Hello China OS Installation and use on Virtual PC

http://blog.csdn.net/hellochina15/article/details/7253350

This article describes how to install the Hello China operating system on the Windows 7 operating system and Virtual PC 2007 VMS, and the version of Hello China is V1.75. For non-Windows 7 operating systems such as Windows XP, because the virtual hard disk cannot be directly supported, you cannot install the GUI feature of Hello China as described in this article, but you can install the kernel and the character-based interface shell.

Hellochina start-up process on Virtual PC

First introduce the Hello ChinaV1.75 on the Virtual PC startup process. In order to minimize the complexity of installation and use, the V1.75 version was launched on virtual floppy on the Vsan pc. Hello China's kernel and core drivers (such as keyboard drivers, mouse drivers, IDE interface hard drives, file systems, etc.) are all integrated into the virtual floppy disk. By booting the computer from a virtual floppy disk, the core module of the operating system is loaded into memory and executed directly from the virtual floppy disk. After the kernel initialization is complete, Hello China enters the character shell mode, when the user can run the character mode command.

In character mode, the user enters the GUI command to enter the shell in graphical mode. Once the user enters the GUI command, hello China looks for the Hcngui.bin file in the Pthouse directory of the first partition of the hard disk (using the C: logo, similar to Windows), which is the executable binary of the Hello China graphics mode module. Once the file is found, the Hello China kernel reads it into memory and then runs the module. Therefore, to support graphics mode on a virtual machine, you must create a virtual hard disk and partition and format it. When you are done, create the Pthouse directory on the first partition and copy the files such as Hcngui.bin to the directory.

The GUI module creates the core thread of the graphical shell thread and other image patterns, and then initializes the application installed on Hello China. The so-called initialization application refers to the GUI module reading all the application's characteristic data, such as application name, application icon, etc., and then displays all of these applications on the main window of the graphical interface. The results of the final launch are as follows:

The left part is the GUI main window, which lists all the applications that have been installed on Hello China. Once the user clicks on an application with the mouse, the program is run.

In the implementation of Hello China V1.75, all applications are installed (actually copies) under the Hcguiapp directory of the First partition (C: partition) of the hard disk. During the initialization of the GUI module, all the files in the directory are read, and once a legitimate application is found, the attribute data is read further, such as the name (display name in), icon, etc., and then loaded into the main window. Therefore, to run the Hello China V1.75 application, you must also create a Hcguiapp directory on the first partition of the hard disk, and then copy all the application files to that directory.

The Hello China V1.75 application is a file with the suffix hcx (Hello China executable), which contains information about the application's executable binaries, the application's icon, the name and version of the application, and so on. The Hcx file is built by a program called Hcxbuild (which is released with the SDK for Hello China V1.75) and is built in the next section.

To summarize, to install Hello China on Virtual PC, the following tasks need to be done:

1. Create a virtual floppy disk file to guide Hello China;

2. Create a virtual hard disk and create at least one partition to format the partition (it is recommended to format NTFS). Hello China will automatically set the partition identifier to C:;

3. Create the Pthouse and Hcguiapp two directories on the C: partition, copy the peripheral modules of Hello China (such as the GUI module) to the Pthouse directory, and copy the application (hcx file) to the Hcguiapp directory.

This launches the Hello China.

The Windows 7 operating system adds support for virtual hard disks, which makes the process very simple, as detailed below.

Hellochina V1.75 Installation Package Description

The Hello China installation package contains all the files and assistive tools required for installation, mainly:

1. Virtual Floppy drive file (vfloppy.vfd) file;

2, Hello China's kernel module;

3, Hello China's peripheral modules, such as GUI module;

4, some application files;

5, related auxiliary tools.

The installation package for Virtual PC is placed in the BIN/VIRTUALPC directory. The use of the above-mentioned files is described in the following description of the installation steps.

Step one: Download and install Virtual PC 2007

Virtual PC 2007 (the above version is also available) can be downloaded from Microsoft's official website, you can search for Virtual PC 2007 on Google, find specific links on the Microsoft website, click Download. The software is completely free and does not require registration. And according to the author's experience, the download speed is also very fast.

Download and double-click to install, do not need to do special settings, with its default installation settings.

