No idea if anyone is interested in this (or if someone here has already done this), but did a fun little project today.
I am really interested in these new Laptops coming out in June running windows for ARM on the Snapdragon X Elite CPU’s and wanted to test some stuff without having to drop $3K+ on a laptop for testing that i might not even be able to use. Windows for ARM has a translation layer built in to allow you to run ‘most’ x86/x64 applications on the ARM cpu (like Apple did with their switch from intel to the ARM based M cpus)
Did some digging and found that there is the WoR project where some devs have created a UEFI bios for the Raspberry Pi and got windows 10/11 ARM64 running on it (supports Pi4 and Pi5).
Got it running on a Pi4 4gb over the weekend but it was so slow it was basically unusable so ordered a Pi5 8gb and tried it on that. There were some issues, I got a M.2 hat for the Pi but windows will not recognise the NVME drive (worked perfectly in RPIos) so i had to use a USB to NVME enclosure i had. There are also no drivers for the Wifi or ethernet port built into the Pi5 (there is ethernet support on the Pi4) but a generic usb to ethernet dongle worked just fine.
So after getting all that figured out i had a working windows 11 on ARM test setup running on a Pi5 and proceeded to configure it and install our Kinetic Client. And it works.
Next i am going to test the edge client for Kinetic in the browser. Tomorrows Job.
We strongly encourage you to contact Raspberry Pi (or post to the forums) and let them know that you care about official Windows and UEFI support on their boards.
We also suggest looking into Rockchip boards instead if you’re interested in Windows on Arm development, as we mostly focus on that today and believe they provide better value.
True but a lot of customers are on prem and do not upgrade very often, some companies stay on one version for years and only upgrade to obtain a feature that they really need. This means that there will be customers still running the desktop client for years after Epicor officially sunset it and there is still the edge agent that a lot of companies will use for various reasons. (it does more than just printing). Also the date for the end of the desktop client keeps getting pushed out so it could be another 2-3 years before epicor actually ends it
These laptops are coming out this month and there are going to be a lot of them and people want to know if they can use them for business (like us) so i wanted to see if the current version of windows for Arm could run Kinetic, and it can.
Yeah they eneded official support with the Pi4 but you can do it on the Pi5 by first installing Raspberry Pi OS and then installing PiAPPs.
In there is the Windows Flasher tool, you grab that and plug in a big enough USB hdd and the tool will grab and install the Pi5 UEFI and the windows oficial ARM image and setup a PE installation environment on the USB hdd, you then change the pi to boot from USB/NVME and reboot and it will boot into their custom windows installer and install windows on the Pi. Its was a fun little project.
I would not call it a daily usable windows install, its slow and clunky, but for the purpose i set it up, ‘can we run kinetic on these new ARM based laptops?’ It did the job and was a LOT cheaper than buying one of the laptops only to find out it doesn’t work
We were on 10.1.600 less than two years ago… I quite understand.
File attachments for one, which was added to printing because UNC access not allowed in the browser. We hit that one too.
ARM for Windows has struggled for quite some time. I have an M3 MacBook, which can’t run my old VMWare Intel images. With the release of the ARM-based Surface laptops (and other brands I assume), Windows on ARM should get some love. We just have to make sure that Microsoft will keep the .NET Framework compatible with ARM so the eventually unsupported client keeps running after Windows 12 or whatever down the road.
I admit I’ve been curious to know if the coming Surface with Windows ARM were going to be able to run classic “Smart Client” or be stuck with browser only. Thanks for pathfinding for us.
Windows on ARM up until this point has been nothing more than a token effort. there have only really been 2 devices out so far using the Snapdragon 8 cpu that you could call proper windows laptops, there is a Surface and the Lenovo X13s.
I tried to get a second hand X13s for testing, but they are unobtanium in my part of the world. Think they only sold in the US and not many made it out into the wild.
But now with the new Snapdragon X Elite CPUs with the neural chips built in, Microsoft is doing a big push on ARM with their new Copilot+ PC’s and marketing them to businesses. Every OEM has a range of ARM based Laptops coming out in June/July using these new Snapdragon X CPUs. They should offer superior battery life to their intel/AMD powered counterparts.
Wouldn’t that be the dream, I actually run Linux on my laptop as my main OS and remote into a Windows VM for Kinetic Stuff (I’m not an end user of the software so it works fine for me) Did try to get it working using WINE and the ,NET Linux libraries a while ago and got so close but there was just some stuff I could not get past. If anyone knows of someone who pulled this off, let me know.
However I am sure that I read somewhere that the edge agent is based on another tool Epicor acquired from somewhere else so it’s possible it’s not pure .NET, in theory if it is pure .NET they could just build versions for Linux and Windows for x86 and ARM natively.
Based on a quick look inside ‘C:\Program Files\Epicor\EdgeAgent\edgeapp’ it looks like it is .NET, but they are using WPF for the UI, which is Windows-Only, even the .NET (Core) version. So they’d have to use a different UI framework but shouldn’t be a huge deal.
Definitely possible that there is more to it than that, but that’s just my quick observation.
EDIT: Actually the exe or service that interacts with the printing system is probably not .NET, and that would be the part they purchased and put a wrapper around.
With the release of the ARM-based Surface laptops (and other brands I assume), Windows on ARM should get some love. We just have to make sure that Microsoft will keep the .NET Framework compatible with ARM so the eventually unsupported client keeps running after Windows 12 or whatever down the road.
