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