Step Two: Create a virtual machine

This step is also simple, run the VIRTUALPC installed in step one, click on the "New ..." menu in the Virtual PC console to launch a virtual machine creation process. Assuming that the virtual machine name you created is "Hello China", you do not need to make a special setting and use the default settings. However, when creating a virtual hard disk step, select "A new HDD", as follows:

In the next step, specify the location of the virtual hard disk (which can take the default location). For the size of the virtual hard disk, you can either use the default size directly or specify a size. If the size is specified, it is recommended to be at least 256M.

Finally click the Finish button to complete the creation of the virtual machine.

For non-Windows 7 operating systems, the following steps three and four or five cannot be applied because the creation and operation of virtual hard disks are not directly supported. Readers can skip to step six and complete the installation of Hello China based on the character interface.

Step three: Partition and format the virtual hard disk

Windows 7 already supports the virtual hard disk feature. Right-click on "My Computer" and click on "Manage" menu to start Windows Computer Management tool. On the Computer Management tool, click on the "Disk Management" option in the left navigation tree and the Disk Management interface appears. Click on the "More Actions" menu on the right panel to see the virtual hard disk Operation menu. Further select the Attach VHD menu, in the dialog box that appears, select the virtual hard disk file that you created in step three, and click OK. At this point, Windows Disk Manager will attach this virtual hard disk to the Disk Management interface, for example:

where "Disk 2" is the virtual hard disk that was just hooked up.

Right-click in the "No Initialization" location, select "Initialize hard drive" in the popup menu and initialize the hard drive with default settings. The so-called initialization, refers to the operating system will establish the MBR sector of the hard disk, and write the relevant data. It is important to note that when the virtual hard disk is just created, there is no data. To make this virtual hard disk available, you must initialize it.

After initialization is complete, only the MBR sector is written, but the specific partitioning operation has not yet completed. At this time on the initialized disk, click the right mouse button, in the menu that appears, select "New Simple Volume ...", with the default settings, you can complete the partition of the virtual hard disk and formatting work.

After formatting is complete, the virtual hard disk is available. As you can see, the system will add a new drive letter, then you can use the virtual hard disk like a normal hard disk.

Assume that the drive letter that Windows 7 assigns to the newly added virtual hard disk is J:, the next part of this article will refer to the virtual hard disk as a J: identity.

Step four: Prepare hello China V1.75 installation directory

Copy the VIRTUALPC directory in the bin directory of the Hello China package to any local hard drive (note that this is not a virtual hard disk), and then copy the install directory under the VIRTUALPC directory to the virtual hard disk (that is, the J: disk).

Step five: Install Hello China on the virtual hard disk

Enter the install directory of the J: disk and run the Batch.bat file to complete the installation of Hello China on the virtual hard disk J. The Batch.bat file mainly created the Hcguiapp and pthouse two directories and then copied the relevant files to both directories. It also copies some relevant files to the root of the J disk. The following are the contents of the successful post-installation J: Disk:

The Pthouse directory contains Hellochina peripheral function modules, such as GUI module, network module and so on. The Hcguiapp directory is a Hellochina application based on the GUI module, the hcx file.

Step Six: Associate a virtual floppy drive with a virtual machine

Since hello China is using a virtual floppy to start the virtual machine, the final step is to associate the virtual floppy disk file (VFLOPPY.VFD) with the virtual machine, which is in the VIRTUALPC directory. In the console of Virtual PC, double-click the virtual machine created in step two to start it. The virtual machine does not start properly because there is no bootable device. Use your mouse to stall the vfloppy.vfd file and drag it onto the floppy drive icon underneath the Virtual machine window, enabling the virtual floppy drive to be associated with the virtual machine.

Restart the virtual machine and you should normally be able to enter the Hellochina character mode.

Step Seven: Verify that Hello China is installed successfully

After completing the above steps, the virtual machine should start normally and go to the Hello China character manipulation interface. The help command is executed under the character interface to see some helpful information. Run the version command to see the release information for Hello China, as follows:

In character mode, run the FS command to enter the file system operating procedure. To execute fslist, you should see the C: Partition, as follows:

Enter "Exit", exit the FS program, and enter the GUI command to enter graphical mode to display all graphics applications. Click on any of the applications to run, such as Click on the "CPI Statistics" program, the results of the operation are as follows:

In graphical mode, enter the "Ctrl+alt+del" key combination (under the virtual machine, click on the Action menu and select the key combination) to go back to character mode.

Hello China V1.75 Beta source code and installation files can be downloaded from the following links:

http://download.csdn.net/detail/hellochina15/4059717

Any technical questions, welcome to join QQ Group: 38467832 for discussion.

Hello China OS Installation and use on Virtual PC