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nLite for Vista - Taming the Beast


PoserOfAllTrades

nLite for Vista!  

404 members have voted

  1. 1. Do you want a version of nLite that supports Windows Vista?

    • Hell yes!!!
      339
    • Nah, I'm sticking with XP anyways.
      51
    • I don't really care...
      14
  2. 2. Don't you just love nLite?

    • YES!!!
      379
    • It's nice, but still kind of hard to use...
      17
    • Not really...
      8


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It will be Veestah after all.

If you want you can post here what would you like first to be removed since Vista is very close and I'll have to speed it up a little.

Nuhi, don't rush it bro.

I am sure all of us here would rather wait a few weeks for a finished product than use Veestah and have it break.

Also, I am sure most users here would agree that it would be wise to wait at least a month before converting to Vista full time. We all know the hacker community is going to try to rip the OS to pieces once it releases so, I repeat, take your time.

But, things I would personally like to be able to remove are Windows Mail/Calender/Address Book/Movie-Maker HD/Media Player 11, the Accessibility tools, the Welcome Center, the Sidebar, the built-in games... pretty much all the useless crap that most people never use or replace with different apps right after a clean install.

I look forward to the release of Veestah. :D

Personal note: nVista sounded much cooler tho. But does bear a striking resemblance to nVidia and both M$ and nVidia might get angry at that one.

How about Revista? (Pronounced Reh-Vista) for "Revising Vista to suit your needs."

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It will be Veestah after all.

If you want you can post here what would you like first to be removed since Vista is very close and I'll have to speed it up a little.

options to remove any and all of the services/programs and drivers should be first, i hate all the worthless apps they keep putting in, i mean not worthless to all but most have several M$ apps that never get used

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Very awesome, glad to hear it's already in development. :D

nuhi, just curious but do you have to create everything from scratch for this nlite vista release? I mean are a lot of the components (removal things, tweaks, etc) similar in both xp and vista or are they vastly different?

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I've been closely following the evolution of nLite for the past time... I am also considering to write my own C# applications to modify windows images that have been hardware-generalised using Microsoft Sysprep, like Vista and images taken after running sysprep -reseal on XP/2003.

I've also been studying how Vista is built (all the way back to build 4029) and would like to describe the main issues of doing a complex operation like nLitening a OS image:

- Vista installation DVD is actually a sysprepped image of another running Vista installation from a technician's computer. Run sysprep on any NT 5.x builds and you would have virtually the same thing. So any user application that would want to modify it can follow one of these 2 general layouts:

1) The direct method (like nLite works today)

- mount a WIM image for read/write operations

- load the registry hives in the active registry

- perform the removals for files and registry settings

- unload the hives

- commit and unmount the WIM image

2) The indirect method (like in Windows XP Embedded)

- develop a method for reversing the modularization of windows (the opposite of Embedded Target Designer)

- transform the contents of a generalized Vista WIM image in modules, stored in a local repository

- add / remove components in the local repository

- regenerate the generalized WIM image

I think both of these methods can be applied on resealed XP/2003 images, allowing WIM deployment for them. This would result in a successor of nLite capable of working with both XP/2003 and Vista. Also, it would allow experimenting on XP, which takes a lot less time to test. Playing with 8 gigs of data when testing is not nice.

Here's a screenshot from my application, it's not much .... I've been working on it scarcely in the past 2-3 weeks

Repository%20Designer%20Screenshot%20(last%20build).jpg

I'd use the following layout for modules, in a similar way Target Designer for Windows XP Embedded works:

1) a set of "primitives", consisting in

- a EXE / DLL file stripped of resources

- separate resources, like ResHacker.exe extracts them (good for applying resource patches very fast, for example XPize could just update the primitive resources instead of unpacking / repacking everything)

- maybe some INFs to be used with regsrv32

2) a set of "components" consisting in

- one or more primitives

- registry settings

3) a set of "features"

- one or more components

- one or more primitives

- scripts, user files ...

For example a primitive would be SHELL32.DLL and it's stripped resources, a component would be the explorer shell and a feature would be Windows Media Player.

Store all these in a repository using the WIM technology and you'd get a lightning-fast Vista reconstruction engine

Edited by dexter.inside
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WOW looks like a cool app, When are you going to release it?

Unfortunately, it just looks cool... but it's not a cool application. I have a SVN repository on Google Code for it and I will probably need a lot of help in order to achieve something that complex.

Try programming for .NET Framework 2.0... all your apps will look cool.

I really doubt that by myself I can finish this thing in under 1 year

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