Blog: On installers

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Z98
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Blog: On installers

Post by Z98 »

IamMomotaros
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by IamMomotaros »

Why don't you keep the 2 installer versions?

the Rosdevs should combine both the bootcd and livecd,
making the bootable cd installer a hybrid of ubuntu and windows installer.
all the services and options of ubuntu(LInux), and the simplicity and structure of windows.
Keeping the bootcd-installer version as an Alternate Text installer.
Spliting the Graphical installer into 2, Try Live cd with Minimalitic Installer or Minimalistic Graphical installer.
and Memtest86+ memory checker.

Boot ReactOS Logo (with 5 second delay for options)
try live-cd with the ablilty to install via graphical installer. {default}{1}
graphical installer with networking only.{2}
the bootcd-installer version as a backup Alternate Text installer.{3}
and memtest 86+ testing suite.{4}

Remember Minimalist doesn't mean featureless or ugly, its resource friendly.
Marzz
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by Marzz »

Many thanks Z98(!) for the update and great to hear about these ongoing ROS developments. I love these blogs! And things like SSD support, better partitioning options, UEFI support, the new explorer.. It sounds awesome and seems to be moving pretty fast! And with the Community Edition's funding coming available within a few more weeks, my hardware vote will be for UEFI support ;)
milon
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by milon »

IamMomotaros wrote:...the Rosdevs should combine both the bootcd and livecd...
...Spliting the Graphical installer into 2, Try Live cd with Minimalitic Installer or Minimalistic Graphical installer.
That was the whole point of the blog that Z98 linked. We don't have a proper graphical installer to handle any of that (partitions, drives, etc). We'll get there some day, but compared to everything else that needs to be done, it's just not priority right now.
IamMomotaros
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by IamMomotaros »

Marzz wrote:Many thanks Z98(!) for the update and great to hear about these ongoing ROS developments. I love these blogs! And things like SSD support, better partitioning options, UEFI support, the new explorer.. It sounds awesome and seems to be moving pretty fast! And with the Community Edition's funding coming available within a few more weeks, my hardware vote will be for UEFI support ;)
milon wrote: That was the whole point of the blog that Z98 linked. We don't have a proper graphical installer to handle any of that (partitions, drives, etc). We'll get there some day, but compared to everything else that needs to be done, it's just not priority right now.
Yes, I agree those should be implemented, but I think older hardware show get support first.

GPT should implementated so that LDMhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Disk_Manager, and UUID are availble for an eventual encrypton of a harddrive, through Cryptfs http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/docs/cryptfs/cryptfs.html or eCrypts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECryptfs.

Edited to fix errors in orginal post.

Issue #1: "IDE, Scsi, Sata1, Sata2, Sata3 need to be fully supported first." ReactOS had IDE support for a very long time now and it is a rare situation where installing fails due to a problem with an IDE interface. ReacOS has had partial SATA support for several years.

Issue #2: "Without MBR(MasterBootRecord)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record and GPT(GUID Partition Table)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table support, their is no way to create filesystemshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system or try filesystems. without filesystems we can't install, boot and run ReactOS." ReactOS had MBR support since we had the ability to install ReactOS to a harddrive. The blog post explicitly states that we support MBR based partitions.

Issue #3: "If you ask why should Reactos support GPT, most Sata harddrives support GPT." Partitioning schemes have nothing to do with what connector a harddrive uses.

Issue #4: "GPT and MBR needs to implementated so that lvmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logica ... 28Linux%29" LVM is a Linux technology. This project is implementing an NT kernel. LVM therefore has no relevance to us.

Issue #5: "Inorder for UEFI(Unified Extensible Firmware Interface)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_E ... _Interface to be supported, EFI needs to be supported." UEFI has superseded EFI. There is no EFI to support. Therefore UEFI does NOT require supporting EFI, since there is no EFI to explicitly support.
Last edited by IamMomotaros on Wed May 21, 2014 3:36 am, edited 2 times in total.
IamMomotaros
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by IamMomotaros »

I have found EFI stuff Called Clover EFI that allows to boot from bios to efi.
CloverEFIhttp://sourceforge.net/projects/cloverefiboot/

I also found something on UEFI called tianocore.

