[Synce-devel] Installation of Windows CE software

[David E. <tw...@us...>]

Hello,

After the release of SynCE 0.8 I have been working on some code to make it
easier to install Windows CE software found on the net. The plan is to automate
the steps described below:

For example, say that you download Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC:

  http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readerforppc.html

If you download the Pocket PC 2002 version, you get the file
acrobatreader-ppc2002.exe. Oh, great, a Microsoft Windows executable. Somewhere
inside there is a file with suffix ".cab" that can be installed on the Pocket PC
device.

The self-extracting executable could for example be using ZIP or RAR
compression, but in this case it is a self-extracting Microsoft CAB file and we
can use the cabextract tool (http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/cabextract.php):

$ cabextract acrobatreader-ppc2002.exe
Extracting cabinet: acrobatreader-ppc2002.exe
  extracting: \DATA.TAG
  extracting: \data1.cab
  extracting: \data1.hdr
  extracting: \lang.dat
  extracting: \layout.bin
  extracting: \os.dat
  extracting: \Setup.bmp
  extracting: \Setup.exe
  extracting: \SETUP.INI
  extracting: \setup.ins
  extracting: \setup.lid
  extracting: \_INST32I.EX_
  extracting: \_ISDel.exe
  extracting: \_Setup.dll
  extracting: \_sys1.cab
  extracting: \_sys1.hdr
  extracting: \_user1.cab
  extracting: \_user1.hdr
Finished processing cabinet.


Well, what do we have here... oh, it is an InstallShield installer. More
Microsoft Windows executables. But hey, there are CAB files here! Let's try
cabextract again: 

$ cabextract data1.cab
Extracting cabinet: data1.cab
data1.cab: not a Microsoft cabinet file.

So it is an InstallShield cabinet file. Some searching on the Internet may
reveal that therare are a couple of tools named "i5comp" and "i6comp" that can
be used to extract files from InstallShield cabinet files, but those tools also
requires Microsoft Windows or WINE to work...

To make this story a little shorter, the source code to those tools are
available and by reading that code I have been able to make a tool without
dependencies to Microsoft Windows. This tool is called "unshield" and is in a
very early stage at the moment, but it only needs an improved command line
interface to be truly useful. See this page for more information:

  http://synce.sourceforge.net/synce/unshield.php

Here is an abbreviated version of the output from this tool:

$ unshield data1.cab
..
Writing arceARMr.PPC_2577.cab...success.
..

We can now use the synce-install-cab tool to install arceARMr.PPC_2577.cab on
our Pocket PC 2002 device.


If you read this far you know how tedious this was, and that I had failed
completely without the new unshield tool. Therefore I will try to make a tool
that automates this procedure as much as possible.

In case there are any special programs that you would like to be able to
install, please tell me! 

Regards,

\David