 Remote Debugging
or even Kernel Debugger to debug remotely connecting to the target device
through serial.

I don't know any way to turn off PnP in XP/XPe completely. If you remove any
PnP component or some Class Installers you may end up having problems
installing your own driver or even FBA may not finish the runtime
preparations and crash at some points.

The specific application we use XPe for has devices that cannot be
connected to a standard PC (controller cards with motors and sensors
attached), sometimes we can debug on a desktop, but other times its not
possible depending on if it's UI or Control systems that we are
debugging, as you need to get feedback from the motors/sensors in the
actual machine hardware. VS6 is an essential in our application XPe

It seems so far both of our problems are gonna be real big headaches to
sort out (I only have a week to get something ready for beta...)

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Do you have anything from following list available on your device or can you
put some expansion card from list:
- Network adapter
- RS 232
- Firewire (IEEE 1394)

If you can then you don't need to install visual studio on your XPe.
Also I have no idea how licensing goes for XPe that runs Visual Studio.

Regards,
Slobodan

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[KM]

Zapp,

"Debugging" as process is not always using IDE debugger, through it is
always convenient to have a comfortable IDE to do the code debug.
E.g., if you work on some cross-platform code sometimes it is very hard to
use an IDE for a particular OS. So you end up using debug messages (or even
MessageBoxes ). On NT branch, OutputDebugString will help you much
debugging your app(s). To see the output you don't really need the VS but
you can use, e.g., DebugView app from www.sysinternal.com. It is very light
app but helps much on embedded platforms.

Also, have you looked at other options - WinDbg, SoftIce? They should have
less dependencies than VS.

 

[Zapp Brannigan]

Do you have anything from following list available on your device or can you
put some expansion card from list:
- Network adapter
- RS 232
- Firewire (IEEE 1394)

If you can then you don't need to install visual studio on your XPe.
Also I have no idea how licensing goes for XPe that runs Visual Studio.

Regards,
Slobodan

To expand what I was trying to say, when debugging the control system,
stepping through code, motors and mechanical parts move, you therefore
need to be infornt of our XPe system, for both clarity and safety sake....

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

I have no idea what you are talking about (I don't understand the problem)

Let me try again. Why do you need VS 6 on your target device?

You have many different remote debug options.
You can use VS to remotely debug your program and this is much better then
debugging it locally.
You can use Kernel Debugger (This is very powerful). You can even debug your
device in real time using KD you can see all debug texts you send from your
app, etc.

Can you describe why you can't use this.
Also can you give us better explanation what is the problem with your
mechanical parts (I hope that you are using step motors)?

Regards,
Slobodan

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[Guest]

I would recommend using the Microsoft Windows Debugger (windbg.exe) -- it is a true kernel debugger, it has an IDE that is very similar to the MS Visual Studio debugger, it supports remote debugging via serial cable, it supports multi-process debugging, and it is also easy to set up and use (from my experience). The debugger is free and can be downloaded from Microsoft's website as part of the Debugging Tools for Windows suite (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/ddk/debugging/default.mspx)

-JW

 

[Guest]

The other problem, is the Plug n Play / Add New Hardware.
You _may_ be able to do this with "legacy" device drivers that are known to work with XP. Legacy device drivers are NT-style device drivers. However, WDM drivers need to be installed the "XP way." Remember that Plug and Play is an essential part of the Windows Driver Model. While automatic installation of devices is disabled after FBA for XPe, that does not mean that the Plug and Play component of the operating system "goes away." The Plug and Play manager is an essential part of the Windows 2000/XP operating systems, and hence is an essential part of the XPe operating system (which has the same kernel/HAL/drivers as XP)

Can you elaborate on why you want to eliminate PnP from XPe? What is the problem that you are trying to solve?

 

[Ralph Wiggum]

You _may_ be able to do this with "legacy" device drivers that are

known to work with XP. Legacy device drivers are NT-style device
drivers. However, WDM drivers need to be installed the "XP way."
Remember that Plug and Play is an essential part of the Windows Driver
Model. While automatic installation of devices is disabled after FBA
for XPe, that does not mean that the Plug and Play component of the
operating system "goes away." The Plug and Play manager is an
essential part of the Windows 2000/XP operating systems, and hence is
an essential part of the XPe operating system (which has the same
kernel/HAL/drivers as XP).

Can you elaborate on why you want to eliminate PnP from XPe? What is the problem that you are trying to solve?

OK, I will try. At the moment we are using NT4 based OS on industrial
PC's that control production equipment. We have a 2 disk setup
system, where disk 1 is a "system disk" containing a ghost image for
each particuar PC we use (we have 4 different PC types to support, so
therefore 4 "system disks"), these "system disks" have no installed
software on them, they are just the OS, in a Ghost image, setup so
that after ghosting the user is prompted to insert the "software
disk", which contains a no user-interaction InstallShield that
installs our control software and the latest versions of drivers for
the control system hardware. After the ghost, the user may insert V8,
V9 or V10 (we don't care). The whole thing has no user interaction
(execpt the disk swap after ghosting), as there is no configuration or
installation options. This works a treat at the moment, we wanted to
seperate our disks out onto 2 disks, as the "system disk" changed
infrequently, but the "software disk" does, so therefore eliminating
the need to build ghosts all the time.

That is the background of where we are at the moment, We are now
moving to XPe, and want the same set-up, the problem being that XPe is
trying to be too clever, and wanting to reboot after loading, and
want's to install devices for hardware that it does not know about (as
the InstallShield has not yet installed them). We want to dumb XPe
down to NT4 levels, where it only does as it's told...

PS. Our drivers are not WDM drivers, they are updated legacy NT4
drivers that the vendor has "tweaked" for use on XP...