Booting Menuet for the first time
*********************************

Menuet is an internet community project, and is very experimental.
The code has not been tested on a huge range of hardware, and for that reason
MenuetOS comes with absolutely no warranty, see file 
COPYING ( GPL ) for details. If you're unaware of how to get through all 
the instructions, then stop, and ask help from more experienced user through the 
forums. 

Menuet has _no_ support for the latest multi-featured systems with
acpi, shared memory, power management etc. It might cause serious
damage to your system, or data corruption. In short, do not use your main 
computer for testing unless you know what you are doing! Having said that, I have had no
problems with the 10 - 15 computers I have use it on.

Must see - Hardware compatibility list.

1) Creating the Menuet system floppy disk.

Download dos-installer from download area to hd and execute it with 
no Windows 3.1/95/98 running. The program will copy Menuet to an empty 
diskette in drive A:
If you are using Windows 3.1/95/98, boot to a dos shell first.

UNIX (linux and clones also) users can separate the floppy image starting from 
byte 20*1024+1 in Dos-installer file with dd.
Shell commands are
dd if=MOSxxx.EXE of=mfloppy.img bs=1024 skip=20
dd if=mfloppy.img of=/dev/fd0 (might need bs=1024, not sure)

2) Make backups or remove hd's from your machine, or at least do not enable the
harddisk features until you are happy at the possible risk of data loss.

Menuet doesn't need hard disk's for booting nor running. However Menuet CAN 
access the hard drive (not by default) and can do serious damage if improperly 
used or even when used properly.

3) Boot your machine with the Menuet diskette in drive.

Your BIOS must be set up to boot from floppy BEFORE Hard drive. Refer to your 
BIOS's information on how to do this.

If your machine at loading displays 'kernel mnt ?', your floppy might have
bad sectors, try another floppy.

a) When the blue startup screen pops up, it shows your displays bios version. 
If the vesa version is below 2.0 you should try the VGA or EGA drivers first 
since Vesa 1.2 is compatible only up to a point.

If you have never heard of VESA, here are there common names 
Vesa 1.2 = SVGA
Vesa 2.0 = XGA
the older your Video card, the older setting you will require.

Vesa 3.0 functions are experimental and the use is not recommended.

b) Enter your mouse, mtrr, and LFB/paging selections.

Mouse is the port were you mouse is connected (USB, touchpad and PS/2 select 
PS/2, Serial mouse users select you mouse port). MTRR's are memory functions 
that are on almost every system since Pentium PRO. LFB is settings for 
VESA 2 mode (it doesnt matter for other settings) it concerns if the video 
data is sent directly to the video memory, or paged (processed) before. 
Turning paging off can speed up graphics but non-standard cards might need 
paging

c) Select booting (loading ramdisk) from floppy.

d) Now menuet should start loading the floppy image. showing process at 5% 
   intervals

4) After loading the entire floppy image, Menuet switches to graphics mode and 
   starts PANEL which in turn starts icons.

5) DO NOT USE THE SYSTEM SETUP APPLICATION, unless you're absolutely sure of 
   what you're doing.

6) Click Programs on the Desktop, or click the icon in the bottom left corner 
   to see other apps.

7) To quit you can use the Shutdown APP, or just press the reset button on your
   computer (DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU ARE DOING ANYTHING WITH YOU HARD DRIVE)

8) Any problems, questions, bugs, advise, visit us at http://www.menuetos.org

Jan. 2004