Re: [ros-dev] Installing and running ReactOS on modern hardware

[Thomas Mueller]

from "David Quintana (gigaherz)" <gigaherz(a)gmail.com>om>:

>   I guess I'll use Plain text mode, just for you ;P
> (Being in 2014, it's
>  a wonder anyone still uses an email client that doesn't decode HTML by
>  default, and requires you to look at the plain text as an attachment,
>  but I'm open-minded) 
>   I don't have any strict numbers regarding the VM
> size. If I recall
>  correctly, the testbox VMs have 2GB HDDs and 512MB of RAM. ReactOS
>  could boot with less, but since the memory manager isn't the most
>  reliable, it's best if you have enough RAM in it so that it doesn't
>  have to do much paging. 
 
>   My own VM has two HDDs, one 4GB, for the current
> installation, and one
>  20GB, for downloaded files and such. Both are dynamically expanding
>  virtual disk images, so they are not actually that large on disk. I
>  usually only reinstall the OS by formatting the main HDD, and try to
>  leave the other disk intact, although in a few cases, I have had to
>  repair/format the 20GB disk because it had been corrupted. This means
>  I wouldn't trust it not to mess with a real disk, if you were thinking
>  of mapping a partition to the VM. 
>   As I said, SOME drivers do work, others do not.
>  Look at this page, and its subpages:
>  https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Supported_Hardware
>  It has a list of supported hardware devices, which mostly means
>  supported DRIVERS for hardware devices. 
>   I do not believe ReactOS is prepared for the situation
> of booting into
>  a ramdisk, when the source of the ramdisk is an HDD. That is largely
>  outside of my area of experience, though, so I can't really help much.
>  (If anyone with more knowledge wants to take over the conversation...) 
HTML email is good for when there are Internet links or special characters such as math
symbols that can't be rendered in plain text.

Otherwise, it is just useless freight.

But multipart/alternative seems to be the MS-Windows way.  Automatically unzipping and
executing attachments by default was also the Windows way, until that resulted in virus
epidemics.

There was a message about how behind-the-times ReactOS is, trying to support Windows XP
drivers from 2003, which points up my doubts as to the feasibility of running ReactOS on
modern hardware.  FreeDOS also would do better on an older computer.

My DVD-RW drives are SATA, now I wonder if SATA as opposed to IDE or ATA would be a
barrier to ReactOS, whether a live CD would boot and run.

I would much rather run a live USB because of rewritability.  Considering ReactOS's
immature (alpha) status, many modifications would be necessary to fix glitches.  ReactOS
website points out that ReactOS is not ready for everyday production use at this stage.

ReactOS 0.3.15 installation failed to boot for me either on SATA DVD-RW or IDE/ATA CD-RW,
the latter being on an old (2001) computer.

So I must realize that even if I can build ReactOS from source with the ROSBE, bootability
is not guaranteed.

I don't like the idea of burning another CD every time I want to make a little
change.

Tom