I tried playing with Windows CE 6.0 R2. Its a bit irritating at first because I had to install a couple of service packs before Win CE 6.0 R2 can be installed. But once I got Windows CE running, I am impressed (I am normally not a fan of Microsoft). Win CE is good for quickly building embedded applications. With the Platform Builder in Visual Studio, one can click and add components such as web servers, drivers, OS applications from a fairly comprehensive library into an image. This image (a bit like vmlinuz) is compiled and downloaded into the target embedded device. Downloading and debugging is done via ethernet, so its very convenient (once you managed to install and run eboot.bin onto the target so that it can initiate the ethernet connection)
Provided that a Win CE board support package (BSP) is available from the embedded platform vendor, embedded linux development should eat the dust compared to Windows CE where it comes to time-to-market. A BSP contains the customised driver code needed to interface with the platform devices and peripherals.
Unfortunately, fast doesnt mean no work. Tinkering is still needed to make CE work on the Artigo. Artigo just refuses to recognize my USB thumbdrives. Since I was not really keen to spend many hours doing embedded development/debugging at this particular moment, I decided to just use good old XP instead. Actually I was deciding between XP and Linux, but because of the application that was forming in my mind, I chose XP. Linux is stable and fast, but when it comes to multimedia and graphics, Windows is still better, in my opinion.
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