Would it be possible to change from WinCE to Linux on a NetDCUA5?

The basic idea is to go to NBoot, erase everything with 'E', download the Linux bootloader U-Boot and save it to the board. Then start U-Boot and install the remaining Linux images. You can download precompiled images from our website, this is the sdcard tar archive. If you unpack the archive and save the contained files to the top directory of a USB stick or SD card, U-Boot can install them automatically. Finally you have to set the MAC address by saving it to environment variable ethaddr, and if you have two ethernet ports, the next higher address to eth1addr. The MAC address is on the barcode sticker on the module.

The whole process of installing Linux is explained in detail in the documentation NetDCUA5 Linux First Steps. For working with Linux in general, there is a documentation Linux on F&S Boards. But please note that the Linux on NetDCUA5 (Vybrid) is quite old and some features mentioned in the latter documentation may not be available there. So this is not really representative for a current Linux system on a current F&S board (i.MX6, i.MX8). So maybe evaluation of Linux for a new project should better be done on a more up-to-date board.

To actually work with Linux, you have to use a Linux PC or at least a Linux virtual machine. We have a document Advices for Linux on PC that tells how the Linux machine can be configured. We also have predefined development VMs for Virtual Box that make this step rather simple. Again you need a rather old machine for the old Linux, so I would take the Fedora 21 machine. Then you have to download the main release tar archive, that is also available on our website next to the sdcard archive. The newest release at the moment is fsvybrid-V2.2, but there will be a version fsvybrid-V2.2.1 soon with some fixes for newer board revisions. This archive contains the Linux source code, documentation, toolchain, examples and also the precompiled images. This is needed to build your own applications and system environment.

Going from a Windows board to Linux and back to Windows is possible. Just go again to NBoot, erase everything with 'E', download EBoot, save it and then you are back again in the Windows environment. However buying a Linux board and converting it to Windows is not legally possible because Linux boards have no Windows license.

Your F&S Support Team