INTRODUCTION
-This is wimlib version 1.4.0 (May 2013). wimlib is a C library for creating,
+This is wimlib version 1.5.1 (October 2013). wimlib is a C library for creating,
modifying, extracting, and mounting files in the Windows Imaging Format (WIM
files). These files are normally created by using the `imagex.exe' utility on
Windows, but wimlib is distributed with a free implementation of ImageX called
-"wimlib-imagex" for both UNIX and Windows.
+"wimlib-imagex" for both UNIX-like systems and Windows.
INSTALLATION
extract the ZIP file containing the latest binaries from the SourceForge page
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/wimlib/), which you may have already done.
-To install wimlib and wimlib-imagex on UNIX (with Linux being the primary
-supported and tested platform), you must compile it from the source code. At
-some point I might start posting RPMs and Debian packages for convenience.
+To install wimlib and wimlib-imagex on UNIX-like systems (with Linux being the
+primary supported and tested platform), you must compile the source code, which
+is also available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wimlib/. Alternatively,
+check if a package has been prepared for your Linux distribution. Example files
+for Debian and RPM packaging are in the debian/ and rpm/ directories.
WIM FILES
distributed with a command-line program called "wimlib-imagex" that uses this
library to implement an imaging tool similar to Microsoft's ImageX.
wimlib-imagex supports almost all the capabilities of Microsoft's ImageX as well
-as additional capabilities. wimlib-imagex works on both UNIX and Windows,
-although some features differ between the platforms.
+as additional capabilities. wimlib-imagex works on both UNIX-like systems and
+Windows, although some features differ between the platforms.
Run `wimlib-imagex' with no arguments to see an overview of the available
commands and their syntax. For additional documentation:
- * If you have installed wimlib-imagex on UNIX, you will find further
- documentation in the man pages; run `man wimlib-imagex' to get started.
+ * If you have installed wimlib-imagex on a UNIX-like system, you will find
+ further documentation in the man pages; run `man wimlib-imagex' to get
+ started.
* If you have downloaded the Windows binary distribution, you will find the
documentation for wimlib-imagex in PDF format in the "doc" directory,
available in wimlib v1.1.0 and later.
The following tables compare the compression ratio and performance for creating
-a compressed Windows PE image (disk usage of about 524 MB, uncompressed WIM size
-361 MB):
+a compressed x86_64 Windows PE image. Note: these timings were done on Windows
+7 so that the times would be fully comparable; however, wimlib-imagex may have
+even better performance on Linux.
Table 1. WIM size
XPRESS Compression LZX Compression
- wimlib-imagex (v1.2.1): 138,971,353 bytes 131,379,943 bytes
- Microsoft imagex.exe: 140,406,981 bytes 127,249,176 bytes
+ wimlib-imagex (v1.4.0): 165,301,379 bytes 155,254,385 bytes
+ Microsoft imagex.exe: 167,212,939 bytes 149,973,212 bytes
Table 2. Time to create WIM
XPRESS Compression LZX Compression
- wimlib-imagex (v1.2.1, 2 threads): 11 sec 17 sec
- Microsoft imagex.exe: 25 sec 89 sec
+ wimlib-imagex (v1.4.0, 2 threads): 18 sec 51 sec
+ Microsoft imagex.exe: 25 sec 93 sec
NTFS SUPPORT
WINDOWS PE
A major use for wimlib and wimlib-imagex is to create customized images of
-Windows PE, the Windows Preinstallation Environment, on either UNIX or Windows
-without having to rely on Microsoft's software and its restrictions and
-limitations.
+Windows PE, the Windows Preinstallation Environment, on either UNIX-like systems
+or Windows without having to rely on Microsoft's software and its restrictions
+and limitations.
Windows PE is a lightweight version of Windows that can run entirely from memory
and can be used to install Windows from local media or a network drive or
Windows 8, in the file `sources/boot.wim'. Windows PE can also be found in the
Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), which is free to download from
Microsoft, inside the `WinPE.cab' file, which you can extract natively on
-Windows, or on UNIX if you install either the `cabextract' or `p7zip' programs.
+Windows, or on UNIX-like systems if you install either the `cabextract' or
+`p7zip' programs.
In addition, Windows installations and recovery partitions frequently contain a
WIM containing an image of the Windows Recovery Environment, which is similar to
Windows PE.
-A shell script `mkwinpeimg' is distributed with wimlib on UNIX to ease the
-process of creating and customizing a bootable Windows PE image.
+A shell script `mkwinpeimg' is distributed with wimlib on UNIX-like systems to
+ease the process of creating and customizing a bootable Windows PE image.
DEPENDENCIES
This section documents the dependencies of wimlib and the programs distributed
-with it, when building for UNIX from source. If you have downloaded the Windows
-binary distribution of wimlib and wimlib-imagex then all dependencies were
-already included and this section is irrelevant.
+with it, when building for a UNIX-like system from source. If you have
+downloaded the Windows binary distribution of wimlib and wimlib-imagex then all
+dependencies were already included and this section is irrelevant.
* libxml2 (required)
This is a commonly used free library to read and write XML files. You
CONFIGURATION
This section documents the most important options that may be passed to the
-"configure" script when building the UNIX version from source:
+"configure" script when building from source:
--without-ntfs-3g
If libntfs-3g is not available or is not version 2011-4-12 or later,
wimlib with --without-ntfs-3g. On FreeBSD, before mounting a WIM you need to
load the POSIX message queue module (run `kldload mqueuefs').
-wimlib has not been tested on big-endian CPU architectures.
+The code has primarily been tested on x86 and x86_64 CPUs, but it's written to
+be portable to other architectures and I've also tested it on ARM. However,
+although the code is written to correctly deal with endianness, it has not yet
+actually been tested on a big-endian architecture.
REFERENCES
as it exists in reality and not as it exists in Microsoft's poorly written
documentation.
-The code in ntfs-apply.c and ntfs-capture.c uses the NTFS-3g library, which is a
-library for reading and writing to NTFS filesystems (the filesystem used by
-recent versions of Windows). See
+The code in ntfs-3g_apply.c and ntfs-3g_capture.c uses the NTFS-3g library,
+which is a library for reading and writing to NTFS filesystems (the filesystem
+used by recent versions of Windows). See
http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/ for more information.
lzx-decompress.c, the code to decompress WIM file resources that are compressed
wimlib is independently developed and does not contain any code, data, or files
copyrighted by Microsoft. It is not known to be affected by any patents.
-On UNIX, if you do not want wimlib to be dynamically linked with libcrypto
-(OpenSSL), configure with --without-libcrypto. This replaces the SHA1
+On UNIX-like systems, if you do not want wimlib to be dynamically linked with
+libcrypto (OpenSSL), configure with --without-libcrypto. This replaces the SHA1
implementation with built-in code and there will be no difference in
functionality.
git://wimlib.net / wimlib / blobdiff