PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING NOTES CAREFULLY, BEFORE INSTALLING XOSL Extended Operating System Loader comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, it is destributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The full license can be found in the GPL.TXT file. 1. 'Easy upgrade' is not support. XOSL 1.1.5 will have to be completely reinstalled from scratch. 2. If you have any other version installed, it is recommened to uninstall it before installing XOSL 1.1.5 To perform a quick uninstall, execute 'fdisk /mbr'. 3. It is strongly recommended to install XOSL from a floppy. Particularily when you plan to install XOSL to a dedicated partition. This way you will always have a backup of the data overwritten (provided the floppy doesn't contain errors :) 4. With XOSL comes Ranish Partition Manager, written by Mikhail Ranish. Note that certain circumstances exist where it is not free to use. Refer to http://www.ranish.com/part for the details. 5. With XOSL comes Smart Boot Manager (SBM). It is destributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. XOSL use SBM to indirectly support booting from CD-ROM. The CD-ROM booting howto can be found in the manual/cdrom folder. The manual to SBM can be found in the manual/sbm folder. SBM can be found at http://btmgr.sourceforge.net. When an update of SBM is available, and you want to install it, you will have to replace SBMINST.EXE, as found in this distribution, with the new one, and completely reinstall XOSL. -- NOTES ON INSTALLATION ON DOS DRIVE -- ... -- NOTES ON INSTALLATION ON DEDICATED PARTITION -- 1. You have to create a partition for XOSL yourself, BEFORE you run install. The XOSL install utility does not create a partition for you. 2. Select the partition you want to install XOSL onto carefully. ALL DATA ON THE SELECTED PARTITION WILL BE DESTROYED! Although install provides an uninstall option, which can completely restore the partition data, you should NEVER rely on such features. 3. If you install from floppy (recommended), make sure that floppy has at least 712kb (729088 byte) of free disk space BEFORE you run install (and after you have copied the XOSL install files to the floppy). If you don't install Ranish Partition Manager, only 584kb (598016 byte) of free disk space is required.
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