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Windows Operating Systems Software

Run Win98 From 16MB Flash Disk 59

Posted by timothy from the reboot-faster dept.
ksheff writes "Embedded Ware Technologies has come up with a product to run Win98 applications from a 16M Flash disk. This could be useful for companies that would like to use an existing Win9x application in an embedded system."
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Run Win98 From 16MB Flash Disk More

Run Win98 From 16MB Flash Disk

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  • Additionally... (Score:5, Informative)

    by TitaniumFox ( 467977 ) * on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @12:34AM (#6054245) Journal
    ... the folks at litepc.com [litepc.com] offer small Win98 installations for flash cards, too.

    Cheers
    • Checked this lite PC website. Seems their solution requires both Windows 98 and Windows 95 license or perhaps neither as seems they will be modifying Windows 98 dlls. Also to make it really small, they charge something like $6,000 NRE for the work. Seems this TinyWin 98 company is offering more flexibility to the system integrators. I wondered what kind of performance will you gain to boot from a 32 bit RAMDisk...

  • Disk-on-Chip (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bobthemonkey13 ( 215219 ) <keegan@[ ]67.org ['xor' in gap]> on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @12:49AM (#6054330) Homepage Journal
    M-Systems [m-sys.com] makes a device called the Disk-on-Chip that I believe can do this. Although it doesn't interface through IDE, it can be made to emulate a hard drive at the BIOS level, using M-Sys's TrueFFS BIOS. Therefore, operating systems (like Windows 98, I believe) that use BIOS calls to access the hard drive can use the Disk-on-Chip as if it were a hard drive. Other operating systems like Windows NT and Linux need the proper drivers / kernel modules to access the disk. The upshot of all of this is that I was able to get my own hacked-up minidistribution of GNU/Linux (which I naturally called Asshat Linux), to boot and run off of the 16-Megabyte Disk-on-Chip in a Visara 1783 [mtc.com] thin client machine (formerly running QNX [qnx.com]). I believe that the same could be done for Windows 98. If anyone wants info on how I did this, email me or post a reply.

  • Wahuh? (Score:2, Informative)

    by zaad ( 255863 )
    If I remember correctly, some enterprising folks managed to do this a couple of years ago when hacking Virgin's Webplayer. I can't find any archives, but Google's cache (http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:nFk2b5yLOY8J :snoopy.net/pipermail/iopener/2000-May/thread.html +16mb+flash+webplayer&hl=en&ie=UTF-8) shows that someone managed to get WinMe to fit under 16MB back in May of 2000.

  • Summary (Score:5, Informative)

    by cookd ( 72933 ) <.moc.onuj. .ta. .koocsalguod.> on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @01:02AM (#6054402) Journal
    Skimming through the website, they appear to have a process to create an instant-on OS image that is custom-fitted to your application. As far as I can tell, it does something like this:

    1. Analyze your application to determine which system components it needs to run properly (which DLLs, device drivers, COM components, etc.).
    2. Create a Win98 install set up to only load the minimum necessary components.
    3. Snap a memory image of the Win98 machine with your program loaded.
    4. Compress this memory image onto a flash card.
    5. At runtime, expand the memory image back into RAM and pass control back to Win98 as if nothing had happened.


    There would probably have to be a few device drivers involved, but it sounds like a pretty cool idea to me. This way, you don't have to rewrite existing apps or retrain the dev team to make them work in an "embedded" environment.
    • This way, you don't have to rewrite existing apps or retrain the dev team to make them work in an "embedded" environment.

      This might be a very specific solution for a small number of embedded applications, but for the most part a product "ported" this way will have a hard time competing in the marketplace.

      Embedded systems typically have less powerful CPUs, a lot less RAM, and frequently strict power consumption requirements. Running off a flash chip usually also means that you have to disable swap space

  • Win98? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @01:32AM (#6054532) Homepage Journal
    OS always startup as it was brand new from factory
    Unpatched?

    I guess it means more photos like this [www.eddh.de] and this [slothmud.org].

    Seriously, why would someone use something so complicated as the basis for a limited-function embedded system? Can't anyone program in assembler anymore?

    • Re:Win98? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @01:39AM (#6054562) Homepage Journal
      Coding those widgets in assembler is pretty time consuming.

      As for crashing, they'd probably have a custom GPF handler that forced a hard reset. You'd never see the BSOD and the longest downtime you'd have would be 6 seconds.

