MSI works well enought with older versions of Windows Installer. It can for example handle WinDbg msi packacge correctly. It has some problems with install packages of the newer version. Since those require installing and running a service, it could be difficult to have them running on ros, but not impossible.
As for video driver installation, it is quite specific. If dedicated installer doesnt work, you can only change the video driver by having the proper files in specific locations at startup of 2nd stage of ROS install. Anything later is just too late.
By specific, i mean all exe and dll in ReactOS\System32, all sys files in ReactOS\System32\Drivers and inf file in ReactOS\Inf. You can easily decipher the proper file list from the inf file. As for inf, you dont need to hack them, they are being processed quite well by ROS, usually. Having the driver package separated as i describe above, will not only allow you to install video driver on 2nd stage, but also to install driver for any device at a later stages, simply by picking "Automatic" option from New device wizard.
2010/10/11 Bernd Blaauw
<bblaauw@home.nl>
The MSI installer has never been working anyway due to ReactOS's development state, thus the vmwinst.exe program developed by a coder in the ReactOS project. I'd have to study its sourcecode to get to know which layout it actually expects of a CD/ISOfile (and since using Windows 7 and VMware 7, I've got no clue anymore how older guest installation tool ISO files are looking internally)
I'd favor quite much if your vmwinst.exe program also allowed to point to a directory where you have the extracted (VMware SVGA) driver files. After all that's easy enough using 7ZIP to extract files from the MSI (which results in .cab files as well), then extract the cab files to gain the actual driver files (which require renaming).
The difficult part is actually getting the extracted + renamed files into the virtual machine (since floppy is broken in ReactOS since 0.2.5 or so, USB in development, FileZilla doesn't startup for FTP purposes, I was unable to browse network shares using the explorer shell, etc), and on top of that finding the correct location to copy all the files (C:\REACTOS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS ?), edit an .inf file to get it working in ReactOS, and finding correct/documented registry settings for registering the driver to ReactOS.
As for bugs, every single one should be reported in bugzilla, but you surely can ask questions and consult bugs on IRC.
OK, hopefully some wishfull stuff regarding the download tool will count as bug as well (FireFox 4 beta , Chrome, FileZilla).
with best regards,
Bernd Blaauw