webmedic

Hm been doing linux for years I have used most of them. If you want something that just works for most desktop things including playing dvd's and such right out of the box so to speak try pclinuxos. Ubunto/kubunto hardware detection is not as good. Fedora well it's fedora. And suse although I like it has been doing strange things lately. Not to mention that yast thier admin tool if you really need to admin the box is a nightmare. It will let you get the basics done but locks down the config of your system so bad that if you really try to admin it yourself never open yast again or it will mess up all your hard work. The last relaease of mandriva was supposed to have been pretty incredible. It's very user friendly. More so that the ubunto based distros. PClinuxos is based off of mandriva from about 3 or 4 years ago. He split it and did his own thing. He adds the best tools from whatever distro works well for each task. And packages things by default like dvd playback that you have to hunt for to find a solution with the others. I didn't read what the guy said about slackware above but it is not named properly. If you try slackware be ready to do everything by hand when you want things to work.

You it would be nice to have openoffice document support. They are simple tar.gz files and if you rename than you can them extract them easily. It would however be nice to be able to simply click on them and extract them. I'm guessing it would be a simple matter of associating uni with the right file extensions. Thanks.. I dont have the code for 1.5 handy but I could post code for you if you like.

yes and to make matters worse the latest graphics pack for nvidia will bsod on tnt video cards. You will have to hand modfiy the inf file to use the built in drivers from your xp cd for the older tnt drivers and then remove the device id's from the newer drivers for the tnt cards. It's kind of a pain but it works.

I have already fixed this. I will be uploading it today and making it available for others to use. Also To note the rest is done. accept for wlan. I have gone through and completely reduced and optimized everything for barts pe. And so far I have everything working but nforce 3 and 4 lan cards. Or at least everything I have been able to test on. There have been many updates and they now work properly in virtual pc since I use that for testing myself. I'll post over at 911 later today about what I currently have. Thanks.

um Nope I'm using those kinds of names right now for my massive mass storage pack and having no issues like that at all. xp console is not dos. Nor will it ever be.

I have been trying to get ahold of you but the pm's go no place and your email is private so I'm interested in your perl script. thanks.

well what really separates us is the way Microsoft sees it and since they have ok'ed barts project the rest of the argument is moot. It doesn't really matter what anybody else thinks if microsoft says it's ok since they are the ones who have the right to persecute bart if they want. The rest really doesn't matter. It's simply arguing to be arguing. It's is not a reverse engineered product as bart does not share code with the winpe builder tool. If it did microsoft would have took care of it before. The rest is windows xp as a product it just so happens that Microsoft made it to be versatile so they could use it for something like winpe. Yes bart takes advantage of this however as stated before he already has Microsoft's ok. I just had to set this straight since there are obviously some people here who are uninformed.

I've been using barts stuff since he made his joe.sys and have been watching barts pe since about the .8 days when it was still beta. This stuff has already happened. Microsoft took intense interest in barts project I think it was before he hit 1.0. They had some issues with his inf files for instance it looked to much like what they were doing so they made him redo it. Barts already been through all the legal stuff with microsoft and they ok'd the projust before he even got out of beta. He did have to do some recoding to make them happy but in the end they sad it was ok. I remember watching the dialog and how bart even pulled the beta till he got the ok from microsoft. So I'm sure that if microsoft thought that he was breaking their license they would have shut bart down already. They are more than aware of everything going on with the project already. As to weather or not it shares any code with winpe it would have to be no or else he would have been shut down already. A long time ago on these boards I had posted some screen shots only using custom inf files during install. They weren't on the net more than maybe a week and the site was forced by microsoft to remove them. I also had changed the background pick during install but was warned by a microsoft employee that it was the inf installer stiff they did not really like. I am fairly shure that if they had a problem with bart he would be shut down already.

sure of course I already have my setups set to run over the network from commandlines.txt so that is no issue. I currently use xplode though and seeing as how it is a paid product I'm looking at moving to other pastures. At any rate I have been wanting to go with a atuoit based setup for a while. I'm hoping autoit maps network paths correctly during t-12 though. Oh well I'll let you know and thanks for the help.

thanks for the reply I have been extremely busy the last few weeks and have not been able to get back to this. I have looked over your scripts do you happen to know if they work ok over the network?