Tianocorehttp://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/t ... le=Welcome
Z98
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by Z98 »

I don't think you have a firm understanding of most of the technologies/projects you keep linking to. Nor do you appear to have read the blog very carefully. Or tried ReactOS out. As there are at least three factual inaccuracies in your posts and at least two points that have basically no bearing on the topic at hand.
erkinalp
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by erkinalp »

"GPT and MBR needs to implementated so that lvm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_V ... 28Linux%29" LVM is a Linux technology. This project is implementing an NT kernel. LVM therefore has no relevance to us.
However they might implement a LVM driver to be installable in LVM allocated space.
-uses Ubuntu+GNOME 3 GNU/Linux
-likes Free (as in freedom) and Open Source Detergents
-favors open source of Windows 10 under GPL2
PascalDragon
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by PascalDragon »

Z98 wrote:GPT's relationship with UEFI is a bit more tenuous since it is possible to perform a UEFI boot from MBR partitions, though Windows does not support this (or booting from 32bit UEFI for that matter, but that's a separate point).
Did I understand it right here that you said that Windows is not capable of booting from 32bit UEFI? If so than this is not correct at least for Windows 8 and younger as we have a tablet (Acer Iconia W3-810) here at work which is solely 32-bit (it has an Atom processor) and boots (by default) with enabled Secure Boot thus that's an UEFI boot.

Regards,
Sven
Free Pascal compiler developer
Z98
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by Z98 »

The issue is not that straightforward. Windows 8 does support booting from 32bit UEFI, but you getting it installed onto a 32bit UEFI system would be quite the trick. The versions MS releases to the public don't support UEFI installation onto such systems, it's only the version they release to OEMs doing SoC hardware like with the Clover Trail in your Acer. The people that have managed to get it to work usually all did so by getting their hands on said OEM image. So for all intents and purposes for consumers, Windows may as well not support 32bit UEFI booting.
BrentNewland
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by BrentNewland »

This is how I understand the basic installer process, is this correct?
  1. Create partition
  2. Format partition
  3. Boot Sector
  4. Check partition for space requirements
  5. Disk Check (optional)
  6. Copy files from disk to partition (including specific HAL)
  7. Configure boot.ini
  8. Reboot to partition for next stage of setup
And this is the only part that needs to be converted to GUI, correct? Because everything before the first step would be handled by the live CD, and everything after the last step would be handled by existing post-boot GUI setup (unless ReactOS doesn't have a GUI 2nd setup phase like XP/2K3 have).

The partitioning seems to be the trickiest part, as there are almost no Win32 compatible open source partition editors. After hours of searching I only found this one that looks promising, but I'm not sure if it uses its own partition editing code or the Win32 API. I see ReactOS has diskpart, is it functional? Or does it rely on unimplemented/incomplete/broken Win32 calls?

Also looks like someone wrote a program to convert MBR to GPT, which might come in useful someday.
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Black_Fox
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by Black_Fox »

Some of the partitioning is also done in usetup - the current text installation. It is receiving some partition-related improvements these days.
IamMomotaros
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by IamMomotaros »

Z98 wrote:One of the things ReactOS does not have proper support for right now is installing on SSDs. Yes, ReactOS can be installed on one, but the inefficient nature of the current partitioning scheme does not do a SSD's lifetime any good. Right now partition alignment is based on cylinder boundaries with 63 sectors per track. This unfortunately does not align with the 4K blocks that SSDs use so there is some inefficiency/waste going on here. One solution would be to detect whether ReactOS is being installed to a SSD versus a harddrive and align accordingly. The other solution would be to always use megabyte alignment for partitions.
While reading some comments on another thread on reactos forum someone was saying that AHCI support was slowing down the reactos project progress.
So inorder to understand what they were saying I went searching online. In wikipedia learned about AHCI(Advanced Host Controller Interface), i found out about NVMe (NVM Express), also known as NVMHCI, I followed the link to http://www.nvmexpress.org and under Products the was a link to opensource drivers.

That link lead me to OpenFabricsAlliance-NVMeWindowsdevelopmenthttps://www.openfabrics.org/index.php/d ... pment.html.
Opensource code for UEFI NVMe boot https://svn.code.sf.net/p/edk2/code/tru ... xpressDxe/.

I hope is information helps the ReactOS Project.
BrentNewland
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by BrentNewland »

IamMomotaros
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Re: Blog: On installers

Post by IamMomotaros »

BrentNewland wrote:ReactOS uses UniATA http://alter.org.ua/soft/win/uni_ata/
I know that, but have you read about NVMe at wikipedia?
NVMe is more than 10x faster than ACHI+SATA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVM_Expre ... _with_AHCI.
NVMe is supported by QEMU since version 1.6 released on August 15, 2013.
And is current use is for primarily Servers and is going to be released to consumers. http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_an ... h_nvme_ssd
and there opensource drivers source code.

NMVe is supported by MacOSX , Linux, Bsd, and Windows.
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