I’ve begun adding all the tool categories and files that BootZilla grabs to the main site. As time goes on, more and more tools will be grabbed and mirrored on BootZilla’s server, to help keep a local repository with proper documentation for each file. This in turn makes BootZilla not only a toolkit, but also a tools website. In turn, development continues on the toolkit and its various scripts. Several changes have been made in the direction this whole project is taking.
Initially, the idea for BootZilla was an easily update-able toolkit that would require the least amount of configuration from the end-user to operate. Earlier versions of the toolkit provided easy to understand documentation for each tool. That’s still the goal, and going forward with the new mirror direction is going to help a whole lot.
The descriptions for the files on this mirror will be scraped together and used in the final build of BootZilla’s documentation. One of the biggest flaws with the current version of BootZilla is the lack of this critical documentation. This new feature will correct this. Not only that, but it will protect against losing some tools that have gone missing from the internet. There’s a handful of these tools that either are no longer available, or completely removed from their respective author’s sites. If this project is to thrive, these types of problems need to be addressed.
One last bit that this will help with is continuity – some files will obviously be updated from the original author’s sites, but others, like Universal Virus Sniffer, which is currently made available through a self-hosted dyndns site will be mirrored to help the author out. I mention this tool in particular, as it’s the first tool to be made fully mirrored on BootZilla.org. The links will be added when the time is right.
As for the next ‘beta’ — It would make more sense to focus on a final release sooner rather than later. As such, the second version of the CMDLet design will have to wait. A lot of work still needs to be done in order for the toolkit to be considered release-quality. A bit of this work was done over the last weekend. ISO-creation will not be a feature this time around, as employing USB drives seems to be the standard means of using this type of toolkit.
BootZilla will include the awesome Easy2Boot toolkit, which supports booting directly from ISO’s, disk images, and various other neat formats. You can dump in practically ANY ISO, ANY disk image, and have it boot without much fuss. It’s what I personally use to boot Windows Installation media on PC’s – and it’s free, too. It’s written by the same people behind the RMPrepUSB format tool, which will be utilized to help create a bootable USB drive, if the user so wishes, with the contents of BootZilla onboard.