This page extracted from www.menuetos.org -- go there for latest instructions

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

For those of you, who have little knowledge about GPL, it means that Menuet is a Internet community project and could and will cause damage to your system if not used correctly. Menuet also comes with absolutely no warranty, see file COPYING for details. If you're unaware of how to get through all the instructions, then stop, and ask help from more experienced user.

1) Creating the Menuet system floppy disk.

Download the MSETUP.EXE 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:

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

If you are a Windows user and want the floppy .img file, you can download an extractor at http://www.digitalblues.org/file/menuetos/striper.zip

2) Make a backup of everything or remove hd's from your machine.

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 (and even when properly used)

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.

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.

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 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 MBAR 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