Re: [ros-kernel]ReactOS Boot CD-ROM!

[Casper H. <ch...@us...>]

tir, 2002-04-23 kl. 14:50 skrev Eric Kohl:
> Hi!
> 
> We can now boot FreeLoader from a CD-ROM.
> 

Great! Nice work Eric!

> The bootsector uses the 'no emulation' mode and permits full access to the
> CD-ROM, just like the WinNT boot CD. Because the cdfs driver is not able to
> read files from a CD-ROM, we cannot boot ReactOS yet.
> 
> Some paths must be hardcoded into the bootsector (ISOBOOT.BIN) and
> bootloader (aka FREELDR.SYS). Therefore I would like to suggest the
> following directory structure for ReactOS CDs:
> 
> \REACTOS:
> Location for all kernel-mode components (ntoskrnl, hal, drivers,
> configuration files) that are used for booting. I don't think we need
> architecture-specific directories (i386, alpha, ppc, mips, ia64, etc.)
> because one CD should support only one architecture.
> 
> \REACTOS\SYSTEM32:
> Location for user-mode compoments (ntdll.dll and smss.sys) that are used for
> booting. In this case smss.exe is the renamed text-mode installation program
> usetup.exe.
> 

I agree with this.

> \INSTALL:
> Location for all packed installation files (.cab files?).
> 

I like the Win9X distribution method which uses .CAB files. The 10.000+
files on the Windows NT 4.0 CD-ROM are really anoying ;o) The Cabinet
Manager in CVS can create cabinet files. It can even split cabinets into
disks and we can control which files go where. It supports no
compression (raw) and MSZIP compression. With MSZIP compression, the
ReactOS distribution is about 1/3 of its original size.

I would like to use the MicroSoft Installer for installation. Has WINE
started implementing this or should we write this from scratch? WINE can
install MS Office which AFAIK uses MSI, but I'm not sure of the details.

> \ (Root directory):
> Location for remaining files (autorun.inf, readme.txt, etc.)
> 

Ok, but I would like to keep the number of files in the root directory
to a minimum.


I guess we will have ISO images of v0.0.20 for download then ;o)