Install apps to Universal (WM6) using Linux host?

[downloadtest82]

Hi Folks.

Many programs for PocketPC are wrapped in MS-Windows .msi installers.
I will never understand why, I don't see any benefits coming with it and you always need a USB connection (not seldomly involving administrative privileges to get the device registered in Windows), active sync and so on, just to install some lousy program

I don't like MS Windows (the desktop versions) and therefore I don't have it and I don't use it. I have access to Windows computers at work, but not enough system rights on the machines to get a usb connection.

Is there a way to

either:

install programs on the Universal using alternative helper applications (GNU/Multisync etc.), preferably open source and running natively on linux machines?

or even better:

extract the .cab archive from an .msi or .exe installer file so it can be directly copied to the PDA and executed there?

I've played with Multisync a little, but it only seems to support contact synchronization, no software installation...

[bbcshokker]

Well if you have a windows pc you can start the installation process,
then when it tells you to install the program on the universal,
don't click on install, but use total commander or a similar program
to search for *.cab files. You will find the cab somewhere.
Copy it to your sd card or wherever because after the installation completes
the cab will be deleted.

Another way would be to install Virtual box on your Linux machine and
install Windows on that. Then you can have the virtual machine use your
usb port.

You'd have to search on google to find information on how to do that.

[kloniwotski]

I'm in the same situation: no windows machine to run installers from.

I've had some luck using cabextract ( http://www.cabextract.org.uk/ )

When that fails (quite often it does) I've usually been able to get the .CABs by running the installer under Wine.*

To do this, I had to install activesync under Wine. It's a while since I did this, but apparently I downloaded the file activesync_4.2.setup.exe from microsoft.com and ran that with Wine.

When you run an installer for a WM app, it won't actually install onto your device (that would be too easy!) and in fact I don't even bother connecting my uni to my linux box during this stage. The aim is simply to get the .CAB files extracted.

The app installer usually craps out at the stage when it would transfer the files to my uni, but it's already extracted the .CABs. I generally find these in /my/wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/ActiveSync/ or /my/wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Name_of_Application/ or sometimes in /my/wine/drive_c/windows/temp/

Hope this info is some use to you!

*Full disclosure: actually, I use the version of wine that comes with Google's picasa 2.2, wrapped in a little script to set up the environment variables. That script, which I call picasawine goes as follows:

#!/bin/bash

mydir=/opt/picasa
export PATH=$mydir/../wine/bin:$mydir:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$mydir/../wine/lib:$mydir/../lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export WINEDLLPATH=$mydir/../wine/lib/wine
export WINELOADER=$mydir/../wine/bin/wine
export WINESERVER=$mydir/../wine/bin/wineserver
export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.picasa

exec /opt/picasa/wine/bin/wine $@


so I run as (eg) picasawine SETUP.EXE