Install favourite Software

[wildschwein]

One question: Do I understand right, that the only possibility to install software in ROS is over the internet ?

Is there no possibility to transfer local software install pakets to ROS, running in QEMU ?

I want to test some of my favourite windows programms

[hefner]

you can add your CD/DVD Drive on Qemu .... (by the parameter "-cdrom e:" )
You can also try a Real HDD with Fat32 as an aditional harddisk...but i wouldn't do that. ( "-hdb f:" )

[wildschwein]

Could this also be an "fake" CD-Rom ? Means an ISO-Image with e.g. PowerISOTools ?

[hefner]

yes , sure ...i use the "opensource dvd" - iso to test reactos

[cppm]

I think QEMU also provides some kinda system that serves up a selected a folder as a smb share visible to the guest OS, however since ReactOS doesn't have a working smb stack (I think) that's relatively redundant.

Also if you want to use a real HD or partition in ReactOS via QEMU, you don't want to be using one that the host OS is currently using as hefner points out. However you can make it so that the host OS doesn't touch it. Called 'hiding' in windows and 'unmounting' in unix parlance. To hide a parition in windows you go through the MMC (right click on 'My Computer' and select 'manage') and it's one of the sections called disks and drives or something.

From there you can use the true NT disk identifier (something like \disk0\partition0 obviously changing as appropriate for your system) rather than the drive letter, which is only there for compatibility/convenience anyway.

I once booted into my windows partition, only to discover that my ext3 content partition needed it's journal to be recovered, and the windows driver being only ext2 aware just reported it as . Not wanting to twiddle my thumbs while going through another few boot processes, I dismounted the windows ext2 driver pointed QEMU to my Ubuntu partition and my content partition and let ubuntu fix the filesystem, while I got on with something else. Once it was done and Ubuntu had shut down i pointed the windows ext2 driver back to my content FS and it was sorted.

Crazy virtual times!

PS: I can't do this trick with windows, without running the risk of falling foul of the dammned WGA Can't wait till ReactOS is ready