Stripping down the network components

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Guest

Hi
I am reasonably new to xp embedded and am essentially playing around at the moment. In the past I made a severely stripped win95a box into a terminal client. It was 17mb. I'm keen to try a similar thing on XP however the instant I add TCPIP the image grows from 17mb to Nearly 50mb. I've noticed that that's larger than the NT4e 'minimal with networking' configuration
All I want is VERY BASIC TCPIP functionality
Can it be done in around 10mb or less
 
Hi,

10mb< :)
Yes this can be done. If you only need TCP/IP without anything else. And you plan to drive everything from your driver.

So you should tell us what functionality you really need. But in most cases you can forget about images less than 30-40 MB.

Regards,
Slobodan

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myne said:
Hi,
I am reasonably new to xp embedded and am essentially playing around at the moment. In the past I made a severely stripped win95a
Click to expand...
box into a terminal client. It was 17mb. I'm keen to try a similar thing on XP however the instant I add TCPIP the image grows from
17mb to Nearly 50mb. I've noticed that that's larger than the NT4e 'minimal with networking' configuration.
 
Thanks for the really quick reply
I'll give just having the TCPIP component a go - thank
I am suprised at all the 'dependencies' if that is all that is actually required to support network traffic

What my ultimate goal would be is an image under 32mb - so it can fit on an IDE flash disk I have that boots directly into mstsc with only very basic svga and network support. I plan to do this using minlogon with runapp.exe as the shell calling mstsc. I've done this on a much larger image and that's how I did the 95 clients a while back.
 
myne,
It is a hard task ahead of you.

1. Disable auto resolve dependencies. You will have to decide by your self what is needed.
2. Don't use TAP. You can use it but only for informational purposes, you should do everything manually.
3.Use http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...F-8&group=microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded for searching this NG
old archives.
4. Consider NTFS and compression this can maybe spare you few MB.

Regards,
Slobodan

myne said:
Thanks for the really quick reply.
I'll give just having the TCPIP component a go - thanks
I am suprised at all the 'dependencies' if that is all that is actually required to support network traffic.

What my ultimate goal would be is an image under 32mb - so it can fit on an IDE flash disk I have that boots directly into mstsc
Click to expand...
with only very basic svga and network support. I plan to do this using minlogon with runapp.exe as the shell calling mstsc. I've
done this on a much larger image and that's how I did the 95 clients a while back.
 
myne,

By "mstsc" do you mean the the Microsoft Terminal Server client? (I can
hardly imagine any other app with the same name)
Then keep in mind that mstsc itself brings many dependencies (even static
dlls). So you won't probably limit yourself with basic TC/IP stack since
mstsc require Winsock, for example.
It is just hard define "TCP/IP without anything else".
E.g., adding "Basic TCP/IP Networking" macro component (or "TCP/IP
Networking", or even "Core Netowkring") to a Minlogon Sample image (~18Mb)
and resolving its dependencies will add ~32Mb to the image size.
Of course, turning off auto-reolving dependencies in TD or just adding
necessary components manually will help you decreasing the image size but
resolving the Terminal Server Client dependencies (like Winsock) will do the
opposite.

KM
Thanks for the really quick reply.
I'll give just having the TCPIP component a go - thanks
I am suprised at all the 'dependencies' if that is all that is actually
Click to expand...
required to support network traffic.
What my ultimate goal would be is an image under 32mb - so it can fit on
Click to expand...
an IDE flash disk I have that boots directly into mstsc with only very basic
svga and network support. I plan to do this using minlogon with runapp.exe
as the shell calling mstsc. I've done this on a much larger image and that's
how I did the 95 clients a while back.
 
Well, if any of the Embedded developers see this (ie from MS), I have a couple of suggestions that might allow for even smaller images.

Make an optional cut-down shell32.dll. This thing is over 8mb. Out of curiosity I stripped all icons and bitmaps with reshacker, the actual useful part of it is only 2.5mb. Clever trimming of other large resources will probably yeild similar results.

Make an optional, smaller, less functional tcp stack. NT4's is a lot smaller and yet it does exactly the same thing. Hard to understand how it got so big.

Work on a better filesystem compression. Zip is better than the current ntfs compression and there's several others that are far smaller - LZMA is amazingly small and decompresses very fast.

If even only the above 2 things are done I think it'd be highly possible for working single application images to be as small as 20mb decompressed. I'm sure a lot of people would be very impressed with that.
 
Turns out that it was easier to hack up nt4ws. 34mb including the annoying 2mb pagefile, filesharing, explorer, cmd mstsc and regedit. With ntfs compression it's only 28mb. Just wish I could disable the pagefile.
 
Page file can be disabled if you don't need it for supporting some strange functions. And since you use 2MB then you probably use it
for just that.
Also I think that MS is doing something similar to ideas from your previous post for LHe, although for XPe I don't think that they
will do anything in this direction. I would love that they prove me wrong (I would be pleasantly surprised ;) ).

Regards,
Slobodan

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Have an opinion on the effectiveness of Microsoft Embedded newsgroups? Tell Microsoft!
https://www.windowsembeddedeval.com/community/newsgroups
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myne said:
Turns out that it was easier to hack up nt4ws. 34mb including the annoying 2mb pagefile, filesharing, explorer, cmd mstsc and
Click to expand...
regedit. With ntfs compression it's only 28mb. Just wish I could disable the pagefile.
 
I hope they do do some more optimising - it's kinda sad that an older butchered workstation OS can outdo a specific embedded OS for size. This entire os is the smaller than the xpe tcpip dependencies alone.
 
AFAIK tcpip does not have heavy dependencies (if any beside files required to support you net adapter), but component does. So
create component on your own, or disable auto resolve and enjoy myriads of warnings ;)

But believe me I would like to see it smaller either.

Slobodan

myne said:
I hope they do do some more optimising - it's kinda sad that an older butchered workstation OS can outdo a specific embedded OS
Click to expand...
for size. This entire os is the smaller than the xpe tcpip dependencies alone.
 
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