[nateklomp]

Anyone ever tried UPX'ing XP source?
I've read it's useful to shrink up W98SE installs...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/upx/

[nuhi]

Hm... I haven't, but it's a good idea, actually that can be a nice addition to the options...how much is the difference compared to the cabs, or there is a difference only on final install ?

[evilvoice]

actually upx is used to compress like .exe files...I dont think it would work on cabs...so in actuality im not sure how useful this is goin to be to nlite...you would have to set a runonce script that upx'd all windows exe files after install...I say that in keeping with the basis behind nlite (just so people dont comment on how you dont have to use a runonce script, i know you dont have to, but nlite is used to reduce source and reduce the install)...also be very careful what you compress...you could end up with a windows install that doesnt work (trust me, Ive done it...even on files that others have successfully compressed caused me problems...so it all depends on your files)...thats not to say that there arent universal files that can always be compressed, just be careful if this is something youre lookin at doin nuhi...and expect to spend A LOT of time on it.

[nuhi]

Oo the sound of the evil voice is with us again
I hope you had a good time.

Well...i didn't thought to compress the cabs, i thought to compress the files with upx before cabbing them, so that when windows gets installed and they etract the cabs installation shoulb be smaller.
But if you say that it can cause trouble then i'll delay it as long as possible...i have more important issues to fix right now.

[evilvoice]

heh, yes, im here again...im not too sure in what capacity as a lot of things are goin on in my life that I need to sort out and fix...

I misunderstood you about the cabs...lol...i see now what youre talkin about...if I were you I would postpone indefinitely, unless there is someone here who doesnt mind doing this...what I would do is to compress everything that someone thinks can be and make a cd from that (iso actually)...then boot it in a vm and test...I would not do every file as Im pretty sure it wont work, but do things like calc mspaint and stuff and test that out, in fact follow this: if you see an icon that looks like the program (look at calc, notepad, wordpad to see what i mean) then compress those...there were things that people said could be compressed and it just have the executable icon (white box with blue bar at top) and I wouldnt try those yet...but that gives a starting point. nuhi what you need to think of is how to implement upx packing...im sure it wont be hard, but youll have to add to your code simply for the fact that say someone removes calc (staying with my example) and you have upx to compress a default list, itll error out, itll prolly continue but you know how some people are about getting errors when they do something.

[bucketbuster]

I believe, when run, upx'd files do decompress themselves in memory before starting, so they take more memory.
But less space on harddrive..

[evilvoice]

thats what they are supposed to do, but try upxing winlogon.exe and see what windows does if you dont believe me that some exe files cant be compressed.

[bucketbuster]

Also, when running more upx'd files, it is possible that they actually slow down your system...

[LeveL]

Are you allowed to reply to 3 year old topics?

I did a lot of messing about with UPX to find its pointless, for instance, the biggest DLL file "shell32.dll" if you UPX that and a few of the other biggest files (something like only the biggest 30 files take up 80%+ of system32) then you have trouble right clicking the desktop or trying to open a folder they don't open, explorer constantly crashes even though I didn't compress explorer with UPX, don't bother with UPX man, I must have wasted literally four days to find its just pointless. Even if you think your system is stable you could run into problems down the road when a DLL file is accessed.

This post has been edited by LeveL: 24 June 2007 - 07:47 PM