Ge van Geldorp wrote: 
From: Ralph Shumaker

Thomas says (regarding the only way offered to me) that it is 
very bad  and may cause various problems, but does not offer an 
alternative.  What kinds of problems?
    

The "boot.bat" method is a left-over from ancient days when all that was
needed to get the kernel booting was to load it into memory and start
executing it. These days, the boot loader has to do more work, e.g.
determining the configuration of the PC. Boot.bat doesn't do that and never
will.

Thank you.


What alternatives are there?
    

The best alternative is to install from a (bootable) CD and not from the bin
distribution. The second best alternative (if you must use the bin
distribution for some reason) is to use a freeldr boot diskette. You can
download that from http://reactos.csh-consult.dk/download/freeldr.zip

Again, thank you.  I think I like the CD option better.  (It may take a little longer since I don't remember how to burn.  I'm running on Linux and I've only burned about 3 CDs, and even that was quite some time ago.  But I need the review anyway.)


I would like to see this OS in action.  Further, I would like 
to try to run some DOS and Windows programs, just to find out
where ReactOS is, and how far it has left to go.
    

No use in trying (16-bit) DOS programs, ReactOS doesn't support 16 bit
programs at all at the moment.

Thanks for that tidbit.  I'll just have to wait for that part then.  But it's the 32-bit programs that have more of my interest for now anyway.