Reactos Shell on Server 2012 r2

[powerplayer]

As we know server 2012 displays things fine without that dreadded dwm.exe but i don't want to add all the metro stuff so my question is how do i install the reactos shell on server 2012 r2? has some of you ros experts a patch of some sort?

Oh yea and the os is x64

[gigaherz]

There is a preprocessor flag in explorer's precomp.h to disable certain features that would prevent the shell from working on NT6 (vista and up). It was designed for easy debugging so it disables more than strictly necessary, including some features that you may consider essential, such as the desktop icons.

It would be possible to selectively remove some of the conditional preprocessor directives, so that those features are not disabled, while keeping the incompatible calls disabled, in order to properly launch the shell as best as possible. Keep in mind, though, that not everything will work fully right, even if you are able to launch the taskbar and start menu from ros.

The simplest method would be, once you have this modified explorer compiled, to just replace explorer.exe with yours, and add rshell.dll along with it. This would give you the taskbar and start menu from ros, while keeping the browse windows intact.

In order to have the browse windows from the ros shell also, you'd need to add also browseui, and some other files. But I don't believe that is a good choice, since our browseui lacks the treeview panel and other features.

Also, keep in mind that I have developed everything with win7, so I don't know the exact working status with windows 2012.

[powerplayer]

Windows 2012 seems to be much better then windows 8 it comes with a command prompt only but it will not go black screen without dwm like windows 8 , could you please send me your patch so that i can test it?

Note
Windows server 2012 hyper-v has no explorer.exe or shell32.dll

Plus side its a free os days
Download is here
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcent ... er-2012-r2

Can you tweak the patch you have to work with this minimal OS?

My guess is:
Maybe it could need a regedit patch too

[gigaherz]

Sorry I don't have the time currently to make such a patch for you. You will have to work it yourself.

[powerplayer]

Sorry I don't have the time currently to make such a patch for you. You will have to work it yourself.

Ok could i get your current patch and test it? I guess i have to add windows 7 files?

[gigaherz]

There's no need for a patch, just get the latest code, open precomp.h inside the explorer folder, and turn on "WIN7_COMPAT_MODE". Then look for usages of that define, because you will want to change a few of them.

EDIT: Also, I have no idea what extra files you may need. You'll see when you try... ;P

[powerplayer]

There's no need for a patch, just get the latest code, open precomp.h inside the explorer folder, and turn on "WIN7_COMPAT_MODE". Then look for usages of that define, because you will want to change a few of them.

EDIT: Also, I have no idea what extra files you may need. You'll see when you try... ;P

So how do i do all that? do i open the precomp.h in notepad or something?

[gigaherz]

I'd recommend at least Notepad++, if not Visual Studio, but yes, Notepad would do.