Let me add some bitternes of experience.

> For example, 0.3.12 release allows you to have a working FireFox (besides
maybe FF 3.6.9's address bar text input issue).
> Modern youth's first inclination: pay a visit to YOUTUBE. Problem: Flash
won't download/install, the Adobe DLM Firefox plugin
> is a mess and searching for standalone setup program seems impossible at
first glance (where I got stuck).

Opera 9.63 works even better (and much much faster) than any FF version, but
it has its vices as well. It also allows to download the offline version of
flash installer, but unfortunately several new versions crash at install. I
would love to look into the issue... but Ollydbg ring3 debugger is not
working from some time. Tough luck.

> Some documentation on how to get this working would be nice.

We do not have enough people to do even basic testing on regular basis...
talking about writing usability docs is like blasphemy to me. The situation
often changes very fast, so without plenty of additional manpower i would
need to split my time 50/50 from bugs to writing docs (and UPDATING) docs...
To present any real example, the screen resolution change slider bug i found
out the next day it happened, would be actually noticed after 10 days, when
Collibri also stumbled upon it. The choice is yours.

> Of course once that works you'll have people shouting for sound support,
which is currently work in progress and hopefully a feature of 0.3.13 or
0.4.0.

We still need the new/rewritten PCI driver, better HAL and kernel support
especially several FPU functions still missing, THEN we need a new PnP
driver, THEN only we can START clearing and fixing up sound support on real
hardware drivers. We try it a bit now, despite several obstacles, but its
very hard, time consuming and sometimes frustrating. Did I already mentioned
we dont have enough people even for regular testing of known-to work
drivers?

> Another thing is you might be wanting to show ReactOS as a "standalone
business computer
> running a simple wordprocessor and/or spreadsheet program". Think latest
OpenOffice (LibreOffice?)
> didn't even start up after installation.

Not sure about latest version, but there is at least one, very tough
regression, so even the dev, whoose commit introduced it, is unable to deal
with it. Every software has usually a bunch of similar issues. Do i repeat
myself with the lack of necessary manpower?

> Install CD could be nice as supporting Syslinux project's "MEMDISK"
ramdisks,
> either by FreeLDR --> Memdisk --> ReactOS ISO , or
> Syslinux --> Memdisk --> ReactOS ISO , to do a fake "boot from cd and run
through installation process".
>I think it requires the WinVBlock driver which is opensource.

Someone has to do it, test it, find regressions, fix it, maintain it. Got
any volounteers?

> Last show-off idea I could think of is releasing a 1-time LiveCD with
Ramdisk
> support integrated (is there a user-configurable ramdisk-driver anyway?),
and
> ROSBE and 0.3.12 sources, so you boot into that CD and can edit + compile
> the 0.3.12 sources to your liking, thus compiling/modifying files without
affecting
> harddisk. Ofcourse that integrated build-environment keeps the option to
download
> other ReactOS sources and edit/compile those instead of the
standard-delivered 0.3.12 sources.

That idea is so cool! Unless of course, you are aware that current ROS trunk
source weights few hundred megabytes, whereas fully build, it takes up to
4.5 GB give or take 200 MB, so you will surely find plenty of potential
users... My buildbot with 6GB of RAM slowed down to turtle speed when i
tried to allocate the necessary ramdisk... another problem is that ROS will
not boot with more than 3.5 GB of ram and is quite crappy in I/O throughput.
A finisher bug is that rosbe is not runnable on ROS. Also, did i mentioned
that you'd need few people to...

Please do not take this mail as an attempt to bust your ideas, they are
actually very logicall and something one could expect from OS project. Still
it is necessary to view them with perspective of our current state and
capabilities.

Best regards
Olaf

I'm not sure how well the Filezilla FTP server and client run at all on
ReactOS, never had much luck with it despite being opensource and portable.

2010/10/27 Bernd Blaauw <bbla...@home.nl>
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