I dont have this scripted for silent install but I do the inatall manually and then my script kills the process's associated with picasa. This is all done durring t-12. A nice side effect of this is that after reboot it does not seem the running process even has tome to add some of the registry entries as the program does not start with windows. It was an unexpected thing but It was nice. I also kill google desktop and google talk in the same way and none of them start with windows either and I dont have to do anything special.

Hello Mhz thanks for all you good code. I also do a few things in autoit and am getting ready release something if all goes well. However for now I'm using a network and I have from the command lines text a single batch file that sets up my network and starts my installer scripts that are on a network share. This saves me allot of space on my cdrom that can be better used for whatever I see fit. The thing is that I'm currently using xplode and it works great Iahve no issues there and it is network transparent. I want to now use auto it for this and I also want to use autoit for scripting some installers to make them silent. My main issue here is that I have tried to use the macro recorder that comes with scite for auto it and I'm not really happy with what it produces. I also have to admit that I'm using auto it for gui purposes and not to automate things so I'm not really to good at that part of it. Could you explain in a simple step by step how you make your installer scripts and also possibly share some more of your au3 scripts for cleanup and also for the runonce stuff after you boot into the os. If you don't want to I understand that ok but i thought I would ask anyway. Oh and my project. It's called buster and you can think of it more as a system cleaner / virus / malware / spyware scanner with definition files that anybody can write. They are completely open. Hopefully soon I will have it out I just need to finish the code for reading the def files and change the back end to execute the commands in the proper order.

Because the project I gave the link to above calls themselves unatended. It is an opensource project that replaces a ris server. It allows you to do full unatended installs over a newtwork using a setup simillar to ris. Why don't you check out the link and see for yourself.

Um no you don't I copy the oobe over at the t-12 mark and I dont use winnt.sif at all. Since i have not found out a way to use recovery install when using winnt.sif. At any rate I copy and do all my installs over the network during t-12. At that time I also copy over my oobe and when it reboots it follows the oobe perfectly. So far I only have it set up to add a single user but i plan to add more to it later.

um if you dont have permission to do allot of stuff like you say why not use unatended. You can think of it as an open source ris server. http://unattended.sourceforge.net/ this all seems like so much wasted effort. I do mine completely different mind you as I use the same cd's to install as I hand out to the customer so my install is not exactly unatended (so that recovery mode works also) but I do have all my software and whatnot install durring t-13. If done correctly there is only one chipset you will have issues with(nvidias) since the way they load their drivers is non-standard.

I currently have this installing great from a network share during t-12. Everything seems to work great. I have it running silent with norestore set also. It would not do any good as I shut off sfc during install and also already have the uxtheme patched into my installer. My issue is that for some reason everything seems to work accept for the style. The background and the screensaver are there the icons are correct (which look great) but the start bar is not skinned and it is using the default windows xp style. Does anybody have any ideas on this.

well although I cant say I'm surprised to see this I hope it works our well for you wraith. By the way I had asked you for a copy when you weren't even offering it for download anymore and stated I would be glad to pay for it. I read your site and I do run a small shop but since I build maybe 1 or 2 systems a month and $500 is kind of high for that I think I may have to back down on the product. I would not feel comfortable just grabbing a copy for $10 and using it allot without paying you properly. Thanks for all your hard work and for the great product. I hope others enjoy it as much as I have. P.S. Is it ok if I continue to use my old copy of 4.0. I'm willing to offer money for it. Thanks again.

thanks wraith. Yes I remember you mentioning that you used it to launch apps at windows startup. Which would be very usefull also. Thanks for your answer There is a plugin for barts pe that adds .net but I was trying to avoid it as I think of it more as a bunch of bloat that serving nay real purpose. So I'm glad your app does not use it. Thanks for the responce.

