How to set up an LXE VX6 for Coldboot Persistance

The LXE VX6 is a vehicle mounted terminal with a half VGA monitor and full qwerty keyboard running embedded CE. The unusual characteristic of this device is that it essential does a “cold-boot” when-ever you power off/on the device. Not sure why LXE architected the embedded CE build like this. Given that the common use of the device is to run a terminal window, LXE by default has RFTerm and AppLock already set for persistence in the base registry image, so if that’s all you are using it for there is no problem except start-up takes longer than it should given it is reinstalling the respective CAB files each time.

LXE VX6

If you are loading your own applications there are a few ways you can set them up for persistance:

1. Modify the Registry
2. Create a folder in “System” called “Startup” (\System\Startup) and place your CAB file there
3. Create a batch file and place it in \System\Startup

For the CloudSync application we chose the last method. The reason why is that most of our application already “lives” in the \System folder, and having it reinstall the application each time seemed excessive, and would ultimately slow down the boot process even more than needed. Secondly we didn’t want to rely on AppLock to start up our application and we didn’t want to have to modify the base registry image.

The nice thing about creating a “Batch” file is that it allowed us to do a sequence of actions before opening our application. This includes:

1. Moving files from a backup folder in “\System” to the “\Windows” folder
2. Create a folder in “\Program Files” for our log files
3. Run the application with parameters

Quite simply we opened up a text editor and wrote our the following lines

@echo off
copy \System\CloudSync\Backup\HtmlEngine.dll \windows
copy \System\CloudSync\Backup\ViaXML2.dll \windows
mkdir "\Program Files\CloudSync\CloudManager\Logs"
start \system\cloudsync\cloudmanager\athena.exe -hidden -config \system\cloudsync\cloudmanager\config

We didn’t have to worry about checking if a file or folder existed as we knew they would get blown away each boot cycle. We saved the file as a “cloudsync.bat” file and placed in the “\System\Startup” folder and it runs beautifully every time.