Board.KolibriOS.org

Hello everyone. I am quite new to Kolibri and have been doing alot of reading on the subject of installation, which it seems it's not exactly "designed" for hard drive installation. Still, is anyone willing and able to take the time to give me a literal step by step to get this booting natively on my machine. I've booted it off the CD (which I don't want to permanently have to do) and I can say I love this system. I think Kolibri is fun, a pleasure to use. Now, Let's presume for a moment I have a blank machine, no OS. Plenty of hard drive space to spare.

*Should I use FreeDOS or Linux, and if Linux, what distro?

*How should I set up my disk partitioning during the installation of one of the above operating systems? Don't I need vfat or fat32 somehow to write data to the hard disk from Kolibri?

I have seen this:
http://wiki.kolibrios.org/wiki/Booting_from_GRUB
but in all honesty, I don't fully understand it, so a little direction would be helpful. The last time I ever used Linux, LILO was a thing. So yes, I could use help here.

My goal is simply to dedicate this PC we're talking about into booting directly into Kolibri, and if possible, I'd like to be able to save data from it to the hard drive such as if I create a document or image.

So this is everything in a nutshell. I want the image to boot immediately from a hard drive. Can anyone help me get there?

Thank you all for your time.

press "Download" tab on KolibriOS main web frontpage
download the most recent Flash/HDD image pressing "English" section
unzip and follow instructions in Docs/install.txt

Thank you but unfortunately none of that information is working for me.

I do not have Windows, it's a blank machine, so those specific instructions don't apply.

I am not giving up the fight but thus far, I have tried (as in that same document) mtldr on FreeDOS 1.2, MS-Dos 7.1 (unofficial), and MS-Dos 6.22. It just causes my machine to go into a reboot loop. This machine does not have UEFI, it is a regular BIOS.

I have only tried Fedora linux for the sake of getting a base OS first (which I don't even intend on booting into once Kolibri is functional here) and the way Grub2 works on Fedora, the instructions provided on both the wiki and in that document you referenced do not work. There in fact is no "update-grub" function whatsoever, it is a grub2-mkconfig command which looks to me to have an entirely different language in it's scripting than what is shown elsewhere. So for now, I'm kicking that idea out the window.

Tonight when I get home from work I have a vanilla base install of Debian I'm going to try, and as a last resort if that fails, I'll try a Grub setup with Ubuntu. I just really wish one of the DOS installs would've worked, I don't "need" anything else and all I want is Kolibri.

I really do want to give a nod to everyone working on this OS. It is so fun to use.

I’m again posting in this thread to possibly help future users get the ball rolling in a straightforward manner on installing Kolibri to the hard drive (or more technically booting it from hd instead of external storage. Remembering that Kolibri itself is a ram disk image OS and doesn’t technically run on the hard drive in the way a fully native OS would.)


Status Update:
Success! I have a hard drive based boot after several days of tinkering. In the next day or two, I will make a Youtube video on my channel and share the link here. The Grub instructions on the wiki work, the documentation for DOS did not.

Despite how much I tried, it just wouldn’t work for me on FreeDOS, and I really wanted it to because I rather like FreeDOS. Secondly, trying to go the grub2/linux route with Fedora was simply a mistake for me. I am not particularly experienced with grub but the “update-grub” command doesn’t exist under Fedora, and using the menu entries as detailed on the Kolobri wiki (with correct partition information of course) just wouldn’t even show up in grub after running it’s grub2-mkconfig which is what Fedora’s documentation said to do. No clue. I made the same entries on Debian’s grub2 and it worked fine.

And there it is. I installed Debian 10 (actual Debian, not Ubuntu) made a separate partition during the initial Debian install for fat32, copied the image and the entire Kolibri CD there, made the appropriate entries for Grub, changed the bootloader defaults, and now when I fire up my tower, it feels like a native OS. I barely even see the flicker of the Grub boot menu, my system just fires right into Kolibri.

I will explain everything a user needs to know (after detailing my particular system) from scratch once I get the time to make the video.

For giggles I tried to boot Kolibri on a Macbook and it got to the blue screen and froze dead
Blasted UEFI.

OK then, here it is:
https://youtu.be/jqn5rWD0yTE

I have only seen a couple of posts in this forum (in English anyway) of people wanting to install the OS natively (as in, booting and running Kolibri without external media.) I have detailed in this video exactly how I got everything working exactly as I wanted it to. Runs wonderfully. I hope this might be helpful to someone someday.