Suggestion to grow the userbase

[bufalo1973]

Maybe ReactOS could have an agreement with, lets say, Ubuntu to have a package to install ROS in a VM from the official repositories. This way more people would try ROS without worrying about breaking their computers. It could be "sold" as a way to use (some) Windows apps that doesn't run with Wine.

It has to be only a metapackage that installs VirtualBox/VmWare/QEmu/... and a ROS VM.

[Black_Fox]

This would be sort of limited by (lack of) the package update frequency in high-profile distros. You would basically have to put only the releases into the package - which doesn't give an exactly up-to-date user experience.

[bufalo1973]

Then, if reaching an agreement with the distros was not an option, having a repository is not so difficult. And basically you only have to support 2 or 3 main distros, given that almost all are Debian/Ubuntu, SuSE or Red Hat/Centos compatible.

[Haos]

That requires packaging and upkeeping work to be done. Again, resources spent with just a promise of possible interest. If someone is willing to volounteer for that - great, but its not possible for us at the present moment.

[milon]

Would it be a bad idea to have a small package that sets up a VM and downloads the latest ROS build? Maintenance would be extremely minimal for such a package.

And it wouldn't work to "sell" this. Wine is free, remember, and it's not an emulator. Wine will always run way faster than an emulated ROS would.

[SomeGuy]

Do Linux distros actually do this sort of thing with any other OSes?

I think the biggest problem here is that at the moment all normal applications that run under ReactOS will also run fine under Wine. The advantage to ReactOS is using device drivers, which is mostly lost when running it in a VM.

[bufalo1973]

milon, I didn't mean to sell it for money but to as a way to making people try it.

[bufalo1973]

someguy, they do: dosbox and aranym is shipped with most distros.

[Haos]

Would it be a bad idea to have a small package that sets up a VM and downloads the latest ROS build? Maintenance would be extremely minimal for such a package.

See how Wine Debian package is doing, how much time is needed to deploy each release... and in this case Wine is much easier to maintain than VM+ROS iso package.

[steveh]

I think "ova" (for virtualbox) and "vmdk" (for vmware) images ready for use are are very good idea.
As the reactos project did in the past with a ready-to-use qemu image.
What about the qemu virtualizer itself? No longer quite common and popular any more?

Such images exist here:
http://www.reactos.org/en/download.html

rpm / deb packages or installation scripts, which provide not only a virtual image, but also the virtualizer,
are a quite bad idea because of the implicit risk of interfering and conflicting with the distributions' own packages of virtualizers.

Moreover virtualizer versions are highly kernel dependant, at least kernel modules to be installed by the virtualizers installer, must match and compile...

On the other hand, installing a virtualizer from it's homepage or from the linux distributor, is a quite simple automated procedure which should not be a problem for any linux users.

[Black_Fox]

On the other hand, installing a virtualizer from it's homepage or from the linux distributor, is a quite simple automated procedure which should not be a problem for any linux users.

Which gets us back to the idea that Linux users can as well just download the ISO/VMDK/whatever from ReactOS' site and use their existing VMs at hand.