I was thinking of another use for xplode and wanted to ask if it would be ok. I wanted a little program that would act as a startup for the shell under barts pe. Right now for me it's all being done by cmd files and I thought that xplode might make a nice little graphical kind of progress bar front end for it all. Wrath is this ok with you or would you prefer it not to be used in this way? Does xplode require .net to be installed? Of course if I want to use the new render method it does require that I have ie in my install but does the original render method require this?

sure well I can tell you I work on hundreds of systems and I would not recomend norton to my enemies. Kasperski is still my second choice just not my first.

Yes same here I coded allot of php stuff but found others always wanted support and everything for free. Now I level with them and tell them unless they are willing ot pay my $45 an hour shop fee then I dont have time. In my case it is true since I usaully do have work comming into my shop lately. I still code though jsut not as much openly.

You must have not have done your homework. Kasperski has by far the best set of definition files. That is how it does what it does. I Can also tell you the problem here with testing is that kasperski picks up tons of stuff that is not virii per say. For instance it picks up and proggies you have on your system that can reboot the system. Try running this on a system with aol on it which uses multiple little apps to reboot the system and you will see kasperski with multiple false positives since these little apps are not really firii. Now multiply that by many other little apps. I'm not saying this is bad though as it does find other things like spyware, adaware and stuff. But the one thing kaspersky does not have is a good heuristics engine. It's not bad but by no means good. Kasperski's success has all to do with it's definition files. And here it is the best bar none. However if you happen to catch a virii in the early hours before they have definitions ready you are out of luck. I have a on demand scanner that uses kasperski to scan systems with after that fact and it is good for this. The other issue with kasperski is that it is much heavier on system resources. You will find allot of people that use their systems heavily will not be happy with this. For powerusers with the latest systems it's not such a big deal but with the normal home user which are using systems around 1ghz - 1.5ghz still it is a very big deal when the av solution sucks the life out of the system. Try running any norton product and you will see even worse. Nod on the other hand is good at catching virii that are new out on the net. it has the best heuristics engine bar none. Which is why it is good for in the wild virii (virii that are new and have no definition files yet) It also makes nod much liter on resources and I have even heard allot of gamers prefer it for it's lightness while playing their games. So when I need to clean systems I use nod32 and the kaasperski on demand scanner they work great together and nod even catches things that kaspersky doesn't sometimes. When I get done I can be sure there is most likely nothing else on the system. it also interesting to note that allot of the other guys on here that I know do system building are recommending nod32 also. There must be a reason why. We see this stuf fall day long week after week. It's kinda sad really.

well no i dont have this as I have my setup files on my linux box and I specificly have it setup to use share for security. This no user name or password is required. I would not mind working with you to find a solution to this though. I'm sure you already know it but here is the complete syntax for that stage net use <drive letter>: \\<server>\<share> /user:<domain>\<user> [<password>] /persistent:no It may be that it really wants a drive letter or something like that. I have not tried the above line yet but I did write it down as part of my documentation for this.

no problem thats one of the exact same reasons i use it.

yes I have all my important information on linux boxen running samba for sharing files. When you run a large network and you get tired of windows trashing or loosing your files once to many you will know what I mean. Ris or the linux version is a server that lives to do nothing but install windows. Once you setup your boot disk there is nothing to do until everything is installed. It is completely unattended which includes installing apps and anything else needed. It is mostly used in big companies with large roleouts as they only have to set it up once and then roll say a couple hundred thousand systems with the same setup. Of course it also works well for much smaller number of installs. Currently the only reason I don't use it is since I do mostly custom single systems at a time. In such cases I still need to givethe end user a cd so I simply build my own cd's for each system. I do however use the network to install all my extra apps, updates, registry tweaks and the like. It makes it much easier than trying to maintain a bunch of cd's or a single large install dvd. The unattended server mentioned above as well as ris are mostly used by companies with corporate keys for installing windows but i guess could be setup for not doing it that way but i have never done so. The advantage of the site I listed is that it is free and does not cost you an arm and a leg like ris does.