Windows 10 Preview on the Spectre x360 - Fixing missing devices

This year's freebie at Microsoft Build 2015 conference is the HP Spectre x360 laptop, which came with Windows 8.1 installed. The idea is to take it away and update it to Windows 10 to allow all us developers to get to grips with the new features of Windows 10, VS2015, etc.


Like many other geeks I've never been particularly happy with the sort of crap you get pre-installed on laptops. Even when you don't get true bloatware, there are usually things like replacement Wifi management apps or manufacturer personal data collection support apps. Also, I've always preferred to do a clean install of a new version of Windows rather than an upgrade.

So, that meant starting from scratch, wiping the windows 8.1 partition and installing Windows 10 straight from a USB stick.  Install went fine, but there were a lot of unrecognized devices in device manager once it had finished.

What's missing? Where are the downloads?

Intel SMBus Controller and other Intel devices

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/1145/Intel-Chipset-Software-Installation-Utility

HP Wireless Button Driver

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp58501-59000/sp58720.exe 

Audio Driver

http://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp70501-71000/sp70653.exe

Intel Virtual Buttons Driver

http://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp70001-70500/sp70349.exe 


This might not be entirely complete, as I have put it together from memory and the things I have left in my download folder after performing the process. I don't feel like going back and installing agian just now to check :)

There was one other driver missing, but that got picked up by asking it to update and automatically find drivers for my device.

You can find other downloads for the machine here

http://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/HP-Spectre-x360-Convertible-PC-Series/7527520/model/7791778#Z7_3054ICK0KGTE30AQO5O3KA30R1

Building Pdf2HtmlEx for Windows

Pdf2HtmlEx (https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX) is a great open source project for accurately rendering PDF files into modern, compact HTML. Getting a Windows build of what is really a Linux orientated open source project is a bit of a challenge however.

If you fancy just downloading a binary, then perhaps head over to this site, where you will find some builds. For me, that wasn't going to be sufficient - if this is going to go into a production environment then I need to be able to build a new version if and when we need to fix bugs or update to the latest build. I wanted to build from source.

Fortunately Marc Sanfaçon has done most of the hard work in working out what other packages have to be built and how to build them under mingw. I set out to follow his instructions and along the way I fixed any gremlins I came across and turned them into a bash script that will perform the whole build unattended from start to finish.

Before you start, make sure you have installed :

• Mingw from here. Leave the defaults (like installing to c:\mingw) alone in the first page of the installer, then select at least 'mingw-developer-tools', 'mingw32-base',  'mingw32-gcc-g++' and 'msys-base' in the package selection.
• Python from here. Actually, the final built product doesn't depend on Python, but building libfontforge seems to require it. In the end it was easier just to install Python than spend more time hacking at the build system trying to remove the dependency. You also need to add Python to your PATH.

Now, start an MSYS shell (there's a batch file in c:\MinGW\msys\1.0) and you will have a bash shell in your home directory (C:\MinGw\msys\1.0\home\<username>).

Copy the script below into a .sh file and run it. You'll need an active internet connection for source to be downloaded, but other than that all you need do is wait. Once the process is complete, the Pdf2HtmlEx.exe file (and the dll files and data files it depends on) will be in the 'pdf2htmlEx.Install' subdirectory of your home directory.

I would really have liked to make a statically linked version of the executable, but it didn't seem a simple change to make, so that will have to wait for now (or for someone with a deeper knowledge of CMake, configure, etc).

Anyway, the script is here.