but this library provides a free implementetion of imagex for UNIX-based
systems.
+ WIM FILES
+
+A Windows Imaging (WIM) file is an archive. Like some other archive formats
+such as ZIP, files in WIM archives may be compressed. WIM archives support two
+Microsoft-specific compression formats: LZX and XPRESS. Both are based on LZ77
+and Huffman encoding, and both are supported by wimlib.
+
+Unlike ZIP files, WIM files can contain multiple independent toplevel directory
+trees known as images. While each image has its own metadata describing a
+directory tree and file access modes, files are not duplicated for each image;
+instead, each file is included only once in the entire WIM. Microsoft did this
+so that in one WIM file, they could do things like have 5 different versions of
+Windows that are almost exactly the same.
+
+Microsoft provides documentation for the WIM file format, XPRESS compression
+format, and LZX compression format. The XPRESS documentation is acceptable, but
+the LZX documentation is not entirely correct, and the WIM documentation itself
+is very incomplete and is of unacceptable quality.
+
+A WIM file may be either stand-alone or split into multiple parts.
+
WINDOWS PE
A major use for this library is to create customized images of Windows PE, the
* libfuse
Unless configured with --without-fuse, wimlib requires a non-ancient
- version of libfuse to be installed. see above). Most GNU/Linux
- distributions already include this, but make sure you have the libfuse
- package installed (libfuse-dev if your distribution distributes header
- files separately). FUSE also requires a kernel module.
- If the kernel module is available it will automatically be loaded if you
- try to mount a WIM file. For more information see
- http://fuse.sourceforge.net/. FUSE is also available for FreeBSD.
+ version of libfuse to be installed. Most GNU/Linux distributions
+ already include this, but make sure you have the libfuse package
+ installed, and also libfuse-dev if your distribution distributes header
+ files separately. FUSE also requires a kernel module. If the kernel
+ module is available it will automatically be loaded if you try to mount
+ a WIM file. For more information see http://fuse.sourceforge.net/.
+ FUSE is also available for FreeBSD.
* libntfs-3g
Unless configured with --without-ntfs-3g, wimlib requires the library
- and headers for libntfs-3g to be installed. Currently, the version
- dated 2012-1-15 is required because I've cloned some of the code from
- the library.
+ and headers for libntfs-3g to be installed. Currently, the libntfs-3g
+ version dated 2012-1-15 is required because I've cloned some of the code
+ from the library, and it needs to compiled against the same version.
+ I'm hoping to be able to use future version of libntfs-3g without code
+ cloning after submitting some patches, however.
* cdrkit (optional)
* mtools (optional)