[ros-dev] Short summary of our September meeting in Sweden, jointly written by JaixBly and Fireball

[Aleksey Bragin]

Hi ReactOS friends and colleagues.

There have been exciting years, I first started to have an eye on the  
freewin95 project. When I first found the ReactOS project and saw  
that they actually gave away free zip-files with files to try it out  
I was eager to test it my self, I first downloaded my first  
“bochs-1.3-reactos-images.zip” the third april 2002, and it worked! I  
was amazed, so I downloaded and tested everything that I could test.  
A long time has gone since that time and I have seen a lot of  
progress during the years, however it's a lot of years, for me about  
nine years of downloading, compiling, testing and reading svn- 
messages. For many people it has been too many years and many have  
fallen away, now however we are close to something that can actually  
be used, the kernel is pretty stable other parts of the OS is  
improving and getting there too.

During the last many years we have had about 100 individuals in the  
IRC channel at all time, it indicates in my mind that we attract as  
many people as we loose, I guess that is kind of the status for our  
project, we should be able to change that in a short while I think.  
If we can release a some real-life applications for our OS we could  
draw some attention that could be permanent and the project could  
really start to grow for real.

I and Aleksey met in Björkvik, Sweden for a discussion on how to get  
the ball rolling, we have some suggestions that could serve as step  
stones for such development. The key is to release a package of the  
project and see to that it can really do that but not everything  
else, for example, a web server, it doesn't need all the OS but the  
ones it needs it has to do really good.

Even with this in mind ReactOS isn't well suited for many real  
applications, so we just looked at a few to see if it would be a way  
to go, you could perhaps suggest some more, and we would welcome  
that, we only have to ensure there isn't too much work to actually  
come to the finish line. Here we present some ideas and what needs to  
get in place to actually make it work.

Webserver
- Network subsystem (mainly tcpip.sys driver, and some winsock  
improvement)
- VNC support (future RDP support)
- Apache/MySQL/PHP support
- XAMPP with toolbox
- WEBMIN

Thin Client (LiveCD or BootCD)
- Re-port our MSTSC.EXE
- Local printing (USB/LPT printer support?)

Please give us your opinion and please also add possible ideas that  
you have and think through what needs to get in place to see it come  
to pass.

Yours sincerely,
Aleksey & Jan (Jaix)
through Jan