Pocket PC is perhaps the most widely known PDA device available to general consumers, although it comes with Microsoft Windows CE, it still does not stop GNU/Linux users from syncing their Pocket PC device with Linux machines.

In this post, I'll concentrate on developing Pocket PC application on Linux machine by using CeGCC.

First of all you need to install CeGCC cross compiler on your system by either

1. Compiling CeGCC from its source code, or
2. Installing it from Binary Package (rpm, deb)

For this quick introduction, I'll concentrate on installing the compiler from Debian Package (deb). Other packages can be downloaded from CeGCC project page

Get the Deb package

• cegcc-cegcc_0.50-2_i386.deb (21MB)
• cegcc-mingw32ce_0.50-2_i386.deb (19MB)

Install both packages
Install both mingw32ce and cegcc using dpkg,


$ sudo dpkg -i cegcc-mingw32ce_0.50-2_i386.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i cegcc-cegcc_0.50-2_i386.deb


the package files will be installed on /opt.

Download Example Source Code

• hello.c - Display Hello world dialog
• randrect.cpp - Random Rectangle

Compiling the application
To compile the example applications, you need to change the directory to "/opt/cegcc/bin/", then execute

$ ./arm-wince-cegcc-gcc ~/hello.c -o ~/hello.exe


Copy hello.exe to your Pocket PC PDA, and execute it using File Explorer to see it running. Repeat the step for "Random Rectangle" example.

Conclusion
CeGCC is a great package for Pocket PC mobile application development as it produces binaries that are compatible with modern ARM processor and Windows Mobile operating system. CeGCC enables Pocket PC application development under a completely free and open source environment

Tags: pocketpc, pocket pc, linux, ubuntu, gcc, compiler, c#, pda, mobile, gadgets

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