VistaPE featured on C'T magazine

Markus Debus, the responsible developer for the PE projects of the German and Dutch CT Magazine released a custom WinBuilder project based on VistaPE/Windows PE 2.0 and this project already comes featured on this month's edition.

http://www.heise.de/ct









These are very good news for the community and a good way to let more people know some of the work developed over these years.


:)

-- Nuno Brito

Press and Partnerships page

A new page was added on the winbuilder.net site - it includes an historical list of computer magazines, websites, people and companies that have somehow crossed paths with WinBuilder.

This page is available to everyone who wishes to see where WinBuilder based projects are/were featured in the world outside boot land.

You can read this page here: http://winbuilder.net/page.php?4


If the list is not complete and you know about any missing articles or other websites developing wb based projects, please mention them in the forums so that these new entries can also get properly listed.


:)


-- Nuno Brito

A section for newbies?

Here is an interesting suggestion done by ispy: to create a new space here on boot land where those who have doubts regarding the initial steps to properly use some of the software we use around here. (also called as "newbies" sometimes)


The idea sounds fun and I must admit that things often look confusing and daunting for people who just got a fresh start into this land where a boot is so much more than foot wear.

Go ahead, take your pick and say what you think about this idea.

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=4028

Aren't we all newbies once in a while? :)

-- Nuno Brito

TinyBit promoted to developer group

Tinybit is the author of a very well known program called Grub4Dos which is used for multi booting from different partitions and multiple Operative Systems.

His work and support for questions placed on this community has been known since a long time so this promotion to the developer group is surely well deserved.


You can find the discussions for grub4dos on the respective subforum here: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/Grub4dos-f66.html


Congratulations TinyBit!

:)


-- Nuno Brito

ETBoot

ETBoot is a new project meant to produce a full portable Windows XP environment.

The whole concept has been discussed a few other times by projects like mobileOS but for the first time we are looking at a project that is somehow "easier" to build and get good working results which only increase the appetite for making even better boot disks.

Quickly explaining how this project works:

- You install Windows inside a virtual machine with a fixed size virtual disk
- Apply the needed registry tweaks and generic drivers
- Add the EWF (Enhanced Write Filter)
- Burn to a DVD and boot



There are of course a lot of improvements that could be done on this process, but this is better left for the end user to customize and improve as he prefers.

The end result is a good XP OS running from DVD and perfectly capable of carrying along your favourite programs without restrictions or worries.


ETBoot is being discussed on this topic: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/project-ETBoot-t3890.html


-- Nuno Brito

LiVista Rescup

Some time ago, mihi has proposed a new approach to the modification of Windows Vista Install DVD's where he combined a small set of batch files capable of modifying the Windows setup while it was running and add some much needed features like the explorer shell for example.

His idea was based on a concept where no MS files would be included inside the package and therefore no restrictions to share these files with your friends or publish them on the web.

The overall concept is very interesting since it would indeed allow a very good level of portability but there are still some design flaws needed to shave out before it can became a stable tool.

At the moment his set of files will nevertheless work very well.

You can find his project introduction here boot land: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/LiVista-Rescup-t3806.html

And also don't forget to visit his development blog here: http://rescup.wordpress.com/

:)

-- Nuno Brito

Tools from Peter

Peter has recently been releasing a small set of console tools for use in everyday script development with winbuilder.

Some of his tools were created to ease the work of tracking down the registry changes that are applied to a target OS when installing a program.

This is particulary usefull for all of those applications that require registering particular ActiveX entries or signing up DLL's .

At least this way it will become possible to incorporate the needed file/registry changes while creating a boot disk rather than just registering every time the boot disk starts up.


You can find more details here:
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/tool-trackWBInstall-t4010.html

-------

Another good tool is called regCompact - and what will do?

As the name states, it will compact a given registry hive and optimize it until the size is reduced considerably, look here:
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/tool-regCompact-t3968.html

---------------

For INI files, he also created two good tools and I'll quote him for the explanation of these tools:

iniSort generates a sorted version of an input ini file.
This makes it possible to compare two ini files with tools like ExamDiff

Syntax: iniSort

creates .srt in the folder

iniDiff creates an ini file as the difference of two ini files.
This gives the user the possibility to use WinBuilder's IniMerge to update an ini file.

IniMerge,, updates to be equal to

Syntax: iniDiff -O: -N: -R:
All ini files with complete path.

They can be downloaded from here: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/tool-package-iniTools-t3989.html


---------------

Last but not least - comes a console capture program to interact with wb scripts.

The command line syntax might seem a bit confusing but if you look on the provided work example it should become easier to understand.

It is particulary usefull when you need to interpret the results given from a command line program. Some tweaking inside the next version of winbuilder is required but it shouldn't take much longer to add the needed changes.

This tool is available here: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/tool-captConsole-t3994.html



-- Nuno Brito

Tell your story!

Some time ago it was more or less easy to know from where the usual visitors on boot land came but since the beginning of this year a significant number of members started participating and things have surely grow a bit.

One thing that boot land takes pride is the good community spirit where everyone gets a chance to talk and learn without fear of "noob" labels or any such things.

So, introduce yourself!

Tell your story, no need for a complete biography but you can start by mentioning how you found the forums, which projects do you like best to use and what are your goals for the future or even your favourite hobbies.

This an invitation open for everyone who wishes to share a bit of their perspective with the rest of us, you're welcome to write on the "hello world" section: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/Hello-world-f24.html


:)

-- Nuno Brito

Blog moved to Blogger

This is the first blog message in since two months ago.

The reason why it took so long to update the blog was mostly because of the excessive bandwidth usage caused by spam bots while crawling up the wordpress structure trying to add their comments filled with spam.

Besides the inconvenience of needing to remove such pesky comments, it was also a very resource hungry leak that made the mySql database and available RAM on the server go nuts for quite some time with annoying "Error 500" messages.

It was sad having to stop leaving messages on the blog was it a good tool to spread news about the things we were discussing at the forums and this way help other members keep up with our daily talks.

To save memory resources, the blog formely placed at http://blog.boot-land.net has been transfered to the blogger services, which are quite fast, free and completely rid of pesky google ads.

Unfortunately, no comments were able to be transfered onto this new database but for the future posts they will surely continue available as before.

Even if the boot land server suddenly becomes offline - this blog will always be available to discuss and explain how things are going.


---

Last but not least - it would be really nice to see more people posting messages about their experiences on boot land around here.

Blogs are all about sharing thoughts, so go ahead and give a try!

:)


-- Nuno Brito