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I respect most of your views and comments, but I really think that is uncalled for. The "ice age"???
I do everything I need to do with BartPE based discs so why do I need something else?
I designated it as
Ice age because it was the first popular XP PE boot disk project in analogy to the time when humans first began calling themselves "human" about 20000 b.c. - a very important landmark in human history but our history didn't finished there.
People from those days survived the cold, using good tools to keep them warm or hunt to gather food but were these tools efficient?
Probably, these "Ice-age citizens" were happy about their way of life but didn't the same citizens try to ease their life and achieve more elaborate results as time passed?
Today, would you in perfect conscience live under the same conditions they lived?
I wouldn't dare to answer the above question for you since it's your own opinion that should matter. From my side I'll respect this opinion the same way that I respect the
Amish even knowing that they don't like cellphones or computers but knowing that I wouldn't be happy adopting that lifestyle.
Most humans are by nature unsatisfied and seek something else sooner or later.
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Now, enough with philosophy and on to real facts:
- Hasn't PE Builder been under deep frozen state over these past two years?
We are talking about the same PE Builder which had no core improvements, no feedback from the author, didn't added work contributions from other members, no nothing during all this time and even charged $$ for the OEM versions to be used by the legions of fans.
Is it reasonable to raise hopes and only expect moving onto the windows PE 2.x platform or any other Windows PE in the future when a specific person brands a tool with his name?
Are you really happy with these PE Builder restrictions?
Is it really good news to hear something like:
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The build of a new PE Builder version failed. Mostly because of time (not having any). You can expect a minor update version.
When you already gathered a group of people interested in doing more with boot disks, will you hibernate in the hope that winter passes?
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Either way, I will now be trying out WinBuilder just to find out if all the "hard to use" and "complicated" comments I've heard are true. I don't mean to sound threatening, but it will be a sad day if all the heresy is true because that will equate to a loss of respect in my book.
All comments you heard are true, WinBuilder is without doubt the single most complex tool ever designed to create boot disks on earth.
The reputation comes from it's habit of mixing different windows sources with different service packs with different languages into different projects developed by different authors in different time frames taken place in different places under different idioms that are all very rarely documented or understood by "outsiders"..
The popularity reached by some projects is a miracle!
To make things better, not even WinBuilder.exe is the same for everyone as it's currently going through the beta version 075's
(which happens to be lasting over a year of development by now) and some people still prefer to use the previous versions for their projects.
I didn't mentioned WinBuilder once on my previous posts, I'm a just a big fan of all things related to boot disks and have to admit that winbuilder is not the average safe and comfortable tool solution to which one size shoe will fit all feets.
It could have been made similar to Bart's PE builder some years ago but a lot of people
(including myself) intentionally pushed it well far beyond this realm into a field of uncharted territory and exploration.
It can be quite dangerous and prune to a million different errors if used blindly but that's the reverse coin of a bartPE world where you can't do much outside that safe sphere and the results equally so exciting to those who live trying out new things at their favorite windows platforms.
But at least you get to talk things directly with the respective developers and work your way to a better solution, with bart I'm sure you've already send countless messages without any replies back.
Some of the things that are different.
- scripts are not plugins
- bartPE plugins run in wb translated on the fly to app scripts
- projects are available for different windows platforms by different developers, etc, etc,
- The running order of the scripts doesn't change if the user is running on FAT32 or NTFS partitions.
- Scripts have levels to run from 1 to 10. The top scripts build the structure, the mid scripts add the bulk of programs and drivers, the late scripts finish things up (there is no need to use dummy mkisofs wrappers)
- There is not need for plugin naming conventions like xxxx, zzzz, yyyy
- You can use subfolder to organize scripts the way you like
- scriptable language means the possibility to get files from the internet, evaluate expressions, dependencies, etc.
- All things are scripted. Since the very beginning of the file copy process to build the boot disk you can define which files are necessary or not.
