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So, it's probably clear by now that our main plan is to get these things torun Linux instead of WinCE. What can we do when we reach that point? Well,we can think about that later. The CPU must be capable of playing ogg/mp3files, so maybe it'd be a nice network-streamer. Or maybe we can installPCMCIA wireless network cards and use them as bloated access points. Or asX-terminals. Or maybe we can even use rdesktop for Linux to get more recentRDP support.

But we're not quite there yet, of course. We don't even know if it's indeedpossible to run Linux on these. But it's worth trying, right?

Try to change things in the firmware

First of all, we downloaded firmware upgrade/addon images from WYSE to seeif they make any sense. Well, they did. The file format was quite easy toreverse-engineer, actually. There's a tool available for download on thissite to read them. Here you can see part of a file listing of such an image:

When you look at this you'd get the impression that this x86 version ofWinCE is more like MS-DOS than you'd expect. Well, we're not sure if thoseDOS-files are really used. Maybe they're just things left from somedebugging environment?

The mid_code file seems to be a special file that, amongst otherthings, contains a VGA BIOS. Maybe this file is flashed at some special placeinstead of as a separate file. nk.bin might look familiar to peoplewho worked with Windows CE before, as far as we understand it's an archivewith all the Windows CE system files. (There's a littleextract-toolfor those files available too.) The k file is still a littlemystery for us, it seems to be there in every file, even in addons.

Obviously, the first thing we tried when we figured out this file format isto insert a different version of poweron.bmp. This gave us a verynice checksum error, so we can now be sure that the field marked as'Checksum?' is indeed a checksum.

Figuring out how the checksum is calculated wasn't too hard though. It's farfrom an MD5, and also not quite like CRC32. In short it's the sum of all32-bit integers (little-endian) subtracted from some magic integer. Besidesthese per-file checksums, there's also one checksum of the whole archive atthe end of the file.

Sorry for sounding like such a newb, but I am having a hard time getting my C10Le to update. We are piloting these, hoping to do a rollout of around 25-35 and allwas going well until I decided to upgrade to the latest ThinOS. The unit I have is on 6.5.023f. I have my FTP and WDM servers apparently working. The Wyse C10LE thin client features a separate graphic accelerator for unparalleled performance in its class. The ultra low power media system processor delivers rich multimedia and video playback up to 1080p HD resolution. The Wyse C10LE diskless devices boot-up in seconds, provide secure user login to corporate networks and, with no moving parts. Dell Wyse Device Manager (WDM) software is the premier enterprise solution for managing Dell Wyse thin and zero clients simply, remotely, and securely. It enables IT professionals to easily organize, upgrade, control, and support thousands of Windows Embedded.

After figuring out the checksum algorithm, we managed to insert a newpoweron picture, see the picture. :-) Although just replacing the poweron picture mightnot look like a big deal, it wasn't that trivial and we certainly considerit a milestone.

After all, if we can replace a bitmap file, it should be possible to replaceor add executable files too. But first we'll have to figure out how to makesuitable executables for this target. It might be x86-compatible and evenWindows, but WinCE does seem to be pretty different from the usual Win32systems. We hope to be able to use MinGW to generate WinCE/x86 executables,first thing to write will probably be 'Hello World'.

What's next?

This is where the hacking starts. We're planning to try to write, afterHello World and maybe some other experiments, a Linux bootloader for WinCE.Obviously we never did that before, so it's not exactly going to be easy.But we guess it should be doable. As long as the program will run asAdministrator, shouldn't we be able to do anything we want? The XBox-Linuxpeople probably did the same thing with their non-modchip hack.

Of course a WinCE-based bootloader wouldn't be the best solution. Bootingdirectly into Linux would be a lot better. But also, it'd probably be a lotharder. This way Windows will initialize the hardware for us, and we can useit while it's still running to download the kernel and initrd-images. Andof course we're less likely to break things when we leave the firmware corealone.

But as soon as Linux runs from WinCE and get more familiar with the hardware,we can try to make this a native Linux box!

Wyse Firmware Site

How To Update Wyse Firmware