Greetings:
I haven't posted on the forums or anything for a good while now, but I still
keep tabs on the mailing lists and such.
On similar lines as Mr. Ionescu's suggestion, a separate disk could be made
that includes a collection of drivers, which for binary blob/licensing reasons
(or simply because including all of them would inflate the release ISOs too
much) can't be distributed in the official ReactOS release. It could be called
"Windows Offline Drivers Disk" or something, nominally as a utility for people
installing Windows on a computer not connected to the Internet (which can
actually be a pain in the ass, especially when Windows can't find the driver to
my USB WiFi adapter to connect to the Internet because Windows didn't ship with
drivers for it and it's not connected to the Internet to access Windows Update
but my Ethernet cable isn't long enough to go across the room and someone else
is currently using it anyway), so that it has functionality with Windows
systems separate from ReactOS, thus dodging the "are the drivers for Windows or
ReactOS" issue. During second
stage of ReactOS installation there could be a prompt asking if the user would
like to insert the Windows Offline Drivers Disk or (other media) to search for
drivers. (Or if the computer is connected to Internet the disk could be
streamed from whatever site hosts it like how Download Manager does it with
other apps, if that doesn't create a separate issue.)
I suggested something vaguely similar a long, long time ago on the forums to
address the issue of ReactOS not shipping with a lot of drivers, so this
conversation rung off a dusty bell in my head.
If this is only an issue for a few select drivers then a separate disk might be
overboard. Hope I'm not intruding by posting here, just thought I'd add my two
cents. :)
-Joshua Bailey
On Sunday, December 1, 2013 8:08 PM, Alex Ionescu <ion...@videotron.ca> wrote:
Imo, up to me, we ship with minimal drivers to get to 2nd stage, and then wipe
everything with the WDK sample project.
Or we simply don't provide a bootable all-in-one CD. We make two separate
downloads and somehow make an easy-to-use "slipstreamer" that builds the final
CD. How to do this at conferences or with pressed CDs is another matter.
I agree all of these solutions are ugly, and as Nuno says, also not guaranteed
to work (in the end, it's up to a judge or jury to decide).
Best regards,
Alex Ionescu
On Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Colin Finck <co...@reactos.org> wrote:
Aleksey Bragin <alek...@reactos.org> wrote:
>> To conclude, our existing fastfast totally sucks. cdfs does too. Fixing
>> them is a waste of time. Rewriting them - good project, but noone will
>> use that driver.
>
>So what is the alternative? Shipping ReactOS without any FAT driver? ;)
>The license discussions have already evolved to a point where we know
>that we can't possibly include the MS fastfat example code in our tree.
>
>What has happened to the FullFAT-powered driver project in the meantime?
>Some years ago, it was still praised in high terms and even ready to
>implement journaling on top of FAT
>(https://www.reactos.org/archives/public/ros-dev/2009-July/011902.html).
>
>
>- Colin
>
>
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