  • Reliability? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by stu_coates ( 156061 ) *

    Windows 98 in an embedded system?

    I always thought that embedded systems were about rock solid reliability - and I don't think that anyone (even Microsoft) would admit that Win98 qualifies.

    • I always thought that embedded systems were about rock solid reliability - and I don't think that anyone (even Microsoft) would admit that Win98 qualifies.

      At least Win98 is better than the uber sucky WinME.

      Truly never before has an "OS" sucked so bad. It must be the most unstable thing I have ever seen.
      • It must be the most unstable thing I have ever seen.
        Obviously you haven't seen the Steve "monkeyboy" Ballmer video clips..
      • had a M$ enabled backdoor and was limited to 640kb of ram IIRC. Windos 5 never got such a backdoor, though NT5's upgrade policy is similar.
        • DOS is wide open- what kind of back door are you talking about? And what is Windos? Is that troll speak for something? And it's called Win2K, not NT5.

          You could use up to 16 MB RAM in DOS 3.3 with either EMS or a third-party XMS driver, incidentally.

          • DOS is wide open- what kind of back door are you talking about?

            I was thinking the same thing - I mean it's not like you needed a password to access a DOS machine.

            Maybe hes talking about a default BIOS password lol
          • I group everything as NT or DOS. Win2k identifies itself as NT5, so I call it that. XP identifies itself as NT5.1, so I call it that.

            "Windos" means a version of windows such as 3.1 or ME that is a direct descendant of MS-DOS rather than a VMS hybrid. When I want to insult Windows(NT or DOS) without a specific reason, I call it "Micros~1 Winshit".

            As I recall, it was some sort of remote-access dealy they sold the US government for DOS 3.3. If I remembered where I read it, I'd quote the specifics.

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by StarBar ( 549337 )
      Well, I think you are thinking about a real-time system. An embedded system is anything that is special purpose as opposed to general purpose. Also it might lack normal user interfaces that we are used to, like keyboard and monitor. If I used Win-98 for an embedded system I would make sure that the system would be reset regularily, once an hour or so, by letting a timer power cycle the CPU board. So there I agree with you that Win-98 might limit what you want to do with it. ;-)

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @09:06AM (#6055993)

      Agilent and Tektronix (and probably others) have been using Win9x in their oscilloscopes and analyzers for years now. The truly "embedded" part is running on a separate CPU on a PCI card. Windows is simply used as a front-end to render the user interface.

      It seems like a win all the way around. These companies can focus on what they do best, which is high-speed data aquisition and analysis. They don't need to get into GUI design. They can use off-the-shelf parts for the chassis and peripherals. And end-users don't have to figure out some obscure UI like on the older equipment.

      Windows is reasonably solid, as long as you're not mucking around with DLLs by installing new software. Typically these devices ship with the app pre-installed, and nothing else is ever run.

      I still don't think I'd trust it for an unattended (eg, ATM) application, though.

  • wine+embedded linux (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JohnFluxx ( 413620 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @02:09AM (#6054657)
    What's the smallest you can get wine down to?

    It would be interesting to see if you can do this with embedded linux + wine.

    Advantages:
    * You can disable all the gui stuff (if it's embedded, then you might not need any gui)
    * You can hack it to make it smaller
    * You don't need a windows license

    Does anyone know how big wine is normally when compilied? libs and all.. I have no idea if it is a few MB, or 10's of MB's.

    • Well, I just took a look at my developer build of Wine, and the DLLs alone take up an astonishing 113Mb. Yes, you read that correctly. Over one hundred megs of DLL. I suspect the vast majority of that code is debug symbols however, and for most apps not all of the DLLs would be needed.

      Considering that most RPMs are perhaps a few megs, I suspect you could trim Wine down quite a bit. Certainly feasable.

      I don't know how large embedded linux distros are though.

    • Without debugging info it's ~17M with the latest snapshot, still over 16M without including the Linux subsystem. We have to remember that Wine is still alpha so the code as it stands (and there's a lot of it) probably wasn't written with maintaining a small footprint in mind. The question is whether the fact that you don't need a license for W98 makes it cheaper to use a 32 or even 64M flash card with the savings.
    • I think you can safely forget about that. WINE depends on X11 and we all know how space-efficient that is, right? And I don't think it stops there; apart from the kernel, you'd probably need a C-library, and considering you would be running win32 binaries, you may need a C++ runtime, too. Even if you manage to get it done, you wouldn't be able to run the bulk of win32 software, so why bother? Linux itself is much better suited to this, and QNX specializes on it.
      • Well I've seen X11 come on 3 floppies before (or is it 8?).