- Launch other instances of wb to run other projects at parallel building for merging several projects (look on the
UXP project for a working example)
- get new files from the internal download center directly onto the place that they are expected to be placed, or update current versions of the same script
- internal script editor to make changes and try them out on the fly
- can attach files inside itself to share the script as a single file (beware some people complain that attachments with dozens of megabyte will take some seconds to load the script)
- platform independent, runs on all windows NT versions and even on Linux through WINE (thought the win32 files included inside each project need to be tested for each project case)
- It's customizable, look on the interface of each script - users can write up their stuff and values to the preferences they like best
- It's fast - process thousands of instructions per minute (which caused projects to equally demand thousands of instructions in some cases.. )
- It's being developed, heck, things haven't stopped and sometimes changed so much so quickly that it's too difficult to keep track of everything or releasing a stable version.
- can run single scripts without running a project from top to bottom.
- portable, only winbuilder.exe is required. All the other files are used by the respective project itself.
- handles multiple projects at the same time - just place them on the "projects" folder and they're available to work with.
- free to distribute, there are no OEM versions of wb. All is perfectly customizable and free to be distributed by anyone else without need for royalties.
- More features coming up in the future - capable of writing NT hives without requiring Admin permission under Vista (no need to use Win32 registry API for nothing)
These and many of the other scripting gems added on some projects, are features that surpass in the measure of light-years any possible PE Builder since we're talking about a one man project against a group of ever growing projects developed by a growing group of very active developers but yet, these conditions contributed to a state where everything looks extremely complicated and undocumented with winbuilder these days from an outsider perspective while the basic idea from the start was quite the opposite and make things much simpler than before at the "Ice Age".
We really need more people saying "Please make things simple as before" and perhaps more project developers take these requests into consideration, unfortunately there isn't much that I or any other single person can do about this sad result of growing complexity
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Also wish I had some recommendations of nice and safe projects for you to try but honestly, they all range from a minimum level of experience to a high level of terror for newbies and therefore you'll need to tell me exactly what you're looking since winbuilder itself is only a script engine
(a bit like AutoIt) and the respective projects that use winbuilder are the part responsible to get the results you expect to see.
There is a somewhat "safe" gallery of projects -
http://winbuilder.net/download.php?list.5But it's also outdated, updated scripts are most times placed on the download center to ease getting fresh files instead of download a bulk of megabytes so they only get updated once in a while
(if at all).
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I will not blindly backup comments against WinBuilder and will question future comments.
You won't need to, it's ok to speak out and say your mind regarding what should be changed from your perspective.
It's too complicated? Complain about it and propose a better way!
Takes too long to build? Find a way to things quicker and share it with the developers!
Doesn't has the features you wanted? Make a request and see what he has to say!
Heck, don't find a project you like? Create a new one!
winbuilder was made for people to wear and tear.
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The kids today. They don't appreciate all the hard work we put in to get us where we are. Some have never seen a real floppy. They're all about the quick and easy; PS3, Wii, Linux, winbuilder,...
Eheh.. if you're talking about me then I'd say that I also proudly did just about the same as you did at the DOS era and was happy!
When I was a little kid, I'd have fun create floppy boot disks to clean up the computer from viruses. Even at school we already used the LAN for booting up the computers and ensure the OS would be clean from the start for the users.
At those days, things were fairly simple. Just typed "sys c: a:" from a clean machine and add up your favorite antivirus
(NAV, Doctor Solomon, Mcafee, ..) to get something done.
Sometimes it would even get to the point of a virus infecting your boot disk floppy and you'd be able to clean the virus running the AV from the infected media anyways, truly amazing days..
WinBuilder is fun because it's not static to anything and really helps making some good boot disks for windows.
About linux, if you try out the latest Ubuntu 8.10 - it already comes with a built in option to create bootable USB pendisks to install Ubuntu on other machines. It's very cool and completely freeware to share as well.
(I'm using this a lot instead of burning CD/DVD's)About PS3 or Wii, I've
bought a wii to my wife and it's an incredible piece of hardware with no doubt, my neighbor also bought one for his kid so we've joined up the wii remotes and played some sports on the tv for a few hours non-stop.
