UBCD4Win Forums: Two Menus or Not - UBCD4Win Forums

SteelTrepid -


This has been discussed many many times you can read more in these two post.
http://www.ubcd4win....?showtopic=1357
http://www.ubcd4win....?showtopic=1570

As long as Digi can help me with this a little I am more than willing to accomadate this request. He reported it is possible, now I just need some examples of code and what needs to be placed where. Please email or PM me Digi with some help.

Now we've just got to compile the list of utilities that do not work in BPE.

All that's really necessary is, i will need someone to supply me a FINISHED nu2menu.xml file - the file AFTER PE Builder has built the CD (or at least contructed all it's files) which wil probably be around 40kb. I'll then need a finalized list of apps which should ONLY appear from Windows. I'll then throw them in the plugin and test - if all goes well, then voila!

DW

You know I have already done this. I switched to using bblean and cyrano's postproccessing plugin(which I have modified to better do what is needed.

With this setup it is very easy to menu entries for xpe and convert them to links for use with bblean. Then I can easily only include nu2menu entries for those programs that I want to run under windows. However with the new nu2menu there is a hide option in the menu and it can be setup to hide menu entries. This is good because you do the check to see if it is under pe or windows and then only disply whichever menu entry is applicable for each environment.


In my case though I opted for the bblean shell route. Since it does not exibit some of the visual anomaly issues that geo does. Like stretching when some programs execute and not displaying the icons correctly for some running programs on the taskbar.

And last but not least bblean the way I have it running will run in less than 1 meg of ram most the time. it goes as low as 300k and usually sits around 500k. Which is much lighter than the 4 or 5 megs for geobar and the 2.5 megs for nu2menu. Combined that makes 6.5 - 7.5 megs or so and it gets bigger the bigger the nu2menu.xml file gets.

Anyway if you would like to see shots of it running and have more info you can look here:

http://www.webmedic....pic.php?t=25111


On side note while you guys were talking about converting the menu structure I already did it with my programs and all the plugins so you can see the results in the screenshots. It worked out quite nicely but I did things a tiny bit different than you guys did for the system proggies.

Oh and with this plugin it still does the autorun entries but it now has run levels. It sets up the profiles on the ramdrive. I even include a little proggie to hide cmd windows so that you dont see then during the autorun. I also included peloader with the plugin so that it gets rid of the resource limits. I wanted it to be an all in one shell solution rather than little bits and pieces here and there.

At any rate enjoy and thanks for the great project here as I have borrowed allot of work from it. Thanks again.

So is web medics shell "lighter" than the one incorporated in the project. I'm not worried about looks (although its a plus) but if it is lighter as well, is there some merit in investigating this shell?

My votes for two menus as I dont like things listed when they don't work !

Yeah, when I get around to checking it out. I've thought of updating GeoShell or possibly going to another alternative. I'm working on so many other things at the moment I probably won't get around to it for quite a while. It is nice to have a pretty interface and it's a fine line when making some decisions for the project. My original vision for it was for it to just be it's name....Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. I wanted it to be simple, able to run on almost any machine, and yet try to look like Windows as much as possible. Digi is the pro at this stuff, so I will discuss this with him and we will make the ultimate decision together!!

well those are some of the same reason I used the shell I did I started with winubcd but kept having issues with geoshell. So I worked on this and got it working well. To answer the question about ram usage.

bblean uses on the average between 300k - 500k. I use a bblean plugin that shrinks it's mem usage every 4 seconds so that it's mem usage can jump as high as 6 - 7 megs but never stays there longer than 4 seconds. It usauly never goes over 1 meg though.

nu2menu by itself takes about 2.5 megs and geoshell takes about 5 - 6 megs. It seems to me that while testing this I found it often grew to about 8 - 9 megs with both of them running.

As for the start menu on bblean the config files are easy to read text files and you can change the name to whatever you like so it would not have to say start if you did not want it to.


AS for the way it works I dont include any other styles but it is very easy to skin bblean with styles. These same styles have been available for blackbox for years so there are quite a few available. You would not have to sue the one I do. Also to note that styles are very small in size since they are wimple text files with no mare than maybe 100 lines in them.

If you guys are serious about this then let me know And I'll even help get a style together that would work better for the windows dull grey look.

You can see some other styles here
http://box.crackmonk...n=browse&cat=ss

and one thing about looking at those. The layout although it can be done differently I have tried to keep it as much as possible looking like windows. So I dont use the layouts you will see there. However if the styles are used from that site what we are really looking it is the colors used in the styles and not the layouts. By layout I mean the general way things are organised and done.

I have done some more work on this plugin it now will allow the changing of themes. Here are about 15 themes shown

Luna like theme
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885469/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885529/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885600/

thinkbox
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885638/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885664/

smoothgnome
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885701/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885729/

sayu
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885784/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885805/

panther
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885845/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885870/

nvid10t
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885909/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15885931/

MellowYello
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886322/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886343/

lovemacs
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886363/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886433/

longhorn
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886488/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886511/

Irondesk
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886541/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886558/

heaven
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886592/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886614/

fir cone
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886650/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886669/

bandit
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886688/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886741/

atomfarm
http://www.deviantar.../view/15886762/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15887015/

abstractparasite
http://www.deviantar.../view/15887614/
http://www.deviantar.../view/15887681/

Webmedic, which in your opinion is the easiest method to maintain after initial setup is done :-

Using the new NU2 menu option of checking which os is running and hiding the progs in the menu which won't run in that enviroment.

Or use the bblean shell and using the prog you've modified to edit the entries for the menu ?

Either way the vote seams to show that we need to present the menu differently in windows than ubcd. Therefore we need to mark each program as to whether it works in ubcd, windows or both.

bblean seems a very promising option to use, especially as it has lower ram requirements which should help people using older PC's.

yes it has very low usage. bblean is about 1/5th the memory usage of nu2menu alone without geoshell besides. And nu2menu memory usage only goes up the more items you have.


Though i do have to admit I have been lookin gother paces for an autorun menu since nu2menu does not work under windows 9x. I have run accross a few but for now I'm kind of leaning towards the one from the guy that used to make the ultimate boot disk. I have not tried it yet but i did try programing my own in autoit. I have to admit that it can be done in auto it maybe but the memory usage would be to high for something this simple.

Try this one, it's small and self-explanatory:

Autorun

How's the TrueImage plugin coming?

This post has been edited by beenthereb4: 16 March 2005 - 09:16 PM

lol true image. Well I can say that it's due to services not starting correctly at boot but i have rechecked the settings and everything should start ok. I can also tell you that the drive filters dont load either.

As for what else is going on I'm not sure yet as I put it away for now to get other projects done but I still have the plugin around and will be working on it as I have time.

I`m a bit confused about this topic. Are you guys thinking of replacing GeoShell with BBLean?

I`ve seen your bblean shell plugin, and it rocks as a shell-replacement. Is this a plugin that can be used on ubcd4win right away, or just a sampel of what`s possible with bblean?

By the way StellTRIP: I love the effort you put in to make the best "win fixing" cd ever. You rock!

Cheers!

Please refer to the beginning of the post. It is just a poll to see if the users agree that there should be two menus for the two different environments.

The idea of replacing Geoshell is up to Steel. This was just a comment (idea) posted by webmedic.

Also:
FYI for the users.

Different menus have not been released in the new 2.5 version.

This post has been edited by lawson23: 15 April 2005 - 08:54 AM