APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY

Transcription

1 APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY How to set up and access the files on your DVDs. First of all, thank you for purchasing this package from us. We are glad to offer it, and to try to get this information out as far and wide as possible. In developing this 4 disk package, we created an easy to duplicate set of files, that can be put on any computer with a DVD drive and enough hard drive space to unarchive the files as needed. The files can also be shared online either in archive form, or as unarchived and reader friendly as you can make it. IMPORTANT NOTE: You will need at least 30 gigabytes (30,000 megabytes) of open disk space on your main hard drive to extract and create your library files on your computer. If you don t have this much space, you can do one disk at a time, as needed. The short way to access the ebooks for experts. 1. Insert a disk into your DVD drive. 2. Open your COMPUTER link, and go to the /Archive/ folder, where all the actual ZIP files reside. 3. Double click on each ZIP file, and extract ALL files within each ZIP file, for ALL zip files on EACH disk, to ONE directory, which we ll call the WORK DIRECTORY. This is a temporary directory, which we ll delete when done. 4. After extracting all files, from every zip file, to the work directory, we ll run a BATCH file called SETUP.BAT. This one file, will extract almost 17 gigabytes of HTML, text, and PDF ebooks that form our library. 5. The extraction process for all these files will take about an hour. When the CMD window finishes creating all the ebook files at C:\CD3WD_40, then you can delete the WORK DIRECTORY and all its contents. 6. To access your new Appropriate Technology Library, navigate to C:\cd3wd_40\CD3WD\index.htm and double click on that file. 7. Your browser will start up, and you may then read ALL your new ebooks. Now, here s the DETAILED step by step process with pictures for everyone else. Here is how to access the files and the disk, and to save them to your computer, and to extract them for reading and printing. 1. Insert a disk (any of the four they are all set up the same way) into your computer DVD drive. If you are using a Microsoft Windows based system, the disk should Autorun, start your default web browser, and show this page. 1

2 2. If the page doesn t load automatically, use your MY COMPUTER link to open the CD in whatever drive you placed the disk in. Open the file called openmefirst.htm. 3. After opening the file with your browser, you ll see this screen. Notice the area that has the Welcome to CD3WD 4 DVD Volume One. You ll see that this part of the web page has a scroll bar on the right side. Let s take a closer look at that part of the screen. 2

3 If you click and drag on the scroll bar button, you will find the direct links to the file archives for each CD image. You have two ways to access the ZIP file archives from here. Click on the archive.htm file, and this page will open up, or click on the ZIP file to automatically open it in another window. Upon clicking on one of the ZIP files, your ZIP unarchiving program should open this file. Windows XP and Vista will open this file with no problem. I do, however recommend a free open source program called 7-zip. You can get it at It is completely free, and opens a myriad of other file types. 7-zip is a powerful and full featured alternative to the native ZIP tool in Windows. Here are the files supported by 7-zip for archiving or extracting. Supported formats: Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z. Let s open up the first file, and see what we have. These are the contents of the file CD3WD401.ZIP. 3

4 Note the very first file in this image. It is a standard Windows text file, also known as a batch file. This file automatically runs each of the.exe files, all of which are self extracting files covering specific topics or areas of emphasis. Now that we have opened up this file, let s EXTRACT the contents to any drive. If you are a Windows Vista user, select the PUBLIC folder, as seen in the next image. You will see under DESKTOP, my username RAFLEET which is my computer user account. Below that is the Public folder. Select that folder, and then type in the disk name, to create a directory where the files will be, such as DiskOne, and then hit the OK button to begin the extraction process, which will take several minutes. Let the extraction process take the files from the ZIP archive and put them into our work folder. 4

5 Change the Destination path from the E:\Archives\CD3WD40* above, to this This folder will be the holding folder for all of the files that will be processed in the final ebook creation step. Just to show you what is in the batch file, here is the SETUP.BAT file contents for CD one. 5

6 Again, EACH of these.exe files contain MANY ebooks on specific subjects and areas of expertise. Here are the contents of Disk One. 6

7 BEFORE you run the SETUP.BAT file, you want to extract EVERY file from ALL 44 of the ZIP archives, into our work folder DISKONE, as in the case above. You can rename the DISKONE folder to anything you want. At the end of the extraction process, you will be deleting this entire folder and all of its contents. Why? Because when we re done extracting, ALL the EXE files will be extracted and the ebook library created AT THE SAME TIME. As you are extracting files from EACH ZIP file, you will see that EVERY disk image has a SETUP.BAT file. Please allow your extraction program (Windows ZIP, 7-zip, WinZip, WinRar, or whatever you are using) to OVERWRITE the current BAT file. Why? Because the original library consisted of the first TWO CDs. Each successive CD added to the set had an UPDATED SETUP.BAT file that included all previous files on each of the CDs, plus the file contents of the new CD. This continues all the way to CD 44. Once all of the files from all 44 disk images are extracted into your temporary folder called DiskOne(or whatever you name this folder), you can click on the folder in MY COMPUTER, and RIGHT CLICK on the properties for the folder. You should see something similar to this. 7

8 At this point you ll be using 13.3 gigabytes of disk space on your system for the temporary files. NOW you are ready to run the SETUP.BAT file, to create the final HTML, TXT, and PDF files that you will finally be able to read. If you run the batch file (.BAT), it will extract ALL exe files, defaulting to your C:\, or root, drive. It will create a folder called C:\CD3WD Upon double clicking on the BAT file, the CMD (command) run window of Windows will show a box like this. As the batch file opens each file, it will give the location (C:\users etc) and the file name it has opened and started to extract the actual ebooks. When the batch process is complete, the run cmd window will close automatically. After the batch files have finished, you may delete the DISKONE folder (or whatever you named it). I would recommend that you do this as soon as you can, as the files within that folder take up almost 14 gigabytes of hard drive space, and you don t need to store them on your hard drive. If for any reason you have to delete the C:\CD3WD_40 folder (where the unarchived ebooks are located), you will have to repeat this process, from inserting the DVDs to running the batch file, all over again. See the next page for details regarding the AT Library and your computer resources. 8

9 The image below is what your C:\CD3WD_40 will look like, and how much space is used by the library. This vast library contains over 16 gigabytes of information. See the info below on creating a shortcut to easily access your new library. Follow the instructions here to create a shortcut to your new Appropriate Technology Library. The process may take up to 1 hour if all 44 CD images are being installed. When the process has finished, then make a shortcut in the directory C:\cd3wd_40\CD3WD to the file C:\cd3wd_40\CD3WD\index.htm and drag that shortcut out on to the desktop. Double clicking on that shortcut will start the main menu Note that these instructions are for Windows PC s - Linux experts and users will know how to unzip the.zip files and unpack the self-extracting.exe (zip) files. Now, go read and learn from this library. 9

10 CREDITS and COPYRIGHT This document, screen captures and graphics, and on disk navigation created by Richard Fleetwood (Founder and Director of SurvivalRing Unlimited ) Copyright 2008/2009 All Rights Reserved. Permission to reuse this documentation on any other website or printed format is allowed as long as these three statements are left AS IS, and proper credits given to all involved in the production of this digital archive. For More Information For more preparedness and disaster planning and educational information, here are some interesting websites