        Anyway, the idea is, that you see what libraries it does need, and just include them. Use a hacked version of wine that doesn't have any of the display code, use only the minimum of the X11 libraries, and so on..

        I think it could be done. Why? /me shrugs
    • Why try to turn a non-embedded app (ie. Win98 native) into a native app by using Wine? Wine wasn't designed to be embedded. I don't doubt that it might give a run for the money, but it just wasn't designed for it.

      No disrespect to the parent poster, but I think that designing an app to be embedded would be a lot easier than morphing and existing app into a Win98 / Linux+Wine pseudo-embedded-app.

      Develop it for *nix(Qnx included) and *BSD for maximum portability, and if necessary port it to the proprietary

  • Windows CE is bad enough... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @04:36AM (#6055160)
    Microsoft can't make Windows CE stable (or PocketPC for that matter), so I don't believe that a 3rd party will be able to do the same with a custom product - particularly with an OS that has such a legendary stability record as Windows 98.

    The reliability of the Windows CE powered ticket machines at my local cinema is awful. At any one time, at least one or two machines have either locked up; are in the middle of rebooting (but stuck because they can't find the network - that's how I know it runs Windows CE); or worst of all.. about to crash.

    You know a crash is about to happen because the UI starts flaking out (text vanishes, on-screen buttons loose captions) while in middle of trying to buy tickets. This happened to me once - I was able to finish by guessing which button to "print tickets", but it locked up when the people next in line tried to use it.

    The only reason the machines are actually useful is because the short lines mean you can get your tickets fast - as opposed to the horrendously long queue to buy from the human ticket drones.

    The only reason the machines manage to sell any tickets at all is because there are 6 of them - "reliability" through numbers I suppose.
    • First, PocketPC 2k and 2002 is Windows CE 3.0, with some exta software. The core OS is the same.

      Second, WinCE has been pretty stable for me. Granted, I'm not running this crashy ticketing app. The only experience I have with WinCE is using it as a computer (not just a PIM) on various small computers, PDA sized devices. That is, I use my Jornada 720 and Axim for programming in Smalltalk perl/tk (not just writing code, testing it as well), writing papers in LaTeX, email, telnet/ssh, web browsing, and othe

      • Maybe you should just run Linux on that Jornada.

        I use my Jornada 720 and Axim for programming in Smalltalk perl/tk (not just writing code, testing it as well), writing papers in LaTeX, email, telnet/ssh, web browsing, and other stuff.

  • On the mac side (Score:3, Informative)

    by __aafkqj3628 ( 596165 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @04:37AM (#6055162)
    Yet, you can boot an entire Mac from an iPod.
    • Yeah, but their products amount to a crap shoot when ya boot (I wish I had a buck for every BSOD I'd ever seen). I bet the reason
      they are excited is the cool "small Kernel">16MB part. Oh well
  • If I could boot a PC from a flash card (whatever size necessary) with Windows 98, yet have the swap file and any writable files be on the HDD, it would ease my tech support issues at home. My wife is a writer, and currently on a combination of Win98 and wordprocessing tools that she's comfortable with. You don't mess with her environment, because that means time re-learning stuff which means loss of income. The primary reason for booting from flash would be startup speed, for her. So - that said, I will be

  • This is nothing new (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    RISC OS [riscos.org] has always sat in rom, ever since it was first released back in the late 1980s. A full gui desktop operating system in ~4mb of rom. And it is a heck of a lot more stable than Windows98.
  • In the case of buying an adapter separate from the card itself, perhaps taking to this plan and buying in bulk may be more expensive. However, for do-it-yourself hobbyist projects, any CompactFlash card, combined with one of these [pcengines.ch] from PC Engines, makes an ideal, tiny hard drive suitable for your embedded application.

    Whoah, I sound like one of those people who sells stuff.
  • ...i got a win98 to boot from a cdrom (but less than 15meg occupied) without using floppy or hard disk. with 64meg of ram. i still have the cd somewhere... obviously it was crap... but a nice memory of when i was a windows user... fortunately time have passed, and and i finnally saw